Co-ordination of action across wide geographic areas distinguished crusading from its inception. By the time he preached at Clermont in 1095, Urban II had recruited the bishop of Le Puy as his legate and Count Raymond IV of Toulouse as a commander. A departure date was initially fixed for 15 August 1096, subsequently modified to fit varying regional harvests. While the main forces travelled primarily by familiar trade and pilgrim land routes, with the minimum of sea passages, for example across the Adriatic from Bari to Durazzo, first Genoa, then Pisa were encouraged by the pope to send fleets east. The widespread mobilization generated a general awareness of timing and direction. The rendezvous for the land armies was Constantinople, reached by the chief contingents in the winter and spring of 1096-7. Italian flotillas from Lucca, Genoa and Pisa coincided in the Levant with the land army’s siege of Antioch in 1097–8, navies that may have included, if a letter written by Luccan crusaders at Antioch in 1098 can be believed, ships from England.1 While it is fanciful to imagine an agreed detailed strategy to attack Syria by land and sea, the confluence of western forces at Antioch shows an awareness of the general thrust of policy and bears witness to the constant flow of information from the crusade armies as they lumbered east. Only in the orbit of Byzantine foreign policy did the First Crusaders get sucked into what might properly be described as strategic policy and planning.
Just as Pope Urban held a series of conferences during his French tour in 1095–6, recruits also consulted widely, as shown by the witnesses to their charters. Gatherings to hear sermons and take the Cross could translate into wider discussions of plans and logistics. King Philip of France hosted a meeting of crusaders from his dominions at Paris in February 1096 at a time, Guibert of Nogent remarked, when the details of how to organize the expedition were engrossing those who had signed up.2 Regional musters were agreed, at traditional centres of lordship or commerce, such as Troyes, Dijon, Poitiers, St Gilles, Lille, Rheims, Rouen and Chartres. Advance muster points may also have been arranged, such as Godfrey of Bouillon’s at Tulln on the Danube near Vienna where he assessed news of Peter the Hermit’s passage on the same route a few months earlier.3 These plans clearly worked. French, German and Italian forces coincided with Peter the Hermit at Constantinople in the late summer of 1096. The contingents that followed coalesced into larger forces, which then joined others to form the very large armies that finally assembled in a combined host of scores of thousands at the siege of Nicaea in the spring of 1097. A pattern of merging has been posited for Robert of Normandy’s contingent. Gathered probably at Rouen, it then combined with Stephen of Blois’s force, possibly at Chartres. Together they joined Robert of Flanders, perhaps at Besançon, before crossing the Alps into Italy and dividing once more at Bari to cross the Adriatic.4
The movement of such large armies presented significant problems of supplies. Lack of prior negotiation over access to markets could jeopardize the survival of any army on a long-distance march. Peter the Hermit secured licence to trade from rulers in Hungary and Bulgaria before commercial tensions and indiscipline exploded into violence. Albert of Aachen’s detailed description of Godfrey of Bouillon’s market negotiations with King Coloman of Hungary for the survival and safe passage of his army reflected their importance; leaving such matters to chance courted disaster.5 Although details of the diplomatic exchanges between crusade leaders and Emperor Alexius of Byzantium have largely vanished, the appearance of imperial agents at key moments during the marches of western forces, and the ability of the Greeks to cope with the massive influx of western troops, suggests close prior contact, even if arrangements on the ground proved inadequate or contested. Both the pope and the eastern emperor kept tabs on the crusade armies as they advanced eastwards and, it must be assumed, on each other.6 Once at Constantinople and with Nicaea taken, Byzantine military advice was sought and given.
