Successful recruiting for a crusade relied on organization, not emotion. Planning to undertake a crusade to the east with Louis IX of France in the late 1240s, Count Raymond VII of Toulouse prepared a file containing written copies of the contracts agreed with the knights and sergeants who were to accompany him, although in the event illness and death prevented the count from setting out.1 Contractual recruiting methods, commonplace in crusading in the 1240s, were traditional features of wars of the Cross. A hundred and fifty years earlier, in the autumn of 1098, the count’s great-great-grandfather, Raymond IV, was contesting Bohemund of Taranto’s right to rule the newly conquered Syrian city of Antioch. During heated exchanges, Bohemund, to support his claim, produced his contract of agreement with the other leaders and his accounts of expenses (compotus).2 Such documents most likely contained lists of payments for equipment and provisions; wages for troops or other servants and followers; and details of loans or subsidies paid or owing. Medieval armies, like their successors, were recruited through a combination of enthusiasm, loyalty, ambition, coercion and cash. Those for the crusades were no different. In his great crusading bull Quia Maior of 1213, Pope Innocent III identified three categories to which he offered the full crusader’s remission of sins: those who paid for themselves; those who paid for others; and those who were paid to go.3 Closely following the contours of the affluent society of noble, knightly and urban elites, recruitment relied on planning, not spontaneity. Whatever the emotional or ideological response to preaching and propaganda, the translation from crusade vow to battlefield required the mediation of customary secular military organization. In late eleventh-century western Europe and beyond, this revolved around obligation and reward.
Until the emergence of modern war states from the later seventeenth century, armies in western Europe rode an often ungainly pantomime horse of public command and private enterprise. Even where an overall commander might provide payment, recruiting and leadership devolved onto patronal and regional groups. Service tended to be conditional and contractual for those with social or professional clout, compulsory for their paid or impressed followers. While in theory voluntary and almost uniquely international, in practice crusading relied on interlaced networks of lordship, kinship, locality, community, subservience, employment, opportunity, profit and pay. Recruitment and finance were, almost literally, two sides of the same coin. While taking the Cross may have been a private decision, its implementation could not be. Beyond the necessary consent of priest, lord, employer or family, to be a crucesignatus, leader or led, meant submission to a structure of necessity: access to funds and material support. None would have reached destinations without money, the people who possessed it and those with the social clout to raise it. Loyalty, community, kinship, peer pressure, acquisitiveness, reputation, hope for temporal or eternal benefit, expiation of sin, honouring family tradition, escaping domestic difficulties, debts or litigation, compulsion by force, a sense of shared purpose: any or all may have underscored decisions to enlist.4
The image of recruitment drawn by crusade promoters emphasized, with perhaps suspicious uniformity, crusaders’ freedom of choice and purity of intent. Critics similarly tended to concentrate on motives not logistics. Intent lay at the centre of the legal justification for the privileges offered to crucesignati and the whole concept of penitential warfare. Yet realities of recruitment challenged the autonomy of commitment, pious or otherwise. Most crusaders were constrained by service and obedience to social superiors or driven by loyalty, necessity or self-advancement. For crusaders obliged to follow their lords or compelled to serve for pay, freedom of choice was notional. Secular incentives and pressures remained persuasive. Religious intensity may have been significant as a motive, but in practice incidental for career knights, paid sergeants, footsloggers, the footloose iuvenes who crowd chronicle accounts, household officials or servants and artisans employed by the great. Occasionally, the image slipped. Troops from Nevers were alleged to have been forced to go on crusade in 1101, and over a century later a Norman knight, Baldwin de Montibus, admitted having been forced (compulsus) to serve for pay against the Albigensians in 1226.5 For the regiments of those in service requiring pay or those hired as stipendiaries, the crusader’s spiritual and temporal privileges acted as added bonuses to subsistence and wages, but of themselves were hardly sufficient. This is not to deny the role of religious faith, without which the whole edifice of crusading would not have survived or been constructed in the first place, but rather to demythologize its role in the practical process of recruitment. Conviction may thrive in both the abstract and in action but does not exist in a vacuum. If crusades were exercises in mass private enterprise, the entrepreneurs of the operation set terms that often left their dependants with little power to abstain, only paymasters enjoying genuinely independent choice.
Motives and money were inescapable partners, tied together by rewards, pay and rations, the commerce of arms. Writing from Constantinople in the summer of 1203, Count Hugh of St Pol made this clear. He described how, a few months earlier, the leadership of the Fourth Crusade, although in a tiny minority, had overcome the resistance of the bulk of the crusade army against diverting the expedition to the Byzantine Empire. The majority had wanted to proceed immediately and directly to the Holy Land. However, Count Hugh recorded, he and his fellow commanders ‘clearly demonstrated to the entire army that the journey to Jerusalem was fruitless and injurious for everyone insofar as they were destitute and low on provisions and no-one among them could retain the services of knights and pay the men-at-arms’.6 The mass of articulate crusaders may have desired Jerusalem but they all needed pay to get there, knights and sergeants as well as infantry. No pay; no crusade.
