A veteran of the First Crusade described the Christian host assembled at the siege of Nicaea early in 1097: warriors with coats of mail and helmets – the knights; those ‘accustomed to war’, but lacking full metal armour – the mounted sergeants and infantry; and those not bearing arms – clergy, women and children. A century and a quarter later, a description of the different tariffs allotted from the booty of the capture of the Egyptian port of Damietta during the Fifth Crusade identified four similar categories: knights; priests and turcopoles (i.e. local recruits); clientes, meaning either dependants or non-knightly men-at-arms/sergeants or both; and, finally, wives and children. The official arrangements for the Saladin Tithe of 1188 in England and France assumed the bulk of crucesignati would be well-to-do knights and clerics.1 From Urban II onwards, planners wished to recruit effective military forces. In theory, all crucesignati required permission to take the Cross from parish priests or licensed preachers-cum-recruiting officers.2 Although, as recognized by the Saladin Tithe ordinances, this stipulation could be ignored, in practice crusading was neither an expression of mass hysteria nor a movement of communal spontaneity but an essentially elite activity, sustained by recruitment from wider social groups. In contrast to chroniclers’ vapid generalizations and moralizing wishful thinking, while a 1215 French inquiry into the operation of crusader privileges noted urban, rural and merchant crucesignati, the core of recruits remained the bellatores, the arms-bearers.3 Even in the thirteenth century, when the system of purchasing vow redemptions copied secular reality by focusing on raising money for troops rather than troops directly, and despite crusade rhetoric saturated with fashionable themes of poverty and humility, campaigns were dominated by the propertied, and those they supported.
LORDS AND LORDSHIP
Extensive evidence of named crucesignati in chronicles and in the archives of Church, state, law and lordship abundantly confirms this. The names of well over five hundred individuals have been identified as crusaders on the First Crusade alone.4 Recruiting agents recorded the names of crucesignati on parchment rolls at least from the 1220s. Accurate-seeming figures for those taking the Cross suggest that preachers in the diocese of Cologne in 1214 and in Wales in 1188 did the same. In 1221, the future Pope Gregory IX recorded the names of those northern Italian crusade captains in receipt of Church taxes. By 1200, the archbishop of Canterbury and the king of England had access to the names of crucesignati in their jurisdictions.5 Chroniclers, historians and poets delighted in sonorous lists of holy warriors. Literary, administrative, financial and legal records are obvious skewed towards those with something to sell, mortgage, protect, donate or abandon: those with social standing. The scale of wealth could be modest. Some charters describe transactions involving no more than a few acres, sous or shillings, yet distinguish those involved from the penumbra of unnamed dependants, troops, servants and hangers-on.6
Crusading’s constituency revolved around lords and knights, their households, relatives, friends and retainers, armies bound unevenly together by loyalty, employment, kinship, geography and sworn association confirmed or supplemented by pay. The additional expense of war distinguished crusaders from pilgrims, as did the distinct rituals of enlistment. Preachers’ discourses on poverty and their exempla anecdotes were designed for propertied, martial audiences. The preponderance of military units based on aristocratic households is overwhelming and unsurprising, from Godfrey of Bouillon’s or Bohemund’s familiäres in 1096, to the extensive noble and royal military équipes of the Third Crusade, to the retained households of Louis IX and the magnates who followed him in 1248 and 1270. The English Pipe Rolls for 1190–92 grouped crusaders according to region and lordship.7 Crusaders sought lords as much as lords imposed lordship. A southern Italian noticed at the time how, once Bohemund had taken the Cross in 1096, young warriors flocked to his service. Three-quarters of a century later, the Jerusalemite historian William of Tyre analysed the process:
For whenever it was rumoured that a prince had taken the vow to make the pilgrimage, the people (populi) flocked thither in throngs and begged permission to join his company (comitatui). They invoked his name as their lord for the entire journey and promised obedience and loyalty.8
A great lord invited service. At the siege of Acre in 1191, it was alleged, seeing the way the political wind was blowing, the Pisans volunteered to perform homage to the newly arrived Richard I, presumably anticipating a reciprocal act of generosity from their new master.9
Patterns of lordship recruitment ran in concentric circles. The widest were displayed at the grand set ceremonial adoptions of the Cross. The great aristocratic assemblies that punctuated the start of international expeditions established or confirmed in a very public manner bonds of mutual complicity. Potential recruits frequently waited to see how the leaders in their communities would jump before committing themselves. At Strasburg in 1188 a stuttering start to Cross-taking was transformed once the magnates signed up.10 As a recruiting event, the Clermont Council in 1095 was hardly even a modest success in this respect, its international reach being largely ecclesiastical, not, as hoped, secular. By contrast, the assemblies at Vézelay and Speyer in 1146 brought together large sections of the higher nobility of France and Germany, identified command structures and imposed political reconciliation. In January 1188, taking the Cross at Gisors both sealed the necessary peace between the kings of England and France and the count of Flanders and set in train official efforts to raise money and men. Frederick Barbarossa’s Court of Christ, three months later, presented the crusade as part of an assertion of royal and imperial power in Germany, a precedent imitated by Frederick’s son and grandson in 1195, 1215 and 1220.11 The higher calling of the Cross, while imposing obligations that could prove awkward if ignored, provided useful contexts for resolving rivalries and disputes without either party losing face. The sequence of Cross-takings in 1199–1200 at Eery and Bruges joined former rebels against the French king with faithful royalists. The regional Cross ceremonies of the Fifth Crusade and the so-called Princes’ Crusades of 1239–41, as well as those associated with Louis IX’s crusades in 1246–8 and 1267–70, shared these characteristics of conflict resolution.12
Cross-taking expressed communal identity as well as personal commitment. Recruiters’ descriptions of the preaching campaigns in Wales in 1188, in the diocese of Cologne in 1214–17 and in Marseilles in 1224 registered how existing social group dynamics – lordship, kinship, location or community – swayed responses.13 Urban recruitment could consolidate corporate solidarity which then continued on campaign: the Venetians in 1101, 1122 or 1202; the Genoese in 1097; Pisans during the Third Crusade; Cologne in 1147, 1189 and 1217; Bremen in 1189; Florence in 1188; Londoners in 1147, 1189 and 1190; Lübeck in the Baltic. Civic identities feature prominently in an account of the Second Crusade: Bristol, Hastings, Southampton, Cologne, Rouen and Boulogne, and young men ‘from the region of Ipswich’.14 Most of these contingents were led by local aristocrats or civic grandees, as the Genoese veteran Caffaro put it, ‘the better sort’ (meliores) in cities and towns. His account of the 1097 Genoese expedition of twelve galleys prepared, equipped and supplied with ‘fighting men of the best quality’ by the leading citizens who had taken the Cross could be replicated across Europe.15 The shipload of at least eighty Londoners that embarked on crusade in 1190 was led by two members of the urban elite, Geoffrey the Goldsmith and William FitzOsbert, nicknamed Longbeard. (The latter was a literate, educated and propertied citizen, later infamous as a leader of popular civic agitation.) The Londoners further emphasized their autonomy on crusade by adopting Thomas Becket as their patronal saint and founding a hospital dedicated to him at Acre.16