The First Crusade, and its successor expeditions of 1100–1101, showed how thousands of individual and group decisions could combine in a coherent military enterprise. Channels of communication were extensive, in lordship and kinship networks, shared locality and economic exchange. The expansion of local, inter-regional and international trade provided a vital grounding for mass crusading, as demonstrated, during the Second Crusade, by the North Sea fleet that assembled at Dartmouth in May 1147.7 Drawn mainly from Brabant, Flanders, the Rhineland, Normandy, southern and eastern England, the crusaders came from places connected by commerce: London, Bristol, Southampton, Hastings, Dover, Ipswich, Boulogne, Cologne, Rouen. The North Sea and English Channel formed a closely knit trading area bound together through fishing, mainly of herring, and wool. The translation of co-operation from trade to war exploited similar skills: in maritime technology, shared investment and, as revealed by the Dartmouth commune, social organization. For all the martial heroics of the surviving accounts of their deeds at Lisbon, the language of trade suffused the army’s debates, contracts, provisioning and hard bargaining. The agreement with King Alfonso of Portugal included an exemption from customs duty not only for the crusaders’ ships and goods but for those of their heirs as well, a hardly covert invitation to establish a privileged trading station in conquered Lisbon similar to those offered Italian allies of crusaders in the Levant.8 Later North Sea fleets, in 1189 and 1217, spread the commercial net further including the Danes and ports such as Bremen as well as those in the Rhineland. Similar patterns of war running in the grooves of commerce marked crusades in the eastern Baltic, inspired by the merchants of Lübeck, and in the Mediterranean, where trading cities were involved in assaults on the Balearic islands in the early eleventh and early twelfth centuries, the Pisan raid on Tunisia in 1087 and the attacks on western Iberian ports from the early twelfth century.9
Long-distance crusades did not proceed at random. Outlines of direction and duration were established, based on precedents from trade, travel and previous expeditions. However, there were limits. In 1147, the German army built new bridges along the Danube to be used by the French army following behind some weeks later.10 Yet these armies lacked coherent operational plans for Asia Minor, let alone for military targets once the crusaders reached the Holy Land in 1148. Odo of Deuil remembered that, when they met to discuss the crusade, Pope Eugenius III omitted to advise Louis VII on how to treat the schismatic Greeks.11 The closest contemporary accounts of the crusaders’ siege of Lisbon described it as an opportunist diversion, in line with earlier non-crusading forays by northern European privateers against the ports of al-Andalus and with the similar assaults by passing crusaders in 1189 and 1217.12 All crusade forces were alert to such chances for re-endowment; Lisbon offered just such a serendipitous windfall. Nonetheless, the gathering of the coalition armada at Dartmouth was hardly coincidental. Its location, the last suitable sheltered natural harbour before the Atlantic approaches, became the customary muster port for North Sea fleets bound for the Mediterranean, in 1189, 1190 and 1217.
The Second Crusade highlighted this contrast between what might be called functional as opposed to strategic planning. Ostensibly well planned, the initial impetus came from a sequence of large assemblies in 1146-7 at Vézelay, Etampes, Speyer and Frankfurt.13 Despite huge numbers recruited from a vast area and very different experiences en route, most of the land and sea forces bound for the Holy Land set out between April and June 1147, arriving in Palestine roughly a year later, a timescale that subsequently proved standard. Oral and written communication synchronized the preaching of Bernard of Clairvaux and the diplomacy of recruiting two European monarchs; the musters in May 1147 for the North Sea fleets at Dartmouth and the German army at Regensburg, and that for the French at Metz a month later. Subsequent rendezvous with latecomers, such as Ottokar of Styria with the Germans at Vienna in late May or June 1147 or the Anglo-Norman troops with the French at Worms in late June, or the final gathering of the French forces at Constantinople in October, when those who had split off at Worms to travel via the Adriatic and Balkans rejoined the main army, did not occur by chance.14 If the precise mechanics of organization remain obscure, the results in terms of assembling armies were impressive. Yet, for all its co-ordination, the Second Crusade lacked practical strategy.
The preparations for the Third Crusade displayed familiar patterns. Regional assemblies to confirm commitment and agree details of finance and privileges were held between December 1187 and March 1188 at Strasburg, Gisors, Geddington, Mainz and Paris. Diplomacy of internal peace-making and foreign alliances secured recruits, provisions and passage. Preaching was centrally inspired but locally managed. If his fellow crusader, the English civil servant and chronicler Roger of Howden, is to be believed, Frederick Barbarossa was typical in his consulting the best military experts in his lands.15 Frederick, a veteran of the Second Crusade, knew the importance of adequate preparations and a coherent plan of march. He stamped his authority on attempts by the bishop of Würzburg to break ranks and travel by sea. Unity and control were features of Frederick’s leadership in 1188–90. Deciding to follow the familiar Danube land route, Frederick sent ambassadors to Hungary, Serbia, Byzantium and even to the sultan of Iconium, at the time a German ally, and received their embassies in return. He may even have attempted to open diplomatic channels with Saladin despite a reputation for being determined, in Howden’s words, to ‘destroy the enemies of the Cross of Christ’. The muster at Regensberg in April 1189, set a year earlier at Mainz, was highly effective, attracting about 70 great nobles, including 12 bishops, 2 dukes, 2 margraves and 26 counts, not all of them close associates of the emperor.16 A year to prepare a substantial land army mirrored the timing of the 1147 campaigns and allowed for another year for the army to reach the Holy Land, as in 1147–8. This followed even earlier precedent. Most of the leaders of the First Crusade had set out in the autumn of 1096, nine or ten months after Clermont; they reached the outskirts of Antioch a year later, in late October 1097. On the march in 1189–90, Frederick’s expedition remained characterized by decisive control, particularly impressive given the German emperor’s uneven domestic political power and lack of centralized administration. Yet Frederick’s expedition also presents the planning paradox at its most extreme. Despite meticulous arrangements and decisive leadership, when Frederick unexpectedly died on reaching Cilicia in June 1190, the German crusade imploded and disintegrated.