THE CONTEXT OF WAR
The appearance of international crusading depended on more than the coincidence of aristocratic existential guilt, the culture of warfare, ecclesiastical radicalism, or the geopolitical upheavals around the Mediterranean. In response to the developing agrarian and commercial economy of western Europe, changing social and financial organization of war created methods of military recruitment, retention and action capable of sustaining such extensive campaigns. Particularly in Italy, northern Iberia, France, Flanders, western Germany and southern Britain – the heartlands of crusade recruitment – the culture of warfare increasingly relied on well-funded, trained mounted knights; structures of local power reliant on aggressive and acquisitive military lordship; expansive, mobile noble ambition that encouraged a fluid market in military personnel; the ready availability of moveable profits and assets convertible, if required, into bullion or cash; access to credit; and familiarity with techniques of accounting and contracts to secure service and loyalty beyond customary associations of household or tenure. It was precisely to these knights that Urban II deliberately addressed his Jerusalem appeal.7 Gathering large, cosmopolitan armies of the sort assembled from the 1090s onwards relied on these expanding opportunities to convert agricultural and trading wealth into armies, in the words of a contemporary biography of a hero of the First Crusade, ‘de argento milites creare’ (to create soldiers from silver).8
Medieval armies were assembled through a variety of incentives: loyalty; kinship; friendship; obedience; coercion; negotiation; or obligation. Military service was performed by tenants, servants, household employees or campaign retainers. These would be paid, as were those without formal obligation, the stipendiaries that comprised increasing proportions of western armies from the eleventh century: cavalry, infantry and archers, both bowmen and crossbowmen. All but the smallest companies were coalitions of otherwise often discrete groups of followers of lords and paymasters. The collective leaderships of many crusades have often attracted modern criticism. In fact they mirrored normal medieval command structures. The fiscal limitations of even the most monetized or surplus-led agrarian economy precluded the existence of standing armies: financially and logistically they could not be sustained except for small regiments based on noble households. Larger forces required the mobilization of dependants and their respective retinues and clients. Medieval political societies could not be run on centralized autocratic lines, nor could their armies. Even when, from the thirteenth century, regional or national governments could deploy more financial resources and institute some degree of central control over funding and recruitment, operational leadership remained in the hands of often powerful and independent-minded commanders, as witnessed, for example, during the Hundred Years War, the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion, or the seventeenth-century Thirty Years War or English Civil War. In the Middle Ages, no general could ignore the opinions or interests of his captains. Nor was collective leadership necessarily detrimental to military effectiveness. The most disparate and contested crusade command structure – that of the First Crusade – proved resilient and successful. Conversely, the most unified command, that of Louis IX in 1249–50, was one of the most calamitous, corroded by personality clashes and scarred by divisions over tactics and strategy.
Military expeditions depended on pay. The period from the second half of the tenth century was distinguished by an increased use of money, in coin not just bullion. More silver was mined, particularly (but not exclusively) in Germany, and circulated around western Europe, mainly through trade. The increased use of coinage was evident in western Germany, Frisia, southern France, northern Spain, Italy and parts of northern France, as well as in England and, after 1066, the cross-Channel Anglo-Norman realms. Regional mints were established, some controlled by regional powers, such as kings in England, some by local rulers, as in France. Even when the supply of coin appeared to diminish towards the end of the eleventh century, the developed culture of money persisted in normal commercial and social transactions, such as paying rent. Coinage affected almost all sections of society, through mints, markets, money-changers, the need to sell surplus produce to generate cash payments for rent, and, notably in England, taxation. In this monetary system, which included bullion, a multiplicity of different mints, money-changers and currencies of account became familiar. The basic monetary divisions and proportions of pounds, shillings and pence, although established as early as the eighth century, now became entrenched in the financial system, in varying regional values operating in parallel with units of weight, such as marks, or silver content, such as sterling.9
As the actual physical coins were silver pennies of varying purity of precious metal, calculations of wealth and value required often sophisticated mathematical computation. One crusader’s report noted seven different currencies circulating in the Provençal camp in early 1099 from Poitiers, Chartres, Le Mans and Lucca as well as three southern French mints. This did not take account of the indigenous currencies or those of other contingents. Godfrey of Bouillon may have travelled with specially minted coins from Lower Lorraine.10 Coin finds along the route of the Second Crusade in central Europe reveal a similar pattern of different coinages – pennies from Normandy, Champagne, the Rhineland, southern Germany and Austria. Such diversity was hardly eccentric and is shared by surviving eleventh-century Scandinavian coin hoards. One method of avoiding contested exchange rates was to use an internationally recognized currency of value such as sterling, as leaders of the Fourth Crusade did in Venice in October 1201.11 Domestically, faced with such increased complexity, keeping records of tax, rents, income, expenses and revenues and other financial transactions became more common. Rendering account became more technical, not just for the growing ports and commercial centres of the Mediterranean, Flanders and the Rhineland, where financial business was far from being confined to growing Jewish communities. As payments in money, including cash, became more common, so too did the instruments used to authorize or confirm them, increasingly taking the form of written accounts and contracts. The requirement for basic numeracy increased and with it varying degrees of functional literacy across all those who handled or relied on money: landlords, estate managers, household officials, merchants, traders, shopkeepers, artisans, employees, taxpayers – and soldiers.