Chroniclers delighted in catalogues and necrologies of crusaders. Three lists of the living illustrate the dominance of social elites: a German and an English one from the Third Crusade and a French one from the Fourth. Each derived from participants or sources very close to them. The Historia de Expeditione Friderici (History of the Campaign of Frederick) was, like most contemporary accounts of twelfth-century crusades, a composite text. The basis for the first part may have been written by the end of 1189 .It includes a long list of the German crusaders assembled at Pressburg on the Danube, modern Bratislava, on the frontiers of Hungary in late May 1189. Arranged in rough hierarchical order, it included, beside the Emperor Frederick and his son Duke Frederick of Swabia, a dozen prelates, three margraves, twenty-seven counts, twenty-five other non-comital nobles, plus an unspecified number of unnamed dependent ministeriales and distinguished knights (‘electorum militum’). The list recognized the nature of recruitment, grouping names in regions – Swabia, Bavaria, Franconia, Saxony, Carinthia, Alsace – and noting where nobles travelled with close relatives, brothers, sons and uncles.17 Similar catalogues from the Third Crusade confirm the pattern. A later English compilation, the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi (The Journey of the Pilgrims and the Deeds of King Richard), based on sources close to the action, recorded the names of nobles, mainly from Angevin lands in France, who arrived at the siege of Acre after Richard I in 1191. A prominent feature of this list were kinship groups: the brothers Corneby; knights with the name Torolens or Tozelis; the knights of the des Preaux family (in fact three brothers); the de la Mares; the Stutevilles (‘Stutevillenses’).18
When a veteran of the Fourth Crusade, the Picard knight Robert of Clari, came to record his war memories, he prefaced them with an extended register of the haus homes, the ‘high men’, those of sufficient standing and wealth who ‘carried banners’ (portient baniere), i.e. those who led their own armed companies, the key component of any crusade or other medieval army. Like the German Third Crusade list, this was arranged hierarchically, beginning with the counts of Champagne, Flanders, Blois, St Pol and Montfort, the bishops and abbots. Next the barons were paraded by region: Picardy and Flanders; Burgundy; Champagne; the Île de France; the Beauvaisis; the Chartrain. Again, accompanying brothers and sons figure. Naming these grandees provided a suitably resonant noble setting for subsequent events, lists of great knights being commonplace in chivalric literature to which Robert’s chronicle bore some resemblance. Robert singled out those who performed deeds of conspicuous bravery on campaign, distinguishing between the ‘rich’ and those he called ‘poor’. These ‘poor’ crusaders were in fact chiefly knights of some local prominence in Robert’s home provinces of Picardy, Artois and Flanders, definitely members of the aristocracy, socially below the nobles but with close links to local barons and the count of Flanders. The poverty of such men was distinctly relative.19
All three lists described the leadership and patronage of rich lords. Beyond them were, in Robert of Clari’s phrase, the ‘boine gent a cheval et a pié’, ‘good men on horse and foot’.20 These were no paupers. In other contexts ‘boni homines’ suggested property; here Robert at least implies military skill. Elsewhere he explained that in 1202, to make up the shortfall in the agreed payment to honour the transport treaty with the Venetians, each crusader was expected to contribute according to rank: a knight 4 marks (1 mark being equal to two-thirds of a pound); a mounted sergeant 2 marks; the rest 1.21 These structures were evident from the First Crusade to the written agreements for retaining and allegiance in the 1240s and beyond: great magnates surrounded by lesser lords and prosperous knights linked by kinship, affinity, service or contract, or a mixture of each.22 Surrounding them were troops who served out of loyalty or obligation, who were supported by their own funds or by subsistence and pay from others, or a combination of both. The whole was woven together by contractual agreements or prior arrangements of association, service and clientage.
Some English evidence shows how this operated. On the Third Crusade Richard I retained great lords such as Duke Leopold of Austria and Count Henry of Champagne, the king’s nephew. He did not incorporate their troops into his household, any more than Louis IX did when he paid for his great magnates and their followers fifty years later. Yet the lesser knights Richard contracted with at Acre were directly attached to his command as stipendiaries to join his existing army of paid troops, to fight under his banner.23 In 1239–40, King Richard’s nephew, Richard, earl of Cornwall (1209–72), embarked on his crusade with his brother-in-law Simon of Montfort (son of the leading commander of the Albigensian Crusade) and William Longspee and at least eighteen ‘bannerets’, knights who commanded separate retinues under their own banners. All of these who embarked with Richard, Simon and William were described by one close observer, who knew Earl Richard, as members of his household, ‘de familia comitis Ricardi’.24 These included John of Neville, chief forester of England, and Philip Basset. These two seemed to have reached a separate bilateral agreement under which Philip agreed to accompany John at his own expense to the Holy Land with two knights. Once there, he and his knights would serve John as members of his familia.25 Similar networks of interlaced contracts secured the participation of the future Edward I of England and his contingent in Louis IX’s crusade in 1270. Edward received what was couched in terms of a loan of
70,000 It from Louis, promising in return to serve him on crusade, an agreement which some saw as tantamount to Edward joining the French king’s household as one of his barons. Edward, in his turn, recruited by contract 225 paid knights.26 The Basset-Neville deal of 1240 survives as the first written crusading contract, if only in draft. Yet Louis IX’s crusade of the late 1240s was raised through a similar chain of contracts, from those with great lords such as his brother Alphonse, count of Poitiers, to the Joinville deal already discussed. While as late as 1270 not all such agreement were written down, that did not impede the tight construction of crusade bands.27
Leaders paying for their own household troops, hiring others and subsidizing their transport presented a long history. The language of retaining appears in accounts of all Holy Land crusades from the 1090s onwards. Such bonds worked horizontally as well as vertically. On the First Crusade, Bohemund took kinsmen of equal status into his familia, while Count Raymond of Toulouse offered cash to recruit fellow commanders. On the Third Crusade, Richard I, Philip II and Frederick Barbarossa all lavished subsidies on crusading magnates, in essence little different from the contracts of the 1240s or 1270. The huge crusade treasure amassed by Count Theobald of Champagne in 1201-2 may have been intended for a similar purpose.28 Transport costs were traditionally concerns of commanders. Bohemund paid for his followers to cross the Adriatic. Louis VII apparently toyed with using a Sicilian fleet. Richard I hired a fleet of upwards of 100 ships for his crusade in 1190. Count Baldwin IX of Flanders invested in a Flemish crusade fleet in 1202 that shipped many of his best troops. In 1228–9, Frederick II paid for the sea transport east not just of his own military entourage but of all his followers.29 Within the confines of lordship, contractual dependence provided merely one element in reciprocal relationships characterized by sentiment as well as gain. Recruiting undifferentiated regiments of stipendiaries or hiring fleets was a largely anonymous process. By contrast, dealing with household troops, close clients and familia could involve personal responsibility, affection even. Lords travelled with administrative and domestic staff, military retinues, social dependants and friends. Medieval lordship and government retained a peripatetic quality well suited to enterprises such as crusading. It was natural for Richard I to take with him his seneschal, his chamberlain, the clerk of the chamber and his vice-chancellor, Roger Malceal, who drowned in a storm off Cyprus in April 1191 still wearing the royal seal around his neck. (An irony, as Roger had sealed a royal charter concerning the king’s right of wreck only six months before.)30 Military households on campaign could be large, such as Landgrave Louis of Thuringia’s in 1227: four counts; eighteen named knights; numerous ministerielles, including his butler, marshal, seneschal and chamberlain, as well as priests, chaplains and other knights. A hundred and thirty years earlier, Godfrey of Bouillon had similarly been accompanied by his butler, seneschal, chamberlain, clerical staff and an extended clientage of lords and knights and a group of client monks.31 However, a familia could possess intimacy.