The organizers of the Third Crusade did not lack information. Even though many of the surviving letters purporting to be eyewitness reports of the disasters of 1187 were probably doctored to suit recruiting propaganda, knowledge of events in the east was plentiful, perhaps too much so. Guy of Bazoches, a cantor of Châlons-sur-Marne, travelled to Palestine with Count Henry of Champagne and the French advance-guard of 1190. In a letter sent from Marseilles before he embarked, Guy warned his nephews not to believe rumours about the fate of the ‘milicia Christiana’ and the Holy Land unless proven by weight of testimony or evidence.17 Just such scepticism had helped prevent western rulers sending effective aid to the kingdom of Jerusalem before 1187. However, crusade planners sought their own intelligence gleaned from ambassadors and agents (or spies) such as Godfrey of Wiesenbach and Henry of Dietz, sent by Frederick Barbarossa to Kilij Arslan II of Iconium and Saladin, or Henry II’s envoy Richard Barre, despatched to eastern Europe with a roving brief in 1188 to scout prospects for a land-based Angevin campaign.18
Information flowed two ways. The arrival of western relief for the beleaguered Frankish outposts in Outremer in 1188–9 may have helped determine the timing of subsequent aid and the start of the siege of Acre in 1189. Winds, weather and currents imposed a twice-yearly rhythm of arrivals and departures from Syria and Palestine. However, while the Germans could not hope to arrive by land before 1190 and a succession crisis in the Angevin empire delayed the Anglo-French monarchs’ expeditions for at least a year to 1190, the needs of Outremer met more immediate responses. News around the Mediterranean could travel quite rapidly, especially in summer: in 1190 Guy of Bazoches sighted Syria thirty-five days after leaving Marseilles; Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and Ranulf Glanvill made landfall at Acre on 21 September 1190 after a voyage (also from Marseilles) of two months; news of Frederick Barbarossa’s departure from Germany in May 1189 took five months to reach Saladin’s court via Byzantium and Aleppo.19 Guy of Lusignan’s decision to besiege Acre in the summer of 1189 may have been encouraged by news brought by a Pisan fleet that arrived at Tyre in April of further reinforcements. Guy pitched his camp before Acre on 28 August 1189; within a month he had been joined by substantial fleets from Denmark, Frisia, Germany, Flanders and England and a French army commanded by James of Avesnes, who had taken the Cross with the kings of France and England at Gisors in January 1188. That is not to say that Guy summoned these forces, each of which assembled through a dynamic of its own.
However, James of Avesnes may have been aware of the plans of the monarchs of the west; others who arrived certainly were, such as Philip II’s cousins Robert of Dreux and the bellicose Bishop Philip of Beauvais, or Frederick Barbarossa’s nephew Landgrave Louis II of Thuringia.20 Once established, the siege of Acre attracted what appear to have been concerted reinforcements encouraged if not sponsored by the kings of France and England: Count Henry of Champagne, nephew to both the kings, arrived at Acre in July 1190 with some of the most powerful lords from northern France and, it was recalled later, elements of Philip II’s armoury. He was promptly accepted as commander of the crusaders in the Christian camp.21 The siege of Acre may not have been planned from a distance but its relief was.
The Third Crusade also provided the most remarkable example of co-ordinated crusading in the twelfth century. Richard I’s government made provision to pay the sailors and troops on board the crusade fleet for a year from, at the latest, June 1190; the king landed at Acre on 8 June 1191, on schedule despite the capture of Messina, wintering in Sicily, a serious storm in April and the conquest of Cyprus in May, of which only the stay in Sicily to refit and extort more funds could have been anticipated. Luck combined with design. The timings of Richard’s land and naval forces indicated a concerted plan informed by detailed knowledge of conditions. The Angevin fleet comprised three squadrons. One left Dartmouth in late March and April 1190; another embarked from the Loire in June; the third from the island of Oléron further south in July. The fleet was bound by a central command; disciplinary ordinances, issued by Richard at Chinon in June; and, for the English element at least, a stated pay structure. The full fleet mustered at the mouth of the Tagus in late July, pausing only to allow its members to entertain themselves in alcohol-fuelled mayhem at the expense of the Jewish, Muslim and Christian inhabitants of Lisbon. The next rendezvous was with Richard’s land army at Marseilles in early August, with a final muster, agreed earlier by Richard and Philip II, at Messina in Sicily.