Discussion of paid troops in the Middle Ages has tended to be vitiated by describing them as mercenaries, a term loaded with pejorative overtones of fickleness and brutality. As such it is a confusing misnomer. Medieval writers usually referred neutrally to stipendiary troops – stipendiarii – rather than mercenaries – mercennarii. Clause 51 of Magna Carta banned foreign stipendiarios from England not because they were paid but because they were aliens. Horror stories attached to mercenaries focused on their violent and licentious behaviour rather than their paid status.12 Criticisms of the mercenaries that terrorized England during the civil wars of the reign of King Stephen (1135–54), or those professional bands or routiers that ravaged southern France in the later twelfth century, or the notorious Free Companies of the fourteenth, were political and moral. Mercenary companies were taken as symptoms of a collapse of an idealized and largely fictional social order, a crisis in lordship, discipline and hierarchy. Hostility was fuelled by snobbery and social anxiety rather than distaste of rampant materialism on which, in practice, all lords and their armies relied. Critics of crusade finance targeted peculation, abuse or hypocrisy, not pay. Despite the aspersions cast on untrustworthy ‘hirelings’ in the parable of the Good Shepherd (John 10:12–13), pay was not of itself regarded as amoral. John the Baptist urged baptized soldiers to ‘be content with your wages’ (Luke 3:14). As it developed by 1200, the code of chivalry emphasized conduct not its means of support. Many knights at one time or another in their careers served in military households, armies or princely retinues for money. Paid status in no way diminished knights’ honour or that of their paymasters. The well-known experiences of William Marshal during the 1170s and 1180s in the commercial tournament team of Henry II’s eldest son, Henry the Young King, stand witness to this.13 Profit sustained lords’ authority and their networks of dependants. By 1100, if not before, money was as much a feature of lordship as the holding of land. Paid service enhanced rather than challenged the moral dimension of the relationship between lord and retainer. In his influential 1150s political treatise, Policraticus, John of Salisbury (d.1180), the bibulous, gossipy English networking intellectual, friend of popes, saints and prelates and shrewd observer of the secular scene, regarded payment of knights as necessary to secure their loyalty and a privilege of their order.14 According to a well-informed contemporary observer, the Norman commander Odo Borleng stiffened the resolve of the royal garrison of Bernay in the face of a rebel army in 1124 by arguing that ‘if we lack the courage to resist, how shall we ever dare to face the king again? We shall rightly forfeit our wages (stipendia) and honour and shall never again deserve to eat the king’s bread.’15 Loyalty, subsistence, honour and pay provided mutually supportive privileges of service and lordship.
Payment covered a wide social spectrum, from hired peasant with a strong arm to royal princes. Until the later twelfth century, perhaps, the term miles still could indicate military function and status not social class. Flanders provides two contrasting examples of hired knights. The milites who assassinated Count Charles the Good of Flanders (1119–27) in Bruges in 1127 were offered four marks each for their pains. They came from relatively modest but not servile backgrounds, drawn from the household (familia) of one of the chief conspirators, bound by wages and hand-picked for their ferocity (animosiores et audaces), a feature many crusaders evidently shared. One of those crusaders, Charles’s uncle, Count Robert II of Flanders (1093–1111), potentially one of the wealthiest lords in north-west Europe, was himself hired by successive kings of England to provide troops in 1093 and 1101.16 Elsewhere, in 1085, to repel a threatened Danish invasion, William the Conqueror collected an army of paid knights, archers and infantry that included another future crusade commander, Count Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France.17 In Germany, such ‘service for gain’ became a literary trope in twelfth- and thirteenth-century vernacular literature where even a king’s son ‘offered his service for pay, as a knight very often does’.18 This was not just artistic licence. Bishop Benzo of Alba, in about 1089, advised Emperor Henry IV of Germany (1056–1106) of the need to ensure he had the funds to pay his troops, important advice given Henry’s dependence on stipendiary forces in his Italian wars of the 1080s, campaigns that involved another crusade leader, Godfrey of Bouillon.19 All medieval military commanders included some, often many, paid troops beyond their own, also paid, military households. While holding land could impose military obligations on tenants variously satisfied in person, by proxy or through cash redemption, the idea that anyone relied on raising an army solely from geographically widely scattered tenants or sub-tenants with their own domestic ties and varying degrees of fitness, military training or skill is both inherently unlikely and contradicted by evidence. A host based simply on land tenure did not exist.
Within military households of the great, membership of a familia could be rewarded with equipment, housing, board (such as free meals, bread, wine and candles) and spending money, in contemporary German chivalric poetry ‘lîp und gût’, board and pay.20 Beyond the household or mesnie of permanent or semi-permanent retinues of paid warriors, other knights, some with tenurial obligations, others with wider, looser affinities of kindred or locality, some freelance, were recruited into larger companies for particular campaigns. These knights could expect pay beyond basic rations, including items such as cloaks. The pay and status of followers exhibited the moral dimension of a lord’s magnanimitas, his largesse: the richer the followers, the grander their lord. The socially more elevated knights would have their own retainers, supported out of the pay they themselves received, pay acting as a powerful cohesive force in these often disparately assembled armies. Alongside knights came mounted sergeants, either directly associated with knights to form cohesive fighting units or as more general regiments of supporting cavalry. When shipping his household to the Holy Land in 1190, Philip II of France assumed a ratio of two sergeants to every knight, while in his scheme to pay recruits for his planned crusade in 1195, Henry VI of Germany assumed a ratio of 1:1, calculating pay and provisions accordingly.21 Beyond the knights and mounted sergeants, money would provide specialist troops such as archers and crossbowmen, as well as infantry and the necessary support artisans: engineers, carpenters, cooks, laundresses, etc.