The retinue of Leopold V of Austra in 1190, besides the count of Moerl and a freeman called Dietmar, contained eight of his ministeriales, some if not all old family retainers.32 When Count Guy V of Forez’s drew up his will as he lay dying near Brindisi on his return from the Holy Land in 1241, the witnesses from his close entourage included his chaplain, a friar, his clerk, a knight, his chamberlain and his master of sergeants; among the legatees were two squires and a physician, presumably also from the count’s retinue.33 In newly conquered Damietta in December 1219, the concerns of a dying Bolognese crusader, Barzella Merxadrus, centred on the immediate security, comfort and material needs of his nearest companions, followers and, in particular, his wife Guiletta, not least her right to stay in the tent they shared.34 The will drawn up at Acre in October 1267 by the Englishman Hugh of Neville is equally eloquent of the care shown towards followers, including paying for their passage across the Mediterranean. Among the beneficiaries were three knights, friends or otherwise attached to Hugh’s retinue, two of whom acted as executors; two more executors, his page, Jakke the Palmer, and Walter his chaplain; Colin his clerk; his cook, Lucel; his groom Thomas; and two marshals, John and Master Reimund. Among the goods bequeathed by Hugh were horses, armour, a sword, jewelled buckles, a goblet, a gold ring and large quantities of cash, in a variety of currencies – sterling silver, marks and gold bezants (Byzantine coins) – a commentary on the complex bimetallism that faced westerners in the Levant and the expense of running even a modest company. Hugh was expecting further money to come from England, as well as 500 marks promised from Church crusade funds. When, nearly twenty years earlier, William Longspee embarked from England on his fatal crusade with his saddlebags stuffed with money, he was merely being prudent.35
NON-NOBLES
Hugh of Neville’s will maps the social contours of recruitment. Despite chroniclers’ trumpeting of mass enthusiasm, precise evidence is underwhelming for active independent crusaders from the poorest, most oppressed sections of the community beyond household servants and military retinues that included archers and infantry as well as knights and sergeants. This exclusiveness was recognized after 1200 by the introduction of vow redemptions and partial indulgences for small donations from those of modest means. Independent crucesignati who did come from lower down the social scale from the arms-bearing elites, the burgenses and rustici mentioned in the ordinance for the Saladin Tithe in 1188, held one thing in common with their social superiors: negotiable property.36 Surviving fiscal and archival evidence, which almost invariably concerns the propertied, may not distort reality. Legally, a crusader had to be free. If, like the Nottinghamshire peasant Hugh Travers, he were a serf, taking the Cross implied manumission (confirmed in this case).37 If self-funded, a crusader required resources. English court records from the early thirteenth century are peppered with references to crucesignati who were poor. Too poor to embark, they nonetheless employed the shield of crusade privilege to resist lawsuits. A list from around 1200 of Lincolnshire crucesignati who had failed to fulfil their vows identified in 20 out of 29 cases poverty as the main cause of non-compliance, some described as very poor or beggars. Even so, one crucesignatus claimed he had been robbed of goods in Lombardy. Another, who insisted he had fulfilled his vow, was listed as a pauperissimus, a consequence perhaps of his five children.38 The social and economic identities of audiences and crucesignati revealed in accounts of preaching and in sermons indicated means. The temporal crusade privileges assumed the same: the ability to sell or mortgage property; immunity from interest on loans and repayment of debts; delay in answering civil charges.
The social profile of the response to crusading from wide swathes of free society reflected the upward mobility of non-noble land-holders, merchants and artisans as much as that of arms-bearers. In 1200, Innocent III distinguished between the feeble and poor (‘debiles et inopes’) who should not be forced to embark, and others who had taken the Cross: nobles, magnates, warriors (‘bellatores’), and artisans and farmers (‘artifices et agricolae’).39 Crusader privileges allowed tenants as well as landowners to raise money freely by sale or mortgage.40 Deals could be piecemeal, raising as little as a few shillings, or, as with a villicus or steward from the Loire valley around 1170, involve a whole patrimony, in this case worth 300 sous.41 Beyond farmers and landed rentiers of one sort or another, artisans feature prominently. Many of them could expect to work on campaign. Lists of crusaders in English Exchequer records for 1207 and 1208 identify a dyer, a bowman and a butcher alongside merchants, provosts, squires, sergeants and chaplains. A c.1200 list of Cornish crucesignati noted a blacksmith, a miller, a cobbler and a tailor, while a contemporary Lincolnshire list adds a skinner, a potter, a butcher, another blacksmith, a vintner, a ditcher and a baker. In the 1220s, the master carpenter of Chichester Cathedral sought permission to go on crusade.42 According to Robert of Clari, the crusaders’ camp outside Constantinople in 1203 was defended by horse-boys and cooks, equipped with quilts, saddlecloths, copper pots, maces and pestles. Butchers in the crusader camp raised the alarm when the count of Poitiers was surrounded by Turks at the battle of Mansourah in 1250.43 Laundresses – old women ostensibly beyond sexual allure – doubled as de-lousers on the Third Crusade.44 Alongside the usual household officials such as butlers, seneschals, stewards, marshals, constables, chamberlains, notaries and physicians, the Fifth Crusade was joined by judges, academics (magistri) – a telling indication of the rise of universities over the previous century – a carter, a barber, a tanner, a cook, a schoolmaster (grammaticus) from Yorkshire, a Gloucestershire franklin (or freeholder) and a German master chef (magister coquinae). From other sources appear fishmongers, physicians, surgeons, masons, fowlers, doghandlers and engineers.45
Besides service in the entourages of the well-to-do, artisans had access to cash as wage earners. Many proved professionally useful in crusader armies, and some were unashamedly entrepreneurial. At the siege of Nicaea in 1097, the Lombard engineer who volunteered his services did so on condition he was paid and all expenses be provided from the crusade’s general funds. He received the substantial sum of 15 livres of Chartres money, which helped pay his team of workmen (opifices).46 The crusade veteran and chronicler Raymond of Aguiliers noted, with a whiff of asperity, that while most of those who helped build the siege engines at the siege of Jerusalem in June and July 1099 did so freely (‘spontane’), the professional artisans, the ‘artifices’, were paid, some from public collections, others by the count of Toulouse.47 Businessmen might hope to secure a good living on crusade. One witness accused merchants (‘li marcheanf) at the siege of Acre in the winter of 1190/91 of deliberately hoarding grain to drive prices up. To underline his moral point, he recounted a story of a Pisan profiteer whose plan to keep hold of his grain store until he could exact maximum profit came unstuck when it was completely destroyed by fire, ruining him.48 Less pejoratively, merchants and money-changers provided commercial and financial services in the markets that fed the armies.
