In one of his pamphlets encouraging urgency in preparations for the Third Crusade, Peter of Blois declared that ‘often experience teaches that it is not money or a mass of armed troops or the virtue of warriors that gives victory to Christ’s soldiers but the virtue of the virtuous Lord’.1 Fortunately for crusade planners, such corrosive optimism in divine agency failed to distract them from paying serious attention to material practicalities. Central to these was finance. Odo of Châteauroux, veteran crusade preacher and legate, could talk of the transcendence of ‘the pay (stipendia) of the Lord’ for the ‘stipendiary (stipendiarius) of God’ in the knowledge that his audience would have the comparison with temporal wages before them.2 One of the four prerequisites for a crusade to the Holy Land proposed by the Armenian Hetoum in 1307 was prior consideration of whether planners possessed adequate funds and other logistic necessities. Another early fourteenth-century theorist urged organizers to calculate whether any such expedition would be able to cover its costs. A third spent much time outlining a possible budget for a blockade of Egypt. The preaching guru Humbert of Romans blithely assumed not only that Christendom could readily support long-term wages for crusaders and fund more permanent garrisons in the Near East but, if need be, ecclesiastical resources alone would suffice for this ‘perpetual project’.3 These writers were not just reacting to recent failure. In 1148, the battered Louis VII of France remarked ‘there is no way we can prosecute the business of Christ without many expenses and much labour’.4
Explicit evidence of crusade budgets dates from the Third Crusade. However, earlier expeditions exhibited no less concern in estimates of cost. During the First Crusade, one crusader recalled, departing husbands assured their wives of their return within three years. Others recognized the value (and hence price) of pack-animals over horses and the importance of wagons, essential for carrying food, arms, equipment and treasure.5 Although no army took all its materiel with it from the outset, relying on re-supplying and re-endowment en route, initial costs of wages and provisions required access to liquid capital in the form of precious metal, predominantly silver, in coins, ingots or plate. Peter the Hermit carried his treasure in a cart; Richard I distributed his aboard his commissioned fleet. Godfrey of Bouillon apparently minted a special issue of coins before embarking.6 Images of cash-rich crusaders recur: William Longspee’s saddle bags packed with silver in 1248; Otto of Grandson from Savoy setting out with as much as 20,500 gold florins in 1312; the £17 18s 1od in cash recovered from the bodies of a group of crusaders who had drowned when the bridge at Ferrybridge in Yorkshire collapsed in 1228.7
Understanding war expenditure was ingrained. Costs provided a running theme within narratives of crusading and dominate surviving archival records, the magnitude of expenses well appreciated. Even the letter sent to the west by the victorious commanders of the First Crusade in September 1099 included precise – if incredible – cash prices for sheep and cattle.8 Provisioning, pay and markets feature prominently in veterans’ accounts and memories: those of Raymond of Aguilers or the stories told to Albert of Aachen of the First Crusade; Odo of Deuil’s and the author of the account of the capture of Lisbon on the Second Crusade; the descriptions of the Third Crusade by Roger of Howden, Ambroise and the writers collated in the Historia de expeditione of Frederick Barbarossa and the Itinerarium Ricardi Regis; the memoirs of the Fourth Crusade by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari; James of Vitry’s observations on the Fourth and Fifth Crusades; and John of Joinville’s memories of Louis IX’s first crusade. Requirements of payment and supplies resound through the charters and letters from the First and Second Crusades. They echo in the provisions for the Saladin Tithe of 1188; the German crusade planning in 1188–9, 1195 and 1227–8; the English Exchequer and other royal departmental records from the Third Crusade; Innocent Ill’s plans for the Fourth and Fifth Crusades in 1199–1200 and 1213–16; the 1201 treaty of Venice; the instigation of taxes on Church revenues in 1199 and 1215; and the extension of crusade privileges to those who redeemed their vows after 1213. The debates over how to revivify crusading in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries were laden with schemes of tax and spend, how best to raise and distribute the necessary money.9
Planners juggled with costs and how to cover or mitigate them. Fouis VII initiated extensive diplomatic efforts in 1146 to establish prospects for transport and supplies, as did Henry II of England in 1188.10 English preparations for the Third Crusade included hiring ships and men; laying in supplies (horseshoes, cured pigs’ carcasses, cheese, beans, arrows and crossbow-bolts); and budgeting for future wages. Costs were discounted in advance. A yearly tariff was set of 2d a day for soldiers and sailors and 4d for steersmen in Richard I’s fleet. By calculating future outlays, officials could provide the sums required for a year’s wages. Thus £2,402 18s 4d were accounted for at the Exchequer in 1190 to cover the future cost of 790 soldiers to be transported in 33 ships from the Cinque Ports of Kent and Sussex. Elsewhere, the forward wages for forty-five ships’ companies came to £3,338 2s 6d.11 Richard was thus able to assess in advance, if only in very general terms, how much parts of his campaign would cost. While the English royal archives and administration may have been exceptional in bureaucratic detail, similar procedures necessarily informed most crusade preparations. Some sort of budget established Philip II’s treaty with Genoa in 1190 to ship and supply his military household. In Germany in 1188-9, Frederick Barbarossa’s officials calculated the minimum cost of two years’ crusade expenses per person – three marks of silver. In 1195, Frederick’s son, Henry VI, costed a force of 1,500 knights and 1,500 sergeants at respectively 30 ounces and 10 ounces of gold each for one year’s service, as well as adequate grain rations for them and 3,000 servientes accompanying the knights, presumably to make bread or dry biscuits, a staple of travelling crusaders. During preparations for the Fourth Crusade, according to Robert of Clari, in 1201 Count Theobald of Champagne bequeathed 50,000 livres to pay for crusaders. Half of this was later given to the leadership of the crusade, enough for an army of some thousands.12
The infamous Treaty of Venice in 1201 was not randomly devised. Envoys sent by the crusade leadership carried a broad budget of numbers and costs sufficiently clear to deter the Pisans from bidding for the contract. The final deal struck with Venice was fatally precise even if based on guesswork and wishful thinking. The treaty stipulated that, in return for 85,000 marks payable in four instalments between August 1201 and April 1202, Venice would provide specialist transport vessels and large passenger ships for an army of 33,500, including 4,500 knights, 9,000 squires and 20,000 paid sergeants, along with provisions – water, wine, wheat, flour, fruit, vegetables, etc. – for the men and for 4,500 horses for up to a year. The costs were itemized at 4 marks per horse and 2 marks per man, sums comparable with previous contracts such as that between Philip II and Genoa in 1190. Individual crusaders seemed to be able to raise significant amounts to meet such costs; in one deal alone the bishop of Halberstadt received 550 marks, enough of itself to ship scores of knights and horses. Other arrangements involved many hundreds of livres at a time. Although the exaggerated optimism of the numbers agreed in the 1201 treaty proved a devastating encumbrance (leading to the diversion of the crusade to Constantinople), the actual sum raised – 51,000 marks – suggests that the Venetian deal foundered on inadequate muster not poverty.13