A medieval army of any size resembled a moving village or town, with its clergy, hierarchy, justice, markets, sex trade, etc. The inherent flexibility of such a system, both in manpower and specialisms, matched the shifting requirements of any warlord and proved especially well adapted to lengthy campaigns such as crusades where allegiances shifted as commanders died, departed or went bankrupt. The primary unit of social organization was the shared mess, based on the extended households of paymasters. The range of some lords’ familia could be extensive. Landgrave Louis of Thuringia’s entourage, assembled for an aborted crusade in 1227, included four counts, eighteen named and numerous other unnamed knights, chaplains, clerks and various unfree knights characteristic of German aristocratic society, known as ministeriales and including four household officials, the butler, marshal, seneschal and chamberlain.22 Not only would all these expect to receive payment of some sort, in cash or kind, Louis himself probably hoped to receive financial support from the putative commander of the crusade, Frederick II, who had promised 100,000 gold ounces for the expedition and in the event paid for at least 1,000 knights. Frederick’s father, Henry VI, had offered 60,000 gold ounces for 1,500 knights and 1,500 sergeants for his crusade in 1195. Five years earlier, Frederick’s grandfather, Frederick I, had placed a monetary budget of a minimum of 3 marks per head on departing crusaders.23
Crusading conformed to patterns of secular warfare. Evidence for the ubiquity of payment for military service from the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries is clear. Paid troops, including knights, are familiar from warfare in Languedoc; in Germany and Italy during the so-called Investiture Dispute between the German kings and allies of the papacy from the 1070s; and in southern Italy during the eleventh-century conquests by the Normans, where they were described by an early twelfth-century commentator as Stipendiaries against the pagans’.24 In the Anglo-Norman realms it was later alleged that William the Conqueror’s need for knights’ ‘wages and rewards’ (stipendia vel donativa) (note the distinction) and Henry I’s need for coined money (numerate pecunia) to suppress rebellions led to a change in the way income from royal lands was received, from food renders to coin. English taxes for war had been paid in coin since the 990s. William of Poitiers, a former knight turned chaplain and biographer of William the Conqueror, noted the vast sums the duke paid his troops in 1066.25 Money and other payment suffused the whole network of legal dependency. Eleventh-century evidence from Normandy and the Beauvaisis in northern France to the abbey of Fulda in Hesse in Germany shows lords paying for, or otherwise subsidizing, the service owed to them. From this it appears that tenants were expected to provide their own horses and arms while the lord supported them during the period of their service. Outside any stipulated term of service, such as the widespread forty days limit of obligation, the lord would be expected to pay.26
English evidence confirms this. From the returns of Henry II’s grand enquiry of 1166 into the amount of knight-service owed by those holding land from him, the so-called Cartae Baronum, it is clear that the service of knights to their lords, and ultimately to the king, was redeemable for cash, at 20 shillings per unit of knight-service, known as a knight’s fee. If these knights served the king, they expected to provide their own horses and arms from the revenues of the lands they held, but beyond that they were paid. If a tenant was obliged to retain in his own household the notional quota of knights owed his lord or the king, they too were likely to be paid as well as provisioned: ‘victum cotidie . . . atque stipendia’, ‘daily subsistence and pay’, i.e. more than just rations. Knights receiving wages for prescribed service also appeared in the returns to Henry II’s Inquest of Sheriffs in 1170.27 A century earlier, before the Norman Conquest, the same formula of ‘subsistence and pay’ (victum vel stipendia) applied to a thegn’s sixtyday obligation in the fyrd and was priced at 20 shillings.28 It was said of William II of England that he was so spendthrift that he allowed his knights to fix their own rates of pay. Abbot Suger of St Denis famously described him as a ‘wonderful merchant and paymaster of knights’.29 By contrast, Suger commented that his hero, the future Louis VI of France, could only afford a much smaller retinue. Almost half a century later, Suger was himself praised for providing the knights of the royal household with their accustomed wages, robes and gifts during Louis VII’s absence on the Second Crusade.30
While legal contracts emphasized the tenurial, landed ties of loyalty and obligation, in reality armies were raised and lordship expressed through the payment of troops, those obliged to serve as well as those hired specially. The armies of this period, including crusade armies, were confederations. Greater lords recruited lesser lords who recruited knights, some of whom were of sufficient status and wealth to have their own banners and retinues of lesser knights. Attached to each company were sergeants and squires, less armoured than knights but mounted, as well as perhaps specialist infantry, such as archers or pikemen, in addition to the less differentiated footsoldiers. Beyond them were the necessary supporters, artisans and servants. All were held together by the chains of command. Pay supported rather than undermined or contradicted this lordship, securing not challenging loyalty, a tangible demonstration of the moral bond of mutual aid and faith between lord and man as much as (in many cases more than) an anonymous financial transaction. This was the world of the crusades. The combination of social rather than legal ties of lordship and reliance on money and pay to secure followers made possible recruitment for crusading’s non-obligatory war service. The techniques of finance, accounting and the administration of paid armies that developed during the eleventh century provided the means to gather and maintain such large forces over long periods under different lords, vital to crusading as an effective military enterprise.