Towns remained the centres for recruits as for preaching. By no means confined to maritime trading cities, recruiting was directed along inland networks of politics and trade to urban centres that acted as magnets for surrounding regions. In 1247, crusaders from Châteaudun in northern France between Chartres and Orleans signalled their corporate identity by forming a confraternity, confratria, to organize funding and to attract non-crusaders’ donations.49 In twelfth- and thirteenth-century Oxford, a well-connected inland market town hosting religious houses, a royal palace and a nascent university, townsmen traded houses, meadows and rents for funds to pay for their journeys east.50 One of the more misleading assumptions about the crusades is that its idealism was less attractive to those engaged in urban or commercial activities except in so far as those ideals promised new markets or the chance for material profit. In fact, incentives of faith and reward gained similar if not greater traction in town as in country.
Two other groups of recruits fit later stereotypes more easily: youths and clergy. In chronicles, iuvenes described literally young men or, more obliquely, as-yet-un-dubbed or not-yet-landed knights. As with armies everywhere, young men were enticed by prospects of fighting and adventure in the service of an exciting and noble cause. Albert of Aachen blamed military failings of Peter the Hermit’s expedition in 1096 on the intemperate indiscipline of crowds of excitable iuvenes. Seven iuvenes from the Ipswich area were singled out for their conspicuous bravery at the siege of Lisbon. In 1190, young crusaders apparently played a leading role in the attacks on Jews in England.51 Propertied crusaders frequently travelled with their sons and younger brothers. Young crucesignati could persuade their non-crusading parents to provide funds for their adventure, like Robert of Marsh in 1201 or John Pacche of Oxford in 1247-8. Others were probably less independent than commentators portrayed them. The habitual structure of noble and knightly households included aristocratic youths as squires or pages, a form of in-service knighthood training, men such as Hugh of Neville’s page (vallet) at Acre, Jakke the Palmer. Under his master’s will, he received a horse and full knightly armoured apparel appropriate for a ‘gentil home’.52
Predictably, clergy comprised another major component of any crusade. During recruitment, they assisted in preaching, crusade liturgies, processions and Cross-giving. As parish priests they granted recruits permission to go on crusade. On campaign, like their lay colleagues, they fell into three general categories: those serving in the households of the wealthy as chaplains and clerks; those of independent means associated in various ways with lords, other clerics or local crusading companies; and grand prelates whose households were, at least in the early years of crusading, indistinguishable from those of secular lords. The clergy from England on the Third Crusade who actually reached Palestine included an archbishop, a bishop and an abbot, archdeacons, cathedral canons, chaplains, parsons, clerks and the vicar of Dartford.53 Although Urban II had disapproved of the involvement of cloistered monks, that did not prevent their participation. Former monks who had been elevated to bishoprics, and thus freed from the cloister, provided much of the ecclesiastical leadership of the Second and Third Crusades as well as the Albigensian crusade of 1209. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who helped lead the English advance guard to Syria in 1190, had been a Cistercian abbot.54 For secular clergy crusading became acceptable and common. Many behaved like other aspiring crusaders. To make crusading easier for them, from around 1200 beneficed clergy were permitted to raise money on their income to pay for other crusaders or to subsidize their own journeys. They were also allowed to enjoy the income from their benefices during their absence and, after 1215, to use proceeds from the general revenues of their churches generated by the new system of ecclesiastical crusade taxes.55
Clergy on crusade served the spiritual needs of individuals, households and the armies at large through regular rounds of quasi-monastic devotions: prayers; private confessions; public processions; penances; liturgies. They exhorted and encouraged. Crusade campaigns were punctuated by public rituals of re-dedication or supplication, often crucial in maintaining morale during moments of crisis. Prayers and sacraments before battle at least addressed the most immediate anxiety of the soldiery, sudden death. The physical presence of a significant number of priests overtly demonstrated the holy nature of the endeavour. Clergy did not form an undifferentiated mass. Even at humbler levels, varying contemporary designations indicated a variety of functions. In one mid-thirteenth-century list of crusaders, three adjacent clergymen are identified as ‘priest’, ‘chaplain’ and ‘clerk’.56 They did much more than pray and reassure. The ubiquity of lesser clergy can be explained as much by their role as writing clerks rather than as priests, keeping accounts, copying contracts, writing letters, drawing up and witnessing charters and wills. Clerics negotiated with the enemy, buried the dead and organized relief for the impoverished, a role in which Bishop Hubert Walter of Salisbury, the future archbishop of Canterbury, distinguished himself during the grim winter of 1190/91 under the walls of Acre. Some also fought, like the archetype of the crusading priest, Adhemar of Le Puy, on the First Crusade; or, during the Third, Hubert Walter, Ralph Hauterive, archdeacon of Colchester and the ‘armed clerk’ Hugh de la Mare, who unwisely attempted to give Richard I military advice; or, on the Fourth, Robert of Clari’s brother, the priest Aleaumes, ‘first in every assault where he was present’.57 As ecclesiastical fashion changed, fewer crusading prelates imitated Bishop Adhemar, a noted horseman who campaigned with his own military household. Later prelates tended more to be administrators, such as Hubert Walter or the Spanish Cardinal Pelagius, the domineering papal legate on the Fifth Crusade, or refined scholarly preachers and politicians such as James of Vitry or Odo of Châteauroux, papal legate to Louis IX’s first crusade of 1248–54.