Later thirteenth-century crusades confirm the appetite for set tariffs and budgets. Louis VIII of France paid followers on his campaigns in Languedoc in 1226 and the rate for a knight serving against the Cathars in 1244 seems to have been set at the high level of 10 sous tournois a day. On his first crusade, Louis IX fixed rates for his knights at 7s 6d a day, less for mounted and infantry crossbowmen and sergeants. The knightly rate was roughly the same as John of Joinville was paying his knights (c.140 l. p.a. compared with Joinville’s 120 l. p.a.).14 The rates of pay for nobles were greater, perhaps 40s a day plus travel, and, as in the 1226 Albigensian war, compensation for loss of horses, with free board if required. This level of remuneration, according to the agreement reached in June 1249 between the count of Angoulême and Alphonse, count of Poitiers, the king’s brother, was calculated ‘on the basis that is paid to a noble of this status by our dearest lord the king and his brothers overseas’; in other words a standard rate.15 The same system operated during recruitment for Louis IX’s second crusade in 1270, when the viscount of Narbonne and his son provided the wages (vadia) for Bernard of Durban (near Auch) and two of his knights on the same terms as the king had provided for the viscount, his followers ‘and other stipendiaries’.16 The core contingent of the future Edward I of England on crusade in 1270–72 was contracted to serve for 100 marks each a year plus travel. In 1323 the French prince of the blood, Charles, count of Valois, offered crusaders 20s for a knight banneret; 10s for other knights; 7s 6d for squires and 2s for an infantryman; a decade later his son, Philip VI, followed suit, although he was marginally meaner to squires by offering only 5s. Although neither of the Valois actually embarked, King Philip’s offers, at least, were accepted.17
PAID CRUSADERS
Every crusade, including the First, relied upon paid troops. Crusaders’ board and wages represented a prime factor in fundraising before departure as well as in the search for further endowment during campaigns: the First Crusade in 1097 or Conrad III in 1148 at Constantinople; northern European fleets’ repeated sallies en route east against the ports of Muslim Spain in 1147, 1189, 1190 and 1217; Frederick Barbarossa in Thrace and at Iconium in 1189–90; Richard I at Messina and in Cyprus in 1190–91; the Fourth Crusaders at Zara and Constantinople in 1202–4. Two instances from the First Crusade expose the importance of the ability to pay and be paid. Bohemund of Taranto threatened to withdraw from the army outside Antioch in 1098, so an admittedly hostile witness recorded, because he claimed he lacked adequate funds to provide for his followers, his familia. At the same time, further down the social ladder, Archdeacon Louis of Toul, probably in the train of Count Rainald of Toul, was forced by the lack of pay ‘(defectione sui stipendii compulsus’) to seek food away from the camp, losing his life when his foraging party fell into a Turkish ambush.18 Lords’ responsibility for pay is everywhere apparent during the First Crusade. Both Stephen of Blois and Godfrey of Bouillon passed on to their retinues the bullion and coin given them by the Greek emperor Alexius I at Constantinople in 1096–7.19 Paying troops reinforced moral as well as material lordship. The near-contemporary legend of the heroic death of Anselm of Ribemont at Arqa in February 1099 showed the pious knight, on receiving a vision predicting his impending death, clearing his temporal as well as spiritual debts by confessing his sins, performing penance, receiving the Eucharist and finally, before returning to the frontline to meet his fate, paying ‘the wages (stipendia) owed his servants and fellow soldiers’. The role of pay in the balance sheet of divine as well as military account could hardly be more obvious.20
No less prominent, throughout the First Crusade, was the extensive use of contracts for pay which revolved around estimated costs. Ralph of Caen’s early twelfth-century biography of Tancred of Lecce showed him as perennially concerned with the needs of his paid followers, providing them with wages, equipment, horses and mules. He was described as taking out loans to cover the wage bill; accepting a contract of paid service with another commander, Raymond of Toulouse; and bartering seventy severed Turkish heads for 70 marks to pay off money (pecuniam) he owed his troops. Plunder, such as the 7,000 marks’ worth of silver he allegedly stripped off the Dome of the Rock, was channelled to arming his own knights and recruiting more. The size of Tancred’s retinue varied from a few dozen to eighty to a hundred men, depending on his own wealth or the higher patronage he had managed to wangle. Lords expected to pay their household troops and to use cash incentives to attract others.21
The armies of the First Crusade operated as marketplaces for fighting men as well as for equipment, provisions, relics and prostitutes. Chroniclers recorded special payments to reward or attract followers and for specific services, such as the 15 livres demanded by the entrepreneurial Lombard siege engineer at Nicaea in 1097.22 Tancred was promised 400 marks to pay his men for garrison duties at the siege of Antioch in 1098. Raymond of Toulouse expected to offer wages to those manning a siege tower at Antioch or filling the ditch before the walls of Jerusalem. Crusaders were paid on retainer, for example the members of Raymond Pilet’s raiding party towards Aleppo in the summer of 1098; or the knights who accompanied Baldwin of Boulogne to Edessa. Recognizing the structural imperatives of the expedition, the high command issued an open offer of paid employment – in cash – to leaderless troops after the capture of Antioch in June 1098.23 Individual settlements were unlikely to have been arbitrary any more than Raymond of Toulouse’s offer to hire his fellow commanders for huge cash sums in January 1099. Such arrangements sat easily in the commerce of warfare familiar alike in southern France, Norman Italy, Normandy and the German empire. Of the leading commanders, Hugh of Vermandois, Godfrey of Bouillon and Robert of Flanders each had experience of being hired by even grander lords to fight or provide paid troops.24 Such deals transcended campaign expedients. A lord or knight travelled with his familia, clients and dependants who expected the rewards of service and companionship, board and pay from the outset. One contemporary commentator noted that the first crusaders embarked only if supported by funds (‘stipendiorum facultas’). Another described how Bohemund lavishly subsidized his followers.25 These paymasters’ requirements were further signalled by a ubiquitous concern for coin and plate.