THE CONTEXT OF REWARD
To admit the incentive of material gain is not to set God against Mammon. Piety is not an exclusive state of mind or action. Religious enthusiasm could be, can be, expressed through concrete acts of public or political action and personal, private temporal ambition. As one of the founders of modern crusade scholarship, the great German historian Carl Erdmann, remarked in 1935, ‘the crusading idea did not eliminate natural human self-interest’ (den natürlichen menschlichen Eigennutz).31 The sacred and the profane complement each other, a matter not of ‘either/or’ but of ‘and/and’. This was understood by crusade promoters and planners who consistently employed allusive language of spiritual and material reward. The vocabulary of holy war reflected social, economic and financial reality. Service to God was, certainly from the Third Crusade onwards, regularly compared and contrasted with service to secular lords. Preachers employed metaphors of charters and chirographs (a particular form of written deed drawn up in duplicate or triplicate familiar especially in contracts of service).32 Proselytizing the Second Crusade, Bernard of Clairvaux used the language of financial bargaining to appeal to merchants: ‘the cost is small; the reward is great’. In his sermon to crucesignati at Basle in 1201, Abbot Martin of Pairis offered his audience ‘certain pay’ and ‘great and eternal pay’.33 The development of crusaders’ temporal privileges in the twelfth century addressed explicitly material interests. As we have seen, crucesignati, their families and possessions received ecclesiastical protection and were allowed to postpone litigation in courts, avoid repayment of debts, acquire interest-free loans, enjoy certain tax exemptions, and freely sell or mortgage property. The attraction of crusading as a legal and financial benefit was neatly summed up by a Somerset crucesignatus in 1220, who argued in court that ‘the crusade (crussignatio) ought to improve my condition not damage it’.34
Concrete, temporal reward served as an inducement from the beginning. Its nature can be separated into two distinct categories: subsistence and profit. Both appeared among the incentives and expectations of crusaders and the requirements of campaigning. No large-scale, long-distance campaign drawn out over an extended period could survive without the repeated augmentation of new sources of funds. Such re-endowments were integral to the whole process, including planning. Hence, the search for money and wealth was not a desideratum of campaigning, more a sine qua non. Generally, the material necessities of war were well recognized. Urban II and his successors specifically aimed their appeal for active crusade service at lords and the arms-bearing classes: ‘stimulating the minds of knights’, as Urban put it, or the ‘more powerful and the nobles’, in the words of Eugenius III. Preachers, when aiming at military recruits rather than financial contributions, pitched their rhetoric directly and flatteringly at ‘renowned knights’ (milites egregii).35 The 1095 Clermont crusade decree implicitly recognized the lure of material ambition, insisting that the remission of penance would only be gained by those who embarked ‘for devotion alone, not for the acquisition of honour or money’ (pro sola devotione, non pro honoris vel pecunie), honour, as we have seen, in this case being ambiguous, possibly implying, in the common usage of the time, possessions – fiefs, lands, status or office -rather than an honourable reputation.36 Gregory VIII in 1187 was more precise: ‘do not go there for wealth or worldly glory’ (ad lucrum vel ad gloriam temporalem).37
The key was right intent and purity of motive, the necessary legalistic trappings of penance and just war. However, by recognizing less elevated soldierly aspirations, the popes acknowledged a central conundrum of the crusade project. While almost all literary, promotional and contractual sources take pains to emphasize spontaneity, free will and religious enthusiasm, recruitment and service were determined by secular responses and material means. Guibert of Nogent, among others, characterized the tension between ideal and practice as a new form of war that promised salvation through conformity with, rather than rejection of, the habits of the milites, as with Tancred of Lecce, for whom the First Crusade resolved the dilemma between following the Gospels or the military life in a ‘two-fold opportunity’: ‘his experience in arms recalled him to the service of Christ’.38 Thus, given devout intent and consequent heavenly favour, all aspects of warfare -recruitment, funding, fighting, slaughter, booty and conquest – were legitimized, sanctified even. In their letter celebrating the triumphant campaign of 1097–9, the commanders of the First Crusade explicitly associated God’s help not just in military victory but in the attendant killing of enemies and capture of possessions, booty and lands.39 This became a key point of the crusade message: habitual military behaviour transfigured by serving divine command, in Bernard of Clairvaux’s infamous pun, no longer a secular curse, malitia, but a militia Dei, a knighthood of God.40
It is unknowable what sort of additional material incentives, if any, Urban II proffered to attract recruits in 1095–6. However, within a decade or so the prospect of material gain in return for service in a divine cause was well established, a reflection of what actually happened. A model of opportunity was created. As the Benedictine commentator Baldric of Bourgueil imagined Urban II putting it, he used the images of payment and reward both as metaphor and material incentive: ‘God distributes his penny at the first and eleventh hour’; The goods of your enemies will be yours, because you will plunder their treasures and either return home victorious or gain an eternal prize purpled in your own blood’: salvation, wealth, fame; a potent cocktail.41 Expected or desired rewards could include anything from basic wages for service, to material loot, to gilded reputations, to offices or possessions gained in conquered territory. Relics were a popular commodity, most blatantly witnessed by the frenzied mass larceny at Constantinople in 1204 but also found in the stream of items liberated from the Holy Land from the 1090s onwards. Many came in sumptuously adorned reliquaries. While not obviously commercial, such sacred booty provided significant tangible benefits, memorials to the returning crusader’s great deeds and valuable counters in the market of social advancement. Donors of impressive relics attracted considerable communal kudos. Some crusaders were at least reputed to have returned more conventionally wealthy. A few appear in the sources rather like English nabobs of the eighteenth century, bearing back silks, gold, gems, precious rings, arms, military fittings and other exotic oriental riches. Some, like Gouffier of Lastours, who according to later legend also brought back a lion from the First Crusade, enhanced their status by showing off their Jerusalem booty, in his case displaying cloth hangings in a tower at Pompadour in the Limousin. Egyptian Fatimid embroideries of linen, silk and cloth of gold acquired or looted during the First Crusade found their way to the abbey of Cadouin in Perigord and Apt cathedral in Provence. In the 1180s, William Marshal (1147–1219), later regent of England, brought back from Palestine a silk cloth which he destined for his shroud. Others may have converted such treasures and booty into cash or property.42