This did not preclude energetic clerical leadership. Bishop Albert of Riga personally orchestrated the wars of conquest in Livonia in the first quarter of the thirteenth century, accompanying campaigns himself under his own banner. His predecessor, Berthold, had been killed in battle.58 If fighting clerics were increasingly frowned upon, supporting roles were still possible. In a famous instance, Oliver of Paderborn, Paris-trained academic scholasticus or schoolmaster in the diocese of Cologne and future cardinal, preacher and recruiter for the Cross in 1213–17, accompanied his Cologne contingent on the invasion of Egypt, about which he wrote a detailed account and apologia, completed by 1222 and partly based on his letters home. Oliver proved to be more than a diligent pastor. At a crucial moment in the siege of Damietta on the Nile in August 1218, he designed a floating siege tower that helped reduce a vital strategic point in the city’s defences. Oliver’s account of this incident (which modestly avoids revealing his own role) encouraged the English chronicler Matthew Paris (d.1259) to commemorate it in one of his lively drawn illustrations to his great Chronica Majora.59
The most actively involved group of professed religious were the members of the military orders, the knights, sergeants and priests of the Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, Sword Brothers of Livonia and the rest. From the 1140s, they played increasingly important roles as professional, disciplined, experienced troops; as strategists with local knowledge; as international and local bankers; and as providers of a range of logistical support, including shipping. Their unique commitment to holy war lent them especial prominence. Templars and Hospitallers were recruited to help assess and levy the Saladin Tithe of 1188 in the lands of Henry II of England, one English Templar being caught embezzling the proceeds on a large scale.60 From the later twelfth century they appeared to enjoy legal and fiscal immunities similar to crusaders’. Their role in recruitment and propaganda stemmed from their status as permanent milites Christi, veterans of holy wars and, individually and corporately, prominent figures and features in the social and physical landscape of western Europe, magnets for lavish lay endowment. In some regions, family patronage and association with military orders were closely associated with habits of taking the Cross. Although members of the military orders were not technically crucesignati, they provided a constant resource of devotion and practical assistance in any crusade plan.61
Criminals were also attracted to crusading. As well as facilitating clerical and lay involvement, the crusade privileges of legal exemption and protection supplied an attractive option to those seeking to escape or evade justice or punishment. This went beyond the use of the crusader’s right to delay civil litigation. The most complete secular legal records for the period in western Europe, those of the English royal courts, supply numerous examples of people absconding to the Holy Land before they could be arraigned or tried for alleged offences.62 The crusade also acted as a punishment in its own right. The export of undesirables to serve a good cause possessed a history as old as the crusades themselves. James of Vitry may have deplored the criminous riff-raff he encountered in Acre in 1217, but penitential exile, formally imposed or as an act of convenient desertion, sprang from the very roots of the crusade’s penitential purpose, closely paralleling the imposition of penitential pilgrimages. Expiation of moral not necessarily criminal guilt could also act as a spur. According to the well-connected Matthew Paris, Simon of Montfort and his wife Eleanor took the Cross in 1248 to assuage their consciences over their marriage: Eleanor had previously sworn an oath of chastity. Certain convicted felons were sentenced to depart on crusade without the option, a procedure reflected in the probably legendary story of the punishment meted out to the murderers of Thomas Becket.63 A penitential crusade could be used to signal the resolution of disputes or a commitment to new obedience. Repentant heretics were sentenced by the Inquisition to serve on crusade to defend the Latin empire of Constantinople in the 1230s and 1240s, including a professional juggler, an unlikely crusader and even more unlikely adherent of puritanical Catharism. Louis IX tried to secure the service of former heretics and their sympathizers in the 1240s, with mixed success.64 While reformed heretics may not necessarily have harboured a taste for holy war, those previously engaged in violent crime possibly suited the life only too well. Enforced crusading might seem to contradict fundamental principles of an enterprise which rested on the concept of voluntary conversion and commitment. In reality, the crusades were sustained by a dependence culture within a social hierarchy in which very few possessed even modest free choice.
WOMEN
This applied most to women. It is a myth, a male myth, that medieval women lacked agency or social presence. Until the early thirteenth century, a wife’s permission was required for a married male crusader to sign up. Even then accounts of crusade preaching are littered with misogynist stories of obstructive wives, backhanded testimony to their domestic power and tacit recognition that the attendant risks of crusading could be as high for dependants as for the crusaders themselves. Women left behind faced legal and more than occasional physical threats to their property, status or person, not least as they were often left in temporary charge of crusaders’ estates. Wives, mothers and daughters held recognized stakes in the assets crusaders used, a role attested in numerous charter witness lists. However, Church authorities and military recruiters alike exhibited a distinctly equivocal attitude to women. In theory, crusading was open to all the faithful as a penitential exercise. But holy war required soldiers, an occupation culturally deemed unsuited to women. Even though, reluctantly, wives were allowed to accompany husbands, the spectre of sex, even conjugal sex, disturbed the ecclesiastical vision of a morally pure enterprise, the ideal crucesignatus abstaining from carnal acts (except killing).65
Such inhibitions failed to prevent women’s participation. Many crusaders travelled with their wives and families, recognized by the inclusion of wives and children in John of Tolve’s list of beneficiaries from the loot of Damietta in 1219.66 Wives, daughters and other women were present on all crusades, many not just as licit or illicit appendages but as crucesignatae in their own right. It is clear that both higher clergy and parish priests, the latter entrusted by Urban II with granting permission for their parishioners to take the Cross, acquiesced. The catalogue of queens, princesses, wives of nobles and other members of the elites taking the Cross and going on crusade is extensive from the First Crusade onwards. On the Second Crusade, for example, Queen Eleanor of France was joined by the countesses of Flanders and Toulouse. By the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was commonplace for wives of crusading nobles to take the Cross; three of Louis IX’s children were born on crusade between 1250 and 1253. Not all joined up simply to keep partners company. Ida, widow of the margrave of Austria, led her own armed contingent on crusade in 1101. A century later, Innocent III recognized that wealthy women could lead armed troops on crusade. In Genoa in 1216, rich crucesignatae persuaded their spouses to enlist.67
The habits of the grand were replicated lower down the social hierarchy. The crusade confraternity established at Dartmouth in 1147 assumed the participation of women. In a list of forty-seven Cornish crusaders of c.1200, four, possibly five, were women. Of 342 commoner crusaders on board the ship St Victor seeking to join Louis IX in the east in 1250, 42 were women, 22 of them unchaperoned. At Marseilles in 1224, women proved integral to the recruiting process.68 Chroniclers, including the Greek Anna Comnena, noted substantial numbers of women in crusade armies and as camp followers.69 They figure in varieties of necessary, chiefly domestic or commercial, roles, such as nursing, washing, de-lousing, prostitution, organizing markets, grinding corn, supplying and occasionally helping frontline troops. Some were remembered for their independent spirit, such as the mortally wounded wife at the siege of Acre who begged her husband to use her corpse to help fill the moat.70 Others were held up for moral censure, such as the nun from Trier rescued from her Turkish captors at the siege of Nicaea in 1097 who subsequently returned to the Muslim lover who had allegedly ravished her in captivity.71 Most crucesignatae pursued less colourful careers. Like the Parisian Jeanne Crest, who took the Cross with her husband Renard in 1224-5, women crusaders, whether in a family group or not, unsurprisingly came from the same propertied social milieux as male crusaders.72 Those of humbler backgrounds only went as servants and more menial workers.