Chains of payment continued to bind the great and the least alike, lord, knight, sergeant, servant, infantryman, merchant, artisan, priest, laundress and whore. On the Second Crusade, Louis VII of France was burdened not only with the cost of his own household and retinue, but also the demands of those, nobles included, who ran out of their own supply of cash. It was as much his inability to extend payment to the infantry as the absence of adequate shipping that forced Louis to abandon most of them at Adalia on the southern coast of Asia Minor in March 1148. Summing up the debacle, Louis’s chaplain pointedly remarked that ‘a king should not only be pious but also without any fear of poverty’, a moral remark crafted in material observation.26 Louis’s need for ready money for daily necessities, as he described it to his regent in France, Abbot Suger of St Denis, suffused his letters home. Like Tancred of Lecce on the First Crusade, Louis was forced to borrow from fellow crusaders, in his case Bishop Arnulf of Lisieux. Once in the Holy Land, he also took out substantial loans from the resident military orders, the Templars and Hospitallers.27 Yet Louis had been far from improvident, extracting levies on churches and probably a tax on royal lands before departure.28 He and his advisers knew that extraordinary sums of money were needed, even if the actual amounts possibly dwarfed expectations. Cash similarly dominated the German armies. Like the First Crusade, the German march across Asia Minor left a trail of coins, some deposited in hoards. When he arrived at Acre in the spring of 1148, Conrad III assembled what he called a ‘new army’ with, a companion recalled, ‘a lavish expenditure of money’.29 Money, retaining troops and fighting for pay similarly provided a running theme in the description of the crusaders’ attack on Lisbon in 1147.30 Payment was an assumed feature of the enterprise and did not of itself contradict fighting for faith. The simultaneous development of crusade privileges acknowledged the crucial role of money in allowing crucesignati freer access to cash funds (through sales, mortgages, loans, etc.): Mammon in the service of God.
With the Third Crusade, the use of stipendiary crusaders, the provision of supplies and materiel, the deployment of subsidized or hired fleets and the scale of costs come into clearer focus. Expanding bureaucracies of written record-keeping apparent across western Europe may have helped planning become more informed now that copies of commonplace written communications by rulers, traders and property owners began to be kept more systematically. As has been seen, English official records allow for the first time direct, if incomplete, access to the range of material and financial preparations. Much even here is left unknown: the total expenditure of Richard I’s crusade, let alone the full costs to his followers; a reliable total for income from the Saladin Tithe; details of the construction of the prefabricated castle Richard took from Messina to Acre or of the numerous trebuchets carried to the Holy Land by French and English nobles. While it is possible from chroniclers’ remarks and comparative non-crusading accounts to reconstruct a rough budget for the German crusade, no administrative documents on the matter survive, if any existed. The French crusade may have stimulated a subsequent archival transformation in royal government, but left few administrative documents of its own, although what survives confirms the burden of fundraising.
While observers noted the especially lavish financial provision made by the English king, all crusade leaders faced similar demands and exploited the opportunities wealth afforded. Philip II strengthened his hold over largely independent nobles and their disparate contingents on campaign by providing them with hefty subsidies in Sicily.31 In his targeted largesse, Richard I was characteristically extravagant or astute, depending on how his personality and abilities are assessed. On top of paying for his own army of perhaps
2,500 to 3,000, he helped fit out a fleet of possibly around 100 ships potentially carrying another 8,000 men. He retained more troops at Marseilles, outbid Philip II in hiring knights at Acre and later brought all the archers there into his paid service.32 Inevitably, his entourage was (and expected to be) paid; Gerald of Wales certainly did, before he slid out of his commitment.33 Lesser magnates faced the same requirements. Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury led a paid force of 200 knights and 300 sergeants under the distinctive banner of Thomas Becket.34 Paid troops satisfied the logic of command and the structures of power without escaping potentially corrosive financial constraints.