Relics apart, tangible profits left little surviving trace. However, regardless of the actual amount of wealth acquired, the crusade offered potential material profit in terms of social prestige. From 1099 it became more or less de rigueur for powerful lords to acquire crusading credentials. It has been argued that this lay behind the otherwise eccentric decision of Philip I of France in 1106 to allow his daughter to marry Bohemund of Antioch, a previously disinherited upstart son of a self-made parvenu transformed into a European Christian hero by his deeds on the First Crusade.43 The story of the First Crusade and the pious commitment and bravery of its veterans were indelibly inscribed onto western European culture in prose, verse, song, hymns, liturgy, local legends, family history, relics, sculpture, stained glass and wall-painting. No mere indulgence of memory, crusade credentials could translate into material benefit. It was alleged that after his defeat and capture by his usually remorseless brother Henry I of England in 1106, Robert of Normandy was spared worse punishment than imprisonment because of his status as a Jerusalemite.44 Great lords regularly sought tours of service in the Holy Land: five out of six counts of Flanders went east between 1095 and 1205, one, Thierry (1128–68), four times. Similar association can be traced across the nobilities of France and Germany, family traditions and habits not confined to the grandest. Domestic reputation could be matched by colonial opportunism. The example of the Lusignans from Poitou showed what could be achieved. Two younger sons of Count Hugh VIII, a lord of modest regional prominence, became kings of Jerusalem: Guy (1186–92) and Aimery (1197–1205). Aimery’s descendants reigned as kings of Jerusalem in the thirteenth century and ruled as kings of Cyprus from 1205 to 1473. The crusade commitment of other minor French comital families, such as the extended Montlhéry kindred from the Île de France in the early twelfth century or the Briennes from Champagne over the following century and a half, displayed comparable trajectories of individual promotion and dynastic advance.45
In high politics, every king of France between 1137 and 1364, of England between 1154 and 1327, and of Germany between 1137 and 1250 (when there followed an interregnum), took the Cross. The political dividends of command of a crusade were obvious and telling. For Louis VII of France the crusade of 1146-8 provided a unique opportunity to act as a king, to preside over assemblies of lords from across his disunited kingdom and to lead a truly national force beyond the frontiers of his kingdom, the first event of the sort since the ninth century. His chaplain noticed that in eastern France, where his predecessors had rarely ventured, as head of the crusade Louis was received as overlord. Similarly, Conrad III of Germany, another monarch challenged by internal dissent, was able to use the cloak of the crusade to impose an agreed general peace in his kingdom and even to outface powerful opponents.46 The prestige of Louis IX of France, both in his lifetime and as a royalist icon after his death, hardly needs emphasis. Such political dividends, while not automatic or universal, nonetheless remained a feature of political calculation well into the fourteenth century, even after realistic opportunities for active mass crusading expeditions had lapsed. Those who reneged on crusade commitments, such as Henry II of England, could expect hostile reviews. King Edward III (1327–77), the first English monarch not to take the Cross since King Stephen (1135–54), remained nervous of the omission.47 Even at the other end of the political scale, to be a Jerusalemite operated as a useful, uncontested badge of honour and status at the level of local courts, where the legal privileges and immunities of absent or returning crucesignati were habitually recognized.48
Crusaders could expect rewards across a range of informal as well as formal patronage during and after any campaign. In 1177, William of Mandeville, earl of Essex, offered a potential recruit for his crusade, the prior of Walden, ‘a place at his table every day’.49 A central dynamic of aristocratic society in this period lay in the creation of loosely constructed affinities whereby lords attracted followers bound not just by tenurial, dynastic or regional bonds but with temporary or permanent contracts of association. Crusade recruitment provided fertile opportunities to form such affinities. The evidence from the First Crusade alone is littered with references to such agreements or contracts, conventiones, sometimes described as monetary arrangements, conventiones solidorum. These conventiones proved fundamental in securing the cohesion of crusading enterprises. As lords died or ran out of money, their followers of necessity sought new patrons and paymasters, just as other lords eagerly sought to capitalize on this fluid market in potential clients to enhance their own standing. Great lords such as Raymond of Toulouse or Godfrey of Bouillon extended their influence within the crusade armies in this fashion. Lesser figures could advance up the social hierarchy by doing the same. A Limousin lord in the Provençal army, Raymond Pilet, briefly asserted independent command at Antioch towards the end of 1098 when he retained (retinuit) many knights and infantry for a raid towards Aleppo. The severe losses suffered by this force reduced Raymond to his former subordinate status, however.50 More striking were the gains made by Tancred of Lecce, the young well-connected Italo-Norman lord of modest means, who successfully established a significant position for himself during the campaign through accepting money from other leaders and then, with these funds, booty and loans from fellow crusaders, offering lucrative employment to knights outside his immediate household. As a result, the size of Tancred’s military retinue varied from between forty and one hundred knights, the core of an influential regiment. On the way he was able to recruit figures from well beyond his southern Italian social milieu, including knights from the Chartrain and Normandy. As Tancred benefited, so did those he recruited. The mutual reciprocity of gain was well caught by Tancred’s contemporary eulogist Ralph of Caen, who has Tancred declare:
My soldiers are my treasure. It causes me no concern that they are provided for when I am in need, so long as I command men for whom provision is made. They load their pouches with silver; I load them with cares, arms, sweat, tremors, hail and rain.51
This model of affinity-building and hiring of recruits formed a staple of crusading warfare, offering any recruit the prospect of a good chance of profitable, if strenuous employment. Examples feature prominently in the accounts of the Second Crusade, where both the king of Portugal and Conrad III of Germany took into their paid service knights beyond their own military establishments.52 The Third Crusade similarly saw kings hiring additional troops, at which Richard I was especially adept.53 Subsequent crusade leaders, such as Henry VI of Germany in 1195 or Louis IX in 1248–9, were open in their offers of pay and good conditions of service. In the latter case, recruits may have been attracted both by the prospects of making a profit from the enterprise and, if that proved impossible, of petitioning the king to be bailed out. In the event, between 1249 and 1251 Louis stood surety for at least ten followers to the amount of 25,000 livres tournois,54
These associations of reward could extend beyond the battlefields and campaigns of the Cross. On the First Crusade, the Norman Ilger Bigod, who presumably embarked with his duke, Robert of Normandy, at some point transferred his allegiance to the southern Italian Norman lords, acting with Tancred of Lecce at the assault of Jerusalem in 1099 and subsequently finding high office under Bohemund at Antioch as his ‘magistrate of knights’.55 In the intricate weave of incentives that formed part of this gift culture, the rewards of service could be material even for longstanding dependants. In 1100, the Tuscan Raimondo of Montemurlo was granted a new fief by his lord, Count Guy V of Pistoia, for his service (pro servitio tuo) on the Jerusalem journey. Less concrete, but no less attractive, could be the fresh contacts and patronage channels opened by shared experience on campaign.56 Hubert Walter’s promotion to the archbishopric of Canterbury in 1193 may have owed much to Richard I witnessing his efficient administration of English troops at the siege of Acre. The Champagne lord John of Joinville, in addition to being rescued by Louis IX from financial embarrassment over his inability to pay his own military retinue in Cyprus in 1249, owed his subsequent close access to Louis and the royal court to their shared service and friendship developed on crusade and in the east in 1248–54.
From his own testimony, Joinville’s experience neatly encompassed the gift and reward culture without which the crusade would have remained stillborn. Although acquainted with Louis IX before the crusade, Joinville’s later intimacy with King Louis and political preferment could not have been anticipated. Prior to the crusade Joinville had refused royal patronage. However, the reality of crusade finance soon caught up with him. On arrival in Cyprus, Joinville found himself running out of money. He had contracted to pay for a retinue of nine knights and two knights-banneret, these last having the right to display their own banners, presumably in turn retaining their own équipe or band of followers. He had paid for the ship that transported his retinue. This left him, he revealed, with only 240 livres tournois, not enough to keep paying his knights some of whom consequently threatened to abandon him. At this moment King Louis intervened and retained (‘et me retint’) Joinville in his service for 800 l.t. which, he admitted, left him with more money than he actually needed.57 The knights were paid; Joinville scooped a profit and royal patronage; and King Louis gained a valuable new servant from outside his customary sphere of influence. This does not mean that people took the Cross simply as a career move, or in search of pay or employment. Joining a crusade carried serious physical and material risk to crusaders and to their families: death, debt, disparagement. However, as a contributory influence on recruitment, the prospect of advancement was inescapable.
The most obvious opportunity for reward lay in booty and conquest. This was admitted by the earliest commentators on the First Crusade and ran as a consistent theme of crusading thereafter. All early medieval military operations offered profit as a consequence of success. Robert of Clari’s anxiety and anger at the unequal distribution of the spoils of Constantinople in 1204 probably spoke for most crusaders. Division of spoils was not simply a welcome bonus but, for extended campaigns, a necessary process of re-endowment without which the whole enterprise could falter and fail. The imperative of material as well as spiritual, God-granted riches, divites, determined the course of action.58 The need to renew sources of income led the First Crusade to accept massive subsidies from the Greek emperor in 1097 and to exploit the lavish booty following the victories at Dorylaeum (1097), Antioch (1098) and Ascalon (1099), as well as extracting protection money from local rulers, such as the emir of Tripoli (1099). One leader, Stephen of Blois, admitted in a letter home to his wife that, as a result of Greek largesse, he was wealthier in 1097 than he had been when he left northern France the year before.59 The army’s anger at the lack of looting at Nicaea in 1097 and at the unequal division of the spoils at Ma’arrat in northern Syria in the winter of 1098/9 reflected not just thwarted greed but legitimate anxiety over future resources. Patterns were repeated. Conrad III received vital subventions from Emperor Manuel I at Constantinople in 1148, allowing him to refit an army in Palestine that spring. Frederick Barbarossa secured his army’s prospects by occupying the rich Byzantine province of Thrace in the winter of 1189/90 and by his victory over the Turks at Iconium the following spring. Richard I forced King Tancred of Sicily to part with the huge sum of 40,000 ounces of gold in 1191 and seized further treasure following his conquest of Cyprus later that year. The diversion of the main crusade army and fleet to Constantinople in 1203 was driven by the prospect of Byzantine wealth to support the Jerusalem war, acceptance of the plan being driven, according to one supporter, ‘partly by prayers and partly by price’ (tum precibus tum precio).60 In such circumstances, profit was neither distraction nor distortion; it was essential.