Recruiters’ appeal to women and their responses were inevitably complicated. However, their presence, prominence even, at all levels cannot be doubted. In April 1250, a woman from Paris, possibly a professional physician, cradled the head of the sick Louis IX as he awaited capture at Sharamshah in the Nile Delta after the defeat at Mansourah. Meanwhile, down river at Damietta, Louis’s heavily pregnant wife, Margaret, soon to give birth to a son, was trying to hold the Christian garrison together at the same time as arranging details of the king’s ransom.73 Crusader women’s resourcefulness was the match of anyone’s. The recruitment of women exposes a tracery of informal, sometimes intimate bonds of association, ties of family, neighbourhood, affection even, that paralleled and supported the more apparent structures of lordship, pay and finance. On board the St Victor in 1250 were lords and knights with their retinues, Templars, Hospitallers, seven clerics, family groups of husbands and wives, sons and brothers, servants and artisans, solitary male and female travellers, and those who were described as being linked in some way as companions (socii). Among these were two women, Guillelma de la Lande and Bernarda, ‘sua socia’ Was Bernarda Guillelma’s business associate, servant, companion, friend, or partner?74
COMMUNAL ASSOCIATION
Such ambiguity nicely reflects the variety of incentives for recruits of either sex. As already sketched, tied up in motives to take the Cross and in how subsequently to run a crusade were considerations of kinship, shared location and communal action. The networks of allegiances and command of the First Crusade rested on cat’s cradles of blood and marriage connections. The brothers Godfrey of Bouillon, Eustace and Baldwin of Boulogne and the brothers-in-law Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Blois are well known. Robert of Flanders was first cousin to Robert of Normandy and Stephen of Blois’s wife but also the brother-in-law to Bohemund of Taranto’s half-brother, Roger Borsa. Kindred links did not necessarily promote unity. Raymond of Toulouse had been married to the daughter of Roger I of Sicily, Bohemund’s uncle and, like Roger Borsa, his political opponent. The Fourth Crusade lacked royal leadership but instead was initiated by a closely associated and related group of northern French counts who, like their predecessors of the 1090s, provided markedly resilient and cohesive leadership. Webs of kindred characterized recruitment for every crusade at all levels, travelling with relatives being a natural option, like living with them.
Shared locality also influenced recruitment and campaign arrangements, from great magnates to humbler gangs clustered around communal camp fires. In the camp at Acre in 1190–91, the English royal clerk and chronicler Roger of Howden, parson of a town in east Yorkshire, witnessed a charter of a local Yorkshire landowner, John of Hessle, and, in listing the English dead, gave especial attention to those far-from-grand casualties from his own neighbourhood: Richard and John of Legsby; the parson of Croxby; Robert the Huntsman of Pontefract.75 They may have been known to him, friends or companions. Equivalent attention to known local associates, lords, relatives and friends is shown by Robert of Clari’s praise for fellow Picards on the Fourth Crusade, not least his brother Aleaumes, the fighting priest.76 Recruited together, they probably travelled together, like the Londoners who hired their own ships in 1147, 1189 and 1190. Such was almost certainly the experience of the knights and priests from the Chalonssur-Saône region who messed together on the Fourth Crusade.77
Many of these regional groups formalized their association. Setting out on the Second Crusade, Milo, lord of Evry-le-Châtel in southern Champagne, and his knights swore mutual oaths of unity, ‘se feder-averunt juramentis’. English bands of crusaders in 1190 were described as bound together by oaths, coniurati.78 The role of formal sworn confraternities had been exploited more than once during the First Crusade to pool resources into centrally controlled funds, as at the sieges of Nicaea and Antioch. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade pooled their authority in licensing representatives jointly to secure a transport contract with an Italian shipper. Communal arrangements became staple accompaniments to crusading, complementing or substituting for lordship: the common poor relief fund at Acre in 1190–91 or the common chest of funds at Damietta in 1219.79 Despite modern stereotypes, medieval society was as familiar with horizontal bonds of social cohesion as with lordly hierarchies: monastic communities; religious confraternities; military orders; universities; secular saints’ and trade guilds; and the more obvious political and urban communes that sprang up in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The communal model was not narrowly civic. It was ubiquitous across the Church and prominent in elite politics, witnessed in ideas such as the thirteenth-century English constitutional notion of the ‘community of the realm’ or the nobles’ anti-royalist ‘Commune of England’ of 1258.80
Crusading, ostensibly a gathering of equal and independent souls freely committed to a common cause, offered a receptive setting for communal bonds of association, particularly where traditional secular lordship was either attenuated or irrelevant. Communal agreements confirmed by oaths were widespread. Louis VII’s disciplinary ordinances of 1147 were agreed by mutual oaths as, more effectively, were those of Frederick Barbarossa in 1189; those of Richard I in 1190 were reached by ‘common consent’. The polyglot fleet assembled at Dartmouth in 1147 agreed to a sworn association to guarantee peace and friendship between the disparate groups – a coniuratio or societas coniurata, a commune.81 Many townsmen involved from around the North Sea region would have been familiar with this sort of association, not least those from London where collective corporate action was becoming increasingly apparent in the 1130s and 1140s. The 1147 Dartmouth commune encompassed civil and criminal justice, sumptuary rules, the conduct of women, the competitive hiring of servants, collective decision making, religious worship, distribution of money and arbitration between members.82 Tactical and strategic decisions were reached collectively, a model replicated in the spring of 1189 by the fleet from London and other North Sea ports gathered at Dartmouth in May and by the crusade flotilla from Bremen in the same year, which also appears to have run itself on communal lines. Similar models of organization were adopted by other English ships in 1189 and 1190 and by the large fleet from the Netherlands, Frisia and the Rhineland in 1217.83 While some of these communes may have been thrown together by the circumstances of travel or campaigning, others clearly operated from the start of recruitment and planning, such as the Châteaudun confraternity of 1247 or the societas peregrinorum in Florence or that of Pistoia during the Third Crusade or the Parisian confrarie of the Holy Sepulchre of 1317.84 In 1210 Bishop Fulk of Toulouse instituted the so-called White Confraternity in the city whose members received the Cross and crusade indulgences. Chiefly active in condemning usury, members nonetheless assisted in the crusaders’ attack on Lavaur in southern France in 1211.85
Acquaintance with communal structures of association and decisionmaking emerged on campaigns. During the First Crusade stay in Syria and Palestine, an active collective role was taken by the populus, a collective noun suggesting a recognized system of assembly politics within the army that involved the commoners as well as the knights and nobles. In similar fashion, the Fourth Crusade acted as a commune, the leadership consulting the ‘commons of the host’ and holding parlements at moments of peril, urgency or dissent.86 Even the forceful Richard I was compelled to concede a second attack on Jerusalem in May 1192 through organized insistence by the commons in the army, cleverly manipulated by his critics.87 Consensual corporate institutions were familiar to crusaders from public law courts to agrarian management. Propagandists’ parallels of a crusader ‘army of God’ with the scriptural collectives of the Israelites or the Maccabees were appropriate. The ubiquity of communal management helps explain the remarkable cohesion within large crusader armies rarely bound together under unified lordship.