Famously, nowhere did these constraints play a larger role than in the course of the Fourth Crusade and the diversion of the main army to Zara and Constantinople in 1202-3. Coming after a decade and a half during which funding of paid crusaders had become a central planning issue, the new crusade after 1198 built on the experiences of the Third Crusade and Henry VI of Germany’s crusade scheme of 1195. Preliminary arrangements unambiguously recognized the requirement of large-scale, organized and, to a degree, centralized financial planning. Innocent III floated the idea of a Church tax to pay crusaders. A lay and ecclesiastical tax of a fortieth was suggested by the kings of England and France in 1201. Fulk of Neuilly’s preaching was combined with raising money for soldiers. The need for and demands of paid troops dictated Theobald of Champagne’s legacy and its division as well as the provisions for 20,000 sergeants in the Treaty of Venice. Baldwin of Flanders imitated Richard I in sending troops and provisions in his own ships in the summer of 1202. To cover costs he tried to tax his subjects, with their lords’ permission. The precise use of funds is suggested by the arrangements of Hilduin of Villemoyenne, in Champagne, who raised at least 280 livres from property transactions, 200 of which came in the form of 48,000 pennies, convenient to pay for supplies and wages.35
The Fifth Crusade witnessed the start of a revolution in crusade finance driven by the need of pay: redemption of vows for cash from 1213; regular Church taxation from 1215; plus the development of a more regularized system of gifts, legacies, donations and ceremonial and pastoral fundraising opportunities, such as frequent preaching tours, processions and special church liturgies and services. National or seigneurial lay taxation for crusades was politically more contentious, but became a formally accepted obligation of faith or allegiance, akin to levies for a lord’s ransom, the knighting of an heir or the marriage of an eldest daughter. In step with such expanded revenue gathering, crusade commanders perfected contracts of paid service and methods to channel donations and Church taxes towards supporting lay crusaders.36 Crusade finance became big business for Church and state alike, dominating practical discussions of defending or recovering the Holy Land in the century following Louis IX’s definitive Egyptian defeat in 1250. In the crush of literary and expert advice, financial issues could be treated in very general terms, as by the Armenian Hetoum or Humbert of Romans, almost as if the will to crusade alone would somehow conjure up the necessary resources. Yet there emerged the almost universal understanding that only professional navies and armies would prove effective if new bridgeheads on the mainland of the Levant were to be secured. Experience of the previous two centuries counted for something, a pragmatic by-product of the obsessive historicism of crusade debates and rhetoric. A mass crusade on the model of the first three major eastern expeditions tended to be deprecated as too unwieldy, costly and amateur.37 The Venetian Marino Sanudo Torsello (d.1343) typified contemporary opinion. Combining his practical proposals with an exhaustive account of crusade history, Sanudo argued at length for a professional naval blockade of Egypt followed by a similarly organized preliminary land invasion (known as a passagium particulare) that explicitly excluded independent, volunteer crucesignati, even though such come-as-you-please expeditions had relied on organized, waged crusaders.38 The myth of spontaneity was hard to erase, but increasingly discounted.
ACCOUNTS
Sanudo, unlike some fellow crusade propagandists and theorists, displayed an acute and detailed awareness of costs. However, the accounting mentality was far from the exclusive preserve of armchair pundits or Italian merchants. It pervaded the warrior elites of western Europe. Payment of knights, household officials and servants as well as estate management required accounts, some of which demanded physical record in the form of tally sticks, parchment rolls, charters or land-surveys. Armies, like estates or governments, ran on networks of mundane instructions, commands and requests. Extrapolating from early thirteenth-century formulary collections (i.e. models or forms of letters used to teach letter writing and account keeping), it is clear that some, perhaps many, administrative communications were customarily in writing, and probably had been for generations.39 Bohemund’s written contracts and accounts at Antioch in 1098 were cases in point.40 Crusade financial records, although not surviving independently until the Third Crusade, stalk the extant chronicles and documentary evidence from the 1090s. Mainly dealing with transient expenses, such as contracts, audits or tax demands, unless they were of future use financial accounts were rarely kept or cherished except by corporations or regimes needing long reach and longer memory. Yet the extending prevelance of payment required their use. In 1099, Tancred broke with his allegiance to Raymond of Toulouse because he claimed the latter had reneged on his ‘contract of shillings and bezants’, of which some record existed; Raymond’s chaplain preserved its details.41
That a clerk in the count of Toulouse’s entourage recorded such arrangements further shows how, as already noted, the lords and knights of the First Crusade inhabited a world of functional as well as academic literacy and numeracy.42 Bohemund was raised in the literate culture of southern Italy. Robert of Normandy had enjoyed a high-powered academic training as a youth and later composed poetry. Knights dictated letters or collaborated in compiling chronicles.43 Each lived in households that employed literacy in business, administration, worship and entertainment. Crusading too was a written enterprise. As already noted, the seeming ubiquity of lesser clergy on crusade may be explained by the need for clerks as well as priests, to keep accounts, copy contracts, write letters or collect material to be spun into acceptable literary narratives, figures such as Raymond of Aguilers or Fulcher of Chartres on the First Crusade; Odo of Deuil on the Second; Roger of Howden on the Third; Oliver of Paderborn on the Fifth; Peter of les Vaux de Cernay in Languedoc; or Henry of Livonia in the north-east Baltic. Some may have been hired, like Gerald of Wales, as campaign chroniclers.44 Most shared an interest in finance and accounting. Literacy acted not merely as an adornment of a noble life but as an essential to its success. Effective administration of property, no less than war, required knowledge, intellect, practical learning and experience. From housekeeping to raising troops, basic numeracy was assumed and necessary for paymaster and payee alike. Literacy and numeracy combined in estate surveys, tax assessments, even military summonses sent in writing. Even if not an active participant in compiling accounts, any property owner wholly ignorant or indifferent of the process risked fraud and impoverishment. The image of a ruler shut up with his financial officials was familiar from twelfth-century literature and twelfth-century fact.45 The powerful Anglo-Norman magnate Robert of Meulan, father, grandfather and great-grandfather of crusaders, possessed his own exchequer; one of his sons, Robert, earl of Leicester, became justiciar of England, heading a very literate royal administration. One of his sucessors, Ranulf Glanvill, son of a veteran of the Second Crusade, went on the Third Crusade.46 Even the literary Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Robert of Clari displayed keen understanding of money and finance. Writing, reading, listening and dictating permeated knightly culture; so did keeping accounts.