For some, the prize went beyond campaign profits. In the Baltic holy wars, permanent lucrative gains were achieved by the Lübeck merchants and ecclesiastical imperialists who underwrote the conquest of Livonia, and by the Teutonic Knights who took up rule there and conquered Prussia. Control of the trade in furs, timber, amber and slaves acted as a clear economic incentive, even if the regular temporary recruits of western European nobles answered to more overtly chivalric and pious appeals.61 Commercial gain and temporal rule were hardly regarded as inimical to the extension of Christendom and Catholic orthodoxy there or in Iberia or Greece. The crusade against heretics in Languedoc (1209–29), largely supported by short-stay and paid soldiery, attracted an element of freebooters. It also offered the chance to carve out a semi-independent principality to its first commander, Simon of Montfort, himself a member of a family whose members seized opportunities for profit and social advancement from the British Isles to Syria. In the 1220s, this so-called Albigensian Crusade was subsumed into the regional expansionism of the French kings.62 Even if not realized, the Levant crusade presented similar prospects for conquest and economic gain, features not lost on planners. The image of the fabulous riches of the east played into this. On his tour of the west in 1106, Bohemund cut an extravagant dash, even though he had apparently bled Antioch dry to achieve this. His crusade against Byzantium in 1107 was overtly one of conquest, and the image of Greek wealth remained a constant draw for crusading armies and organizers for another century.63 One element that undermined the diplomatic efforts of Patriarch Heraclius of Jerusalem to elicit western aid for the beleaguered kingdom of Jerusalem in 1184–5 was his entourage’s gaudy public display of gold, silver and perfumes.64
The lure of eastern treasures attracted the maritime cities of Italy and southern France. In particular, Pisa, Genoa and Venice invested men, money and ships in crusading in the eastern Mediterranean, both on their own commercial behalf and as carriers of crusaders and pilgrims, activities intended to produce material returns as well as spiritual benefits. Contracts with crusaders show the high levels of investment involved, from the Genoese deal with Philip II of France in 1190 (5,950 marks plus wine for an army of just under 2,000), to the famous treaty of Venice with the leadership of the Fourth Crusade (a massive 85,000 marks for a supposed, unrealistic force of 33,500), to the extensive series of contracts agreed with Marseilles, Genoa, Aigues Mortes and other ports by Louis IX, whose naval expenses between 1248 and 1254 probably far exceeded 100,000 livres tournois.65 The risks, as the Fourth Crusade vividly demonstrated, came from defaulting clients not honouring their contracts. Lasting trade advantages accrued from helping to capture trading ports in the Levant, in the form of commercial privileges and control of whole sections of the captured ports, such as the Genoese in Acre after 1104 or the Venetians in Tyre after 1124. While far from immune to religious incentives, trading cities unashamedly celebrated material profits, such as the share of the booty (‘gold, silver and gems’) brought back to Genoa from the battle of Ascalon (in August 1099) by the Embriaco brothers.66 The mixed incentives of wealth and salvation were prominent in accounts of the Venetian crusade of 1122–5 in the Adriatic, Aegean and Levant, part terrorist raid, part crusading armada, part relic hunt. An apparent eyewitness saw the Genoese fleet, returning from the capture of Caesarea and Arsuf in 1101, proclaim ‘the triumphant victory which had come their way with God’s help’ and show off ‘the great wealth and treasures which they had seized there’.67 Such bonanzas were not confined to Italians. The return of crusaders to Cologne in 1189 laden with booty taken from Iberian Muslims was noted by locals with approval.68 To these direct profits could be added the potentially huge proceeds from the support industries of ship building, ship chandlers and the employment of sea captains and crews. For these commercial centres, crusading offered not competitive but simultaneous spiritual attraction, costly investment and abundant business opportunity.
Calculations of material return and how to deal with conquests and other profits were not confined to Mediterranean or Baltic merchant elites. At Vezelay in July 1190, Richard I of England and Philip II of France entered a sworn agreement to share any conquests made on their forthcoming crusade. Similar agreements to share the spoils of war were reached between the leaders of the Fourth Crusade and the Venetian Republic. These deals recognized that material acquisition was integral to the project. During the First Crusade, the western leaders swore oaths to the Byzantine emperor regarding lands they expected to conquer. Commanders such as Raymond of Toulouse or Bohemund strenuously manoeuvred to acquire estates and principalities, ambitions which had probably formed part of their motivation from the beginning. Minor or landless nobles, such as Tancred of Lecce or Baldwin of Boulogne, unashamedly sought their fortunes. Issues of paid service and the share of booty formed part of the preparatory communal arrangements of the North Sea crusade fleet in 1147.69 Subsequently during the Second Crusade, the pursuit of private gain drove events at Lisbon and, apparently, later, at the siege of Damascus. At least one version of what happened there ascribed the failure of the campaign to competition for control of the city between local Jerusalemites and the count of Flanders. He was said by the same hostile account to have lobbied hard for the city to be given to him despite his rich possessions in the west.70
Even if a libel, the story recognized a material dimension to crusade warfare hardly concealed in the widely circulated descriptions of such expeditions, still less in the associated adventure stories popular in vernacular verse. The conquest and retention of the Holy Land, ‘Christ’s heritage’, was the intrinsic point of the Jerusalem crusade, a temporal ambition for a transcendent reward – and, inevitably, vice versa. At the start of the Fourth Crusade, Innocent III worried lest there be insufficient land and population in the Holy Land to support crusading artisan and agricultural settlers. By the late thirteenth century, the secular means to achieve and secure territorial conquest and occupation dominated much of the lively contemporary strategic debate. At least one possibly well-informed observer was reported as claiming that in 1248 Louis IX had transported a mass of farm equipment with him to Egypt, and was distressed that he lacked the manpower to effect a full secure colonization.71 Beneath the shadow of serious spirituality, crusades were presented and directed for what they were: wars of conquest.