THE ‘POOR’
The accumulated evidence for recruitment and service seemingly excludes a category dear to many medieval and modern commentators, the poor. It is clear that crusading was chiefly the preserve of some, not all, sections of society, of the free and those with access to material surplus. For them, the costs of individual crusade travel may not have been prohibitively exorbitant. In the 1240s, a third-class berth from Marseilles to Acre might have cost a third of a year’s wages for a posh Parisian cook, or a full year’s wages for a specialist Parisian tailor.88 However, with food expensive, even without the inflationridden campaign markets, and war materials costly and easily depreciated, either credit or accumulated capital were essential. For the nobility, crusading, whether by land or sea, has been estimated to cost four or more times an individual’s annual income.89 For the less elevated, similar scales of cost were likely, although rulers with access to extraordinary taxation, such as Louis IX, might hope to break even. The introduction of vow redemptions for the ‘debiles et inopes’ (‘feeble and poor’), as Innocent III put it, confirmed active crusading as a socially elite, niche activity, in many ways no different from other expressions of medieval religious devotion and charity such as almsgiving, donations to religious corporations, or pilgrimages with which crusading was culturally so closely linked.90
What of that other constant presence on crusade, the crowds described as the poor, the pauperes? Chroniclers employed a variety of blanket terms, often more literary and rhetorical than sociological, blurring social and functional distinctions between infantry, non-combatants, camp-followers, civilian providers of necessary support services and the destitute. The comparative or absolute social or economic status of plebs, pauperes, peregrini and mediocres lacked definition. For example, the ‘poor’ are regularly depicted as fighters. Recruits such as the menu peuple who rioted at Aigues Mortes in 1270 were armed and capable of mounting a violent contest.91 Similarly, non-combatants were frequently performing tasks essential to the military effort. The populus of the First Crusade or the ‘commons of the host’ of the Fourth comprised fighting men with a collective and personal stake in the direction of operations. Crucesignati had to be free, to take the voluntary vow and enjoy the temporal privileges. Legally, unfree serfs taking the Cross were ipso facto manumitted. Of course, the incidence of freedom and servility, in law and in fact, varied across Europe. Technically, German ministeriales, conspicuous in German crusade armies, were unfree. But they represented a very unusual elite class of bondmen, culturally and economically the peers of knights. Social exclusivity in recruitment and arms merely acknowledged contemporary twelfth-century practice in raising armies. Henry II of England’s Assize of Arms (1181), applicable in Henry’s continental as well as insular possessions, contemplated only arming freemen, a measure copied by the king of France and the count of Flanders.92 Obligation was extended in the following century to the unfree. Volunteer serfs illicitly left their fields to fight in the English civil wars in the 1260s.93
Taken with the so-called Children’s Crusade of 1212, the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320 and the popular response to the crusade in 1309, this exposes a level of conscious, independent political awareness and involvement among the mass agrarian workforce. However, such demonstrations were largely unauthorized and unwelcome to the elites that organized crusading. Servile peasants did not formally become regular members of levied armies until the Anglo-French wars of Edward I and Philip IV in the 1290s.94 The absence of agricultural labourers on crusade as much as that of farmers sabotaged Louis IX’s scheme to colonize Egypt in 1248–50.95 Of course, legal status may not have excluded those on crusade who had not taken the Cross. Not all those who went on crusade were crucesignati, as revealed in Cardinal Ugolino’s register of north Italian recruits for the Fifth Crusade. Standing professional garrisons were established from the mid-thirteenth century in the remaining Christian mainland outposts in the Holy Land. In the early fourteenth century, the Venetian writer Marino Sanudo Torsello advocated preliminary crusade campaigns to attack and blockade Egypt explicitly manned by non-crucesignati, a gesture towards professionalism rather than class.96 However, in each of these cases, the non-crucesignati were to be paid – far from the individualist crusading peasantry imagined by some chroniclers and subsequently by modern historians seeking evidence of mass belief, populist action or democratic agency.
The masses of ‘poor’ who colour narrative accounts of crusading resist clear identification. Were they the indigent or merely the unrich? Preachers and chroniclers employed poverty almost indiscriminately to describe social status, economic condition or moral standing; a synonym variously for non-nobles, infantry, the newly impoverished, non-combatants or even, in quasi-monastic terms, all crucesignati. It is sometimes argued that the overt apocalyptic strand in crusade commentary, particularly associated with the First Crusade, reflected the emotions of the populace, the non-elite crucesignati,97 Why the less-educated and socially disadvantaged should be more susceptible to intimations of the Last Judgment than those in the educated elites who promoted its imminence in the first place is unclear. The susceptibility to rumour and mass enthusiasm attested by witnesses to preaching campaigns in 1095-6, 1188–90 or 1213–17 was hardly the preserve of the socially marginal, as preachers’ accounts show. When observers such as Guibert of Nogent cast lofty aspersions on the rabble, as he saw it, who answered the call of the Cross in 1095–6, his targets were not necessarily paupers but rather the ignorant or those lacking aristocratic lay or ecclesiastical guidance and control. Guibert’s gibes at the woman and the credulous band which traipsed behind her special goose revealed that even this eccentric example of crusade enthusiasm exhibited a degree of cohesive social structure.98 The poor harvests and economic depression of the early 1090s may have rendered the escapist prospect of a gilded Jerusalem more alluring, but primarily to those whose livelihoods had been undermined, whose expectations had been reduced or narrowed – the impoverished, not the poor. For them, the crusade may have offered material as well as spiritual relief, not a mass exodus of serfs from the fields.