Details of household finance, obligations and rewards survive from secular as well as ecclesiastical households from the mid-twelfth century.47 The English litigant Richard of Anstey compiled meticulous detailed accounts of his costs trying to extract judgment from Henry II between 1158 and 1163, recording a huge total sum of £344 6s 4d, itself tribute to the extensive varieties of credit available in the mid-twelfth century.48 In the eleventh century and beyond, behind any grant of land, rents or fiscal demand lay accounts of estate renders and income, from Catalonia to England.49 The same was true of crusading. Crusaders’ charters precisely identified property and income to be transferred, this aspect of the knightly life as much part of their culture as religious observance or spiritual anxiety. Experience of legal procedures, increasingly involving writing, and claims to land, rights or obligations enveloped the propertied – from princes to free peasants – in a culture of accounting. So, too, did the obsessive and iconic aristocratic indulgence in tournaments. By the 1170s and 1180s detailed lists of participants were being compiled, some of which were preserved for decades. More immediate to the tournaments and the knights themselves, written accounts (acontes) of winnings were recorded by household clerks, and also archived for future reference. In both cases, practical accountancy and chivalric memorialization served each other’s purpose: profit and fame. By the early thirteenth century, Gerald of Wales was comparing European nations according to their rulers’ incomes.50 Over a century earlier, the world of the First Crusade was that of payments to knights and fundraising; the world of the English king’s contracts to retain for pay the service and soldiers of Hugh of Vermandois and Robert of Flanders in the 1080s and 1090s; the world of the accounting abacus of the English Exchequer; the world of Domesday Book. Bohemund’s compotus at Antioch spoke not of an eccentric exception but of a pervasive mentality of calculation.
Thus, the financial records of the Third Crusade operated in a wider tradition of written recording. To make sure crucesignati were held to their vows or were able to enjoy their privileges, as well as to aid military planning, preachers kept lists of those who had taken the Cross. Agents of secular rulers equally required such information in order to assess tax liability or exemptions, as for the Saladin Tithe or other taxation. The papacy and its legates retained careful records of recruits and money, a requirement of tax collection, the offer of vow redemptions for cash and solicited donations. Innocent III made this plain in his provisions for the Fourth and Fifth Crusades. As already noted, the figures contained in the Treaty of Venice, Frederick Barbarossa’s estimate of a crusader’s costs or his son’s 1195 offer to his knights were not random guesswork, any more than John of Joinville’s wages bill or the calculations of a Bavarian knight who, in 1147, collected funds ‘to maintain knights serving God’.51 Richard I’s accounts for his fleet survive in part. There is no reason to suppose that Baldwin IX of Flanders’ investment in the 1202 Flemish fleet or, on less lavish scales, those in the 1140s or 1190s by citizens of Cologne, London, Bristol, Boulogne, Southampton and Ipswich, or in Genoa, Pisa and Venice from the 1090s were any less rationally considered. Shipping costs determined the prosperity of maritime and riparian commercial cities. The prospect of free sea transport, if actually made, constituted the most attractive and generous element in Roger II of Sicily’s offer to Louis VII in 1146.52 For landlubbers, wage bills were not arbitrary. Even if quartermasters of the eleventh and twelfth centuries did not carry around with them written ledgers of the sort Ramon Muntaner used when running the mercenary Catalan Company in Greece in the early fourteenth century, and there is nothing to suggest they did not, budgets and balance sheets were clearly employed, if only to record debts.53 Louis VII was able to repay his crusade loans in detail. Either he or his creditors, the Templars, kept account, as they were to do for Louis’s successors on a more general basis. The royal instructions to those charged with securing these repayments, laymen included, were presumably based on some sort of invoices.
COSTS
Budgets and accounts exposed the scale of costs. Crusading to the eastern Mediterranean got more expensive in real terms in the centuries after the 1090s. Yet it was obvious from the beginning that the initial capital outlays dwarfed usual, local military expenses and were potentially prohibitive without subsidy or clever management of converting fixed assets into cash. The more detailed and sophisticated the budgets, the more apparent became the financial challenge. However, rather than the budget determining action, policy dictated costs: ‘how much?’ rather than ‘can I afford it?’ This is a common feature of warfare. To supporters, crusades were not optional. They were seen as necessary protection of Christendom’s vital temporal and transcendent interests, to be paid for however high the price. This could be spectacular. Louis IX’s crusade cost upwards of 1,537,570 livres tournois between 1247 and 1257, or perhaps five times annual royal revenues.54 Marino Sanudo’s credible estimates in the 1320s of the cost of a preliminary crusade of 900 cavalry and 15,000 infantry for three years to secure the coast of Egypt came to well over two million florins, or about ten times annual papal income. Sanudo further suggested that a subsequent general crusade to conquer Egypt would take two years and cost five million florins. A French scheme of 1323 was carefully costed by the French government: 26 ships, 4,800 crew and 3,000 crossbowmen at a cost of 300,000 livres parisis. The ordinary annual income of the French king between 1322 and 1325 varied from 213,000 to 242,000 l.p.; with clerical taxes, loans, fines, profits from currency manipulation, etc., his total annual receipts in these years came to between 477,000 and 610,000 l.p. 55 The accounts of Louis IX’s first crusade survive because they were copied in the royal archives by officials under Philip VI when he was proposing a crusade in the 1330s. They showed Philip he could not afford a crusade without massive subsidy from the Church, which his great-grandfather Louis had enjoyed. Louis’s total expenses of the equivalent of over I million livres parisis (1.5 million livres tournois), coupled with detailed accounts of 1250–53 of between 600,000 and 700,000 /.p. (1,053, 476 l.t..)> sat uncomfortably with Philip’s total annual receipts in the 1330s, even ignoring currency depreciation and devaluation in the interim decades.56
The burden of investment obviously depended on the number of followers being supported. The artisan crusaders on the St Victor stranded at Messina in 1250 who paid for themselves or, at most, very small retinues, would have been faced with basic charges for transport, food and water that might have equated to a third of the annual income of a smart tailor or a month’s income of a celebrity chef.57 For leaders of more substantial retinues, costs could reach multiples of disposable annual revenues, added incentive to seek even grander paymasters.58 Capital costs were considerable: armour, weapons, mules, horses, harness, horseshoes and domestic utensils, as well as cash, in coin, ingots or plate. However, equipment was more within the financial compass of ordinary members of the military or even artisan classes than open-ended provision for food and wages. Even though the rich in the Middle Ages could be spectacularly wealthy, especially in comparison with the rest of society, crusade expenses could appear gargantuan. Yet, to perhaps a surprisingly large extent, they were covered.