Crusades, especially those travelling by land, attracted non-combatant pilgrims, eager to enjoy the protection and camaraderie of the military expedition. The camp followers, ribaldi, and local peasantry who joined the Albigensian Crusades against heretics in Languedoc from 1209 may have been drawn by the hope of gain as much as religious paranoia.99 On eastern expeditions, some pilgrims may have hoped to rely on charity rather than their own resources. If they did, they soon fell by the wayside, gave up or were forced to seek patronage, subsidy or employment within the army. The same fate descended on armed crusaders, such as the archers described by one eyewitness as plebs, who failed to secure lordly patronage at Bari late in 1096 and so were forced to abandon the expedition. Joining any crusade, at any level, in any capacity was determined by the imperative of funds.100 The corporate treasuries established during crusade campaigns from Nicaea in 1097 onwards were for those who lost employment, service or lordship, or who had run out of money. Their existence did not necessarily indicate legions of poor present from the outset. Most of the legends of the Children’s Crusade of 1212 emphasize that the so-called pueri who joined the mass penitential marches in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and northern France were drawn from the social and economic margins of society: the young, adolescents, the unmarried, the old and the rootless; shepherds, ploughmen, carters, farm workers and artisans. Their failure to make it beyond the ports of France and Italy underscored the financial, hierarchical and structural requirements of crusading.101 Recruits from equivalent social groups did travel on campaigns, but only as part of organized and funded contingents. Crusade recruiters did not want or seek the materially poor, and never said they did.
Even the mass enthusiasm for the First Crusade was not indiscriminate or wholly inclusive. The first wave of crusaders under Peter the Hermit in 1096 was distinguished by its ultimate failure and the relative dearth of major nobles taking part, rather than its lowly social or economic status. Famously, Walter sans Avoir was not ‘Penniless’; Boissy-sans-Avoir is a place in the Île de France of which Walter was lord. The nickname ‘the Carpenter’ applied to another commander in Peter’s army, Count William of Melun, referred to his method of despatching his opponents in battle rather than to any useful profession. Peter’s army held together and defended itself for hundreds of miles through unfriendly territory, conducted effective sieges of cities, and possessed a central treasury. Its main force reached Asia intact, defeat by the Turks being the result of immediate indiscipline and bad tactical leadership, phenomena not reserved to this crusade army. The denigrating identification with ‘peasants’ or the poor owed most to its disastrous fate and the inherent cultural snobbery of contemporary commentators, not to any especial social disadvantage or indigence.102
The appearance of the poor on crusade may not be what it seems. Some called poor, such as Innocent III’s inopes, evidently took the Cross. However, these may have been those with inadequate funds, rather than none at all, hence the progressively standardized offers of partial crusade privileges culminating in the fully-fledged system of redemptions after 1213.103 Equally obvious from Innocent’s and others’ remarks – active crusaders required material means. The poor in chronicle accounts do not contradict this. The legends of the cannibalistic poor Tafurs on the First Crusade describe their leader as a Norman knight fallen on hard times. Describing the Second Crusade, Odo of Deuil appears to include in the crowd of ‘poor’ those with funds to try to buy provisions, later swelled by the ‘paupers since yesterday’ and ‘seasoned youths’ adept with bows. Elsewhere, the term ‘poor’ is used relatively, as in Robert of Clari’s inclusion of knights of local prominence in his list of ‘poor’ crusaders from Picardy, Artois and Flanders. At Venice, Robert claimed, the ‘poor’ celebrated the news that the Venetians were going to transport the expedition by fixing torches to the ends of their lances. Like the plebs on the First Crusade who reached Antioch with rusty weapons, these ‘poor’ were fighters with equipment.104 Commentators exposed selective views of what they meant by poor. The English historian Henry of Huntingdon celebrated the capture of Lisbon in 1147 as a triumph of the poor, a distinctly misleading description of the count of Aerschot, Hervey of Glanvill and the other commanders. Henry was drawing a dramatic moral contrast with the failure of the campaigns led by the grander crusaders Louis VII and Conrad III.105
This metaphorical use of poverty was shared by commentators and propagandists alike. In an increasingly prosperous society dominated by the power of wealth, Christian teaching on poverty acted as a vehicle for moral not social reform. While the virtue of moderation and sobriety in dress and behaviour were staples of puritanical crusade preachers, the poverty they lauded was not necessarily, or even usually, that of Francis of Assisi or the Lincolnshire failed crusaders in the 1190s designated as pauperissimi.106 Material poverty was not the issue; indeed in crusade recruitment it would have been self-defeating. As already discussed, Alan of Lille’s crusade sermon designed for the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross (14 September) emphasized how the spiritually poor received Christ’s especial favour, the humble, not the economically destitute, citing Matthew’s version of the Sermon on the Mount – ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’, ‘beati pauperes spiritu’ (Matthew 5:3) – not the potentially more socially radical Luke 6:20 that omits the spirit or Luke 6:21 that blesses the hungry.107 Crusade recruiters urged poverty of spirit on prosperous audiences, poverty movements being aimed at moral regeneration not social reform or the redistribution of wealth.
However, the preachers’ sophistical appeal to the doctrine of Christian poverty could backfire, misconstrued as a literal elevation of the efficacy of the indigent over the propertied. If the poor were uniquely chosen as the vehicles of God’s purpose, why were the only poor recruited for the crusades dependants of the wealthy? Where did that leave those poor excluded from the pale of active crusading? As the preserve of the rich, successive crusades had failed to receive God’s complete favour. Perhaps the two were connected? With crusade promoters around 1200 increasingly employing crusading as a general model for Christian devotion, this tension became institutionalized in the system of partial donations and vow redemptions which privileged the well-to-do. If fighting for the Cross was the pinnacle of penitential devotion, recognized as such by the uniquely generous indulgence, the system of vow redemptions implied and imposed exclusion, a segregation compounded by the redemptions’ monetization of commitment. The eruptions of popular impatience such as the Children’s and Shepherds’ crusades exposed the discrimination in crusade recruitment. The eruptions of 1212, 1251, 1309 and 1320 each constituted a response to heightened crusade awareness: the threat of heresy in France and Muslims in Palestine and Spain in 1212; the defeat of Louis IX in Egypt in 1250; the publicity for a Hospitaller crusade in 1309; and the prominent but abortive attempts in France to reignite a crusade to recover the Holy Land in 1320. Each followed extensive crusade propagandizing that created a perception of danger, a sense of duty and a collective fear deep in society which then fused with specific anxiety and anger at the failures of the traditional social elites. Exclusion, made easier by the near-universal use of sea travel for crusaders after 1190, exacerbated frustration which, ironically, was fuelled by the very authorities whose inadequacies had been exposed by events. Striking features of these popular demonstrations lay in their understanding of crusade evangelism and, certainly in 1251, 1309 and 1320, their direct if fleeting contacts with potential crusade planners. These crusade enthusiasts were not revolutionaries.108 Neither were they those wanted by planners as active crusaders. Despite the rhetoric of poverty, in real life the poor do not inherit the earth; nor did the indigent go on crusade. The image of hordes of peasants spontaneously abandoning their fields in sporadic outbreaks of inchoate mass hysteria to travel to the furthest ends of the known world relying on nothing but God and charity is a myth.