The financial cost of the First Crusade is incalculable. It has been estimated that a knight might have required 144 silver shillings a year; a non-combatant perhaps around 18 shillings. So even a modest retinue, such as Tancred of Lecce’s that hovered between 40 and 100 knights, might have cost anything between 300 and 700 pounds a year, hundreds of times an ordinary knight’s landed or waged income.59 If, as is likely, there were some thousands of knights and many thousands of others – one recent informed guess proposed c.7,000 nobles and knights and c. 20,000 support troops – the costs can be imagined rather than computed.60 These figures are highly speculative, useful only as an indication of the scale of expense. Another recent estimate suggests that Godfrey of Bouillon, from a variety of sources, could have raised 1,875 pounds in cash. Robert of Normandy raised the equivalent of £6,600 sterling from pledging his duchy in 1096. Yet these leaders required further regular windfalls en route, from Byzantine largesse, booty, plunder, tribute or protection money. In January 1099, Raymond of Toulouse offered Godfrey and Robert of Normandy 10,000 shillings each, i.e. 500 pounds, perhaps reflecting retinues of about 100 knights. Although substantial, such sums point to short-term contracts only, to cover the final march to Jerusalem.61 Much more impressive, if Raymond’s chaplain can be credited, were the 15,000 gold pieces (apparently at a conversion rate of one gold piece to eight or nine shillings) and the 5,000 gold pieces provided by the emirs of Tripoli and Jabala respectively to buy the crusaders off a few weeks later, amounting on the chronicler’s figures to 8-9,000 pounds.62 If any of these figures are remotely accurate, the total bill for just the first year for a force of tens of thousands easily dwarfed the combined royal revenues of the kings of the regions from which the crusaders were chiefly drawn. Even given that funding was a joint enterprise, spread across half a continent and shared between separate leaders, lords and men, freelancers and others, these are daunting sums, anticipated or not.
Cost helped fatally undermine the prospects for the Second Crusade. In debt himself, as the campaign progressed Louis VII was forced to bail out his leading followers as well as pay for his own troops. He had prepared for heavy expenses, his fiscal expedients including taxes, loans and extortion. Evidence survives for loans of perhaps as much as 7,500–10,000 livres tournois, at a time when ordinary revenues from the royal demesne ran at perhaps no more than 20,000 l.t.63 From his begging letters to his regents at home, Louis’s shortage of ready cash was apparent even by the time his army reached Hungary, only a few weeks into the march east.64 It was to get worse. Witnesses’ memories confirm that the plight of followers matched that of the leaders. The absence of Byzantine subsidies comparable to those offered in 1096 further stretched the crusaders’ resources regardless of the free access granted to Greek markets. Military failures in Asia Minor prevented the seizure of booty and plunder. Although each contingent of the Franco-German forces carried stores of coin and precious metal, the increasing shortage of funds led to the division and dismemberment of the French army at Adalia in March 1148. The financial woes of the Second Crusade may have taken a secondary place to moral invectives in the laments over the expedition’s dismal failure in Syria and Palestine, yet they were not forgotten by crusade planners. From the 1160s onwards, any scheme for campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean by western rulers would be prefaced by proposals for taxation, as in 1166 and 1185 and, most famously, with the Saladin Tithe in 1188. The inability to cover costs during the Second Crusade bequeathed a lasting legacy. Failure bred realism.
The Third Crusade confirmed the scale of expense. The records of English royal administration suggest the main costs were in wages. On figures derived from Exchequer accounts for the English fleet of 1190, these could comprise as much as two-thirds the total, although this includes payment for crew which a land-based army, such as the German one of 1188–9, would have avoided. Again precise figures remain speculative, although not to those doing the calculations in 1190. On a reasoned estimate of the size of Richard I’s fleet of just over 100 vessels, annual wages might have reached c.£8,700, with ship-hire costing a further £5,700 – wages therefore reaching 60 per cent of the total £14,400, in line with a two-thirds ratio.65 While many propertied crucesignati paid for themselves, such as the Londoners who commissioned their own vessel to carry eighty well-equipped troops, the crown provided many others with the means of transport; the king even donated a ship to the Hospitallers, hardly among the destitute or dependent of his realm.66 Wages and ship-hire constituted only part of the cost. Richard’s ships, as well as crew and soldiers, like those of Baldwin of Flanders in 1202, carried military equipment -arms, armour, clothing, etc. – and food. One commentator alleged horses were shipped as well, despite the long passage around Iberia to the Mediterranean.67
The Exchequer accounts also show heavy royal investment in horseshoes (almost £50 for at least 60,000 in 1190), arrows, crossbow-bolts, cheeses from Essex (£31 5s), beans from Cambridgeshire, Gloucestershire and Hampshire (£15 4s 8d), and over 14,000 cured pigs’ carcasses from Lincolnshire, Essex and Hampshire (£101 7s 11d). (A labourer at the time might earn 1d a day, and a very comfortable annual income for a knight might be between £10 and £20.) The sheriff of Hampshire’s expenses for crusade provisions in 1190 display the range of necessary preparations: almost £58 for bacon, 20 shillings for beans; just over £14 for 10,000 horseshoes; just under £20 for a hundred-weight of cheese; over £25 towards eight ships; and £12 2s 1d for cartage and storage of supplies and treasure.68 Food and money were currencies of patronage too. At Acre in 1191 Richard apparently gained the allegiance of the count of Champagne with 4,000 measures of wheat, 4,000 sides of bacon and £4,000 of silver, a deal paralleled by the gold and grain contracts offered by Henry VI to his crusading retinue in 1195.69 To the costs of Richard’s 1190 fleet, possibly upwards of £14,000, had to be added those of Richard’s own force which he led overland through France to the Mediterranean -perhaps as many as 3,000 strong. Moreover, these sums only covered the initial outlay and expenses for no more (and in many instances probably considerably less) than the first year of service. To put this expenditure in context, ordinary royal revenues accounted at the Exchequer between 1187 and 1190 hovered around £25,000. This excluded additional levies on Jews, crusade taxes, fines or other extraordinary receipts, but also discounted extraordinary expenses such as the 24,000 marks possibly paid as a relief or entry fine to Philip II of France for Richard’s French lands.70 Effectively, just the initial outlay and projected costs for the first year of the king’s crusade consumed the equivalent of a year’s worth of actual ordinary royal income.
Although details of French royal finances are vestigial by comparison, Philip II’s expenses were of the same order. He paid the Genoese 5,850 marks to ship 650 knights and 1,300 squires and their horses, with food for eight months and wine for four (presumably it went off after that). If a knight cost twice as much as a squire, this would work out at 4½ marks per knight, or the equivalent of a modest annual income. However, for the crown, the cost may have been anything but modest. The Genoese deal may have represented as much as 60 per cent of the crown’s ordinary income. Add to this Philip’s spending spree in Sicily to bail out some of his leading magnates which, according to a well-informed royal eulogist, amounted to 2,800 marks (c.5,600 livres parisis) plus 400 gold ounces, a combined sum equivalent to perhaps a quarter of ordinary royal revenue.71 Small wonder Philip had been eager to extract a share of Sicilian debts owed to Richard; he got a third of the 40,000 gold ounces handed over. Of course, the French and English kings were better off than many of their followers. They enjoyed access to large quantities of cash beyond ordinary income from their estates; they were committing at most only one as opposed to many years’ income and employed officials experienced in financial administration. The kings adopted leading roles in subsidizing all aspects and every level of participant. Crusading had always been a rich man’s adventure. Only the resources of the richest could hope to sustain such long-distance military and naval enterprises.
The lessons of the twelfth century encouraged the financial expedients of the thirteenth. Levels of expenditure continued to rise, a consequence of inflation and the near-universal use of sea-transport. Of the major thirteenth-century crusade commanders, only King Andrew of Hungary chanced the roads and hostility of Asia Minor, and then only on his return journey from a brief stay at Acre in the winter of 1217/18.72 The dominance of naval travel reduced the number of unsought non-combatants while at the same time adding to immediate costs. On shore, an army could forage and even re-endow itself, almost pay for itself as it went. By sea, shippers required pre-payment and provisions had to be secured before departure. The compensation for organizers was the time and hence overall expenses saved. The twelfth-century trend towards higher costs and greater dependence on central command was thus accelerated. Henry VI of Germany’s paid retinue of 500 knights and 500 sergeants planned in 1195 was costed at 2,000 gold ounces. In 1201, the extremely wealthy count of Champagne set aside in his will the huge sum of 50,000 livres to pay crusaders, and, as already seen, the Treaty of Venice envisaged a cost of 85,000 marks, perhaps 170,000 livres parisis, equivalent to well over the then annual revenues of the French king, and about twice as much as Philip II had available in 1202 for his war with King John of England.73 Even though they defaulted on the total amount, the crusaders did raise over 50,000 marks, a sign that they had individually equipped themselves with adequate funds – the problem was there were too few of them. In retrospect, the failure of Innocent III’s proposed Church tax of 1199 proved crucial.
Costs also fell on the shippers. It has recently been calculated that, to carry the crusade host in 1201, Venice was committed to supply perhaps over 200 ships of various sorts – war galleys, horse transports and sailing troop- and cargo-carriers – crewed by over 30,000 men. On top of that, the city promised to provide a fleet of 50 galleys of its own, crewed by perhaps as many as 7,600.74 According to Robert of Clari, a form of conscription by lots had to be introduced to compel sufficient Venetian recruitment. Additionally, in order to construct such an armada, all other commerce was suspended. Venice’s capital investment was therefore considerable.75 While the 1201 treaty may have been the highest value single shipping deal, the same constraints and problems attended all such arrangements from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. As with many commercial transactions, benefits and risks were mutual. Venice found itself massively out of pocket when the crusaders failed to honour their bargain. This could cut both ways. Shippers were liable to complaints, even litigation, if they reneged on their obligations, as the owners of the St Victor in 1250 discovered to their cost when sued by disgruntled crusading passengers at Messina.76
One solution to the added premium on sea travel was provided by the ecclesiastical tax agreed at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which supported recruitment and the lengthy amphibious campaigns in Egypt between 1217 and 1221. Again, figures were impressive. One account of money spent recruiting knights just in one region of northern Italy came to 7,730 marks. Papal accounts of income and expenditure of 1220 recorded crusade expenses of more than 775,461 marks (or perhaps over one and a half million livres parisis).77 The expectation of expense became settled opinion. Philip II of France’s will of 1221 bequeathed 300,000 livres parisis for the crusade. In 1223 Frederick II promised – fancifully perhaps – that he would deposit 100,000 gold ounces (perhaps worth two and a half million livres) for the crusade with bankers at Acre to guarantee his planned crusade.78
Such huge reported sums can be tested against the fullest surviving records of thirteenth-century crusade expenses, those for Louis IX’s crusade of 1248–54, preserved as part of a budgeting process in the 1330s. As already noted, Louis’s expenses between 1247 and 1257 were recorded as 1,538,570 livres tournois, about five times the customary royal revenue of the period. Wages comprised a major item. From a more detailed account of Louis IX’s costs in maintaining himself in the Holy Land between 1250 and 1253, 23 per cent went on wages for knights alone: 243,128l. 4s. out of a total spent of 1,053,476l. 17s. 3d. While shipping costs in this period were only 32,000 livres, the previous costs of transporting the crusaders -perhaps numbering 15,000 in all – were far greater. The cost of hiring dozens of vessels from Marseilles, Aigues Mortes and Genoa probably ran into hundreds of thousands of livres. The largest ships cost Louis 7,000 l.t. each. Even before embarkation, food for the crews came to nearly 2,000 l.t. and one bill for additional naval equipment (canvas, rope, spars, rudders, etc.) reached around 4,500 l.t. (5,926 livres viennois). One year’s provision of food (1251–2) cost 31,595 livres tournois. Modern estimates of Louis’s daily expenses on his army vary from 700,000 to 2 million livres for two years; one calculation suggests a mean daily cost of 1,000 livres.79 Similar charges fell on lesser lords and knights. During less than one year, 1250, Louis’s brother Alphonse of Poitiers spent more than 6,000 livres on ships and sailors’ wages, not counting pay for his contracted troops. In the event, like Joinville, Alphonse needed bailing out by the king who, by the time the crusade landed in Egypt, may have been subsidizing most of the contingents in his host.80 Although possibly exceptional in extent, Louis’s largesse was far from novel, following a long tradition: Raymond of Toulouse in 1099; Conrad III at Acre in 1148; Richard I at Acre in 1191; Cardinal Pelagius at Damietta in 1219–21.
Twenty years later, Louis’s financial clout was even more persuasive. Lor his second crusade, in 1269, he loaned Edward of England and Gaston of Béarn 70,000 livres to hire knights at a rate, in Edward’s case, of 200 livres or 100 marks each. Ships were commissioned, a fleet of forty new vessels costing perhaps as much as 280,000 livres.81 Again the totals spiral, with wages (of troops and crewmen) accounting for the bulk of running costs on top of the capital expense of shipping, which itself included, as had the 1201 Treaty of Venice, an element of sailors’ pay. While overall figures are absent for the 1270 crusade, the sums raised in England and France to cover costs suggest the usual high expenses, especially in the now clearly regulated system of contracted soldiery. Paid crusaders have often been regarded as a feature of the more professional, centrally directed recruitment of the thirteenth century or as adjuncts to armies acquired once they had reached the eastern Mediterranean. Yet, being a ‘stipendiary in the army of God’, as William of Newburgh drily described Leopold V of Austria, was probably the case for the majority of fighting crusaders on campaign from the outset.82 Whether in Europe, Africa or the Levant, that was how all Christendom’s wars were conducted (the Latin word conduco in its medieval sense could mean ‘I hire’).
This was the world from which Marino Sanudo derived his estimates. However, despite their scale it should be noted that the costs of Louis IX’s crusades and Edward of England’s expenses were largely covered by a variety of fundraising expedients. The biggest spenders appeared to be the most immune from long-term financial damage. The Second Crusade did not bankrupt Louis VII, neither did the Third wreck the acquisitive potential of Philip II or Richard I’s ability to raise a ransom or fight a five-year war in France. This capacity to absorb crusade costs was not restricted to kings or popes. The resources of Peter des Roches, bishop of Winchester, were hardly stretched by his crusade expenditure in the 1220s.83 Of course, Winchester was one of the richest dioceses in western Christendom and des Roches an experienced and effective administrator, so perhaps his case was exceptional. Nonetheless, especially as institutional ways of subsidizing crusaders increased in scope and value, it is hard to find many great lords made destitute after a crusade, however much of a strain finding the capital had been beforehand. Many appeared wealthy enough afterwards to lavishly memorialize their deeds.
One obvious reason for this is that many crusaders were habituated to war, their normal revenues usually directed to pursuing it. The calculation that Philip II in 1202–3 could have drawn on a war chest of some 90,000 livres parisis for his confrontation with King John of England puts the count of Champagne’s legacy of 50,000 livres and the Treaty of Venice’s stipulation for 85,000 marks (or c.170,000 livres parisis) into perspective.84 Despite his notorious spending on the crusade in 1189–90, much of Richard I’s ransom in 1194 of £100,000 was met; the king was still thereafter able to tax his realm and even pay £11,000 (or c.30,000 livres parisis) on building one castle, Château Gaillard.85 A century later, the costs of Edward I’s crusade paled into insignificance compared with the huge sums spent on conquering and subduing Wales, fighting the Scots or defending Gascony.86 French kings also had many other wars to fight or plan. French knights in the mid-thirteenth century, on crusade or not, earned c. 160–200 livres tournois a year, slightly more than Louis’s crusade daily rate of 7s. 6d., although this excluded food, horses, etc., which would have made the total reward much the same.87 In sum and in detail crusading should not be seen as operating outside its leaders’ and participants’ military or financial experience or assumptions. A French scheme to invade England drawn up in 1295 envisaged a fleet of about 50 ships carrying a force of about 10,000 at a monthly cost, in wages and food, of 11,900 livres tournois, or, for a year, almost 143,000 l.t. Two centuries earlier, William of Normandy successfully invaded England in 1066 with possibly a similarly large force at, contemporaries agreed, huge cost.88 The heavy expenses of war were not unique to crusading. They were what royal, lordly or knightly income was for.