The two kings had carefully synchronized their preparations. The date of 24 June, the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist, a suitably preparatory intercessor for the restoration of Christ’s heritage, had been set as the formal date of the start of their crusades. On that day, the kings simultaneously received the scrip and staff of pilgrimage, Richard at Tours and Philip at St Denis. In an orchestrated ritual of departure, they met, as arranged, at Vézelay on 2 July and set out together two days later on 4 July, the third anniversary of the battle of Hattin. While Philip aimed for Genoa and the shipping he had hired, Richard made for Marseilles, arriving in late July to find his fleet was not there. After waiting a couple of weeks, impatient to press on to Sicily, he hired twenty galleys and ten cargo vessels and left on 7 August, although some detachments were still embarking over a week later. Yet the main fleet only missed him by a matter of days, reaching Marseilles on 22 August, a remarkably close-run thing. There the fleet would have learnt of Messina as the next destination if it had not already been agreed. The choreography maintained its shape. The main fleet put in at Messina on 14 September; Philip II arrived on the 16th; Richard, after an unhurried cruise down the Italian coast, made his ostentatious entry into Messina on the 23rd.22 However, this image of efficiency should be set against the incidences of accident and muddle. The collapse of the bridge at Lyons in 1190 under the weight of crusaders from the Angevin and French armies became notorious.23 Away from the influence of kings and great lords, crusaders made their own dispositions and found their own ways east, always a complicated and often messy process.
Carefully laid schemes did not necessarily translate into effective action. The Fourth Crusade presents the classic example, exposing the limits of planning and leadership in the face of exaggerated ambition and adverse circumstances. This was not due to lack of preparation or understanding of the problems but, if anything, the opposite. The leaders of the Fourth Crusade were precisely aware of how their plans were unravelling and why. In the absence of kings, the commanders quickly organized themselves into a formal collective leadership, holding regular meetings and deciding issues of strategic importance in apparently open debates, for example at gatherings during the summer of 1200 at Soissons and Compiègne. Cohesion was helped by the early leaders, the counts of Champagne, Flanders and Blois, coming from neighbouring regions, surrounded by interlaced political and dynastic circles crowded with crusade veterans and saturated in memories of past crusading heroics. This collective leadership proved impressively united and resilient, or, alternatively, its critics might have said, purblind, self-interested and obstinate.
At an initial conference at Soissons, the leaders decided there were too few crusade barons present to make sensible strategic decisions. A fuller meeting at Compiègne held a lively discussion about objectives and transport, finally agreeing to send an embassy to scout for a contract with an Italian port. Given that this embassy negotiated a deal to target Egypt, the destination may have been decided at Compiègne. Beneath the appearance of frank and easy collegiality, the major decisions rested with the counts of Champagne, Flanders and Blois. They chose the six plenipotentiary envoys to Italy who went on to agree the Venetian treaty. On the count of Champagne’s death in 1201, Champenois associates such as Geoffrey of Villehardouin and Geoffrey of Joinville (uncle of the companion of Louis IX) played significant backstage roles in seeking a new leader. An inner circle, including figures such as Count Hugh of St Pol, made most of the running, notably in the choice, after refusals by the duke of Burgundy and the count of Bar, of the Italian Marquis Boniface of Montferrat to assume overall command, although his authority was to be more primus inter pares than absolute. More conferences were held at Soissons in the summer of 1201 to approve the choice of Boniface and receive him as leader, with another formal assembly at the annual Cistercian general chapter at Cîteaux. Despite this public show of open debate, strategic planning rested with the inner coterie. The bulk of crusaders were kept in the dark over the decision to target Egypt. This concentration of executive power invited a damaging contradiction when openness proved a sham, leading to the bruising confrontations with representatives of the bulk of the army. These had to be consulted because they formed much of the army’s fighting power and had earlier been called upon to subsidize the shortfall in the debt owing to the Venetians. The Venice debacle exposed the leadership’s inability to impose their will on those beyond their own retinues or the paid sergeants identified in the Venice treaty.24
For all that, this harried high command did steer a large, disparate, amphibious force to a series of astounding victories at Constantinople in 1203-4. From the perspectives of Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Robert of Clari and many others across western Christendom, this was a glorious achievement. Before the lurid denouement of the main campaign at Constantinople, the Fourth Crusade followed the example of its predecessors: orchestrated acceptances of the Cross; well-publicized assemblies of planning and commitment; secured transport on precise terms; extensive preparatory diplomacy; a clear – at least to the high command – ultimate target; a willingness to take the opportunity for re-endowment en route. The planning still came unstuck. The count of Flanders was one of the wealthiest princes in Europe. His lands boasted an unsurpassed crusading pedigree. Yet the contrast between the fate of his crusade fleet and Richard I’s a dozen years earlier is telling. The fleet that sailed from Flanders in the summer of 1202 was a coalition, part the count’s ships and men, part independent allies, such as the governor of Bruges, who had sworn to obey the count’s orders, although not in his pay or control. They failed to reach Venice, if that had ever been the plan, wintering in Marseilles. From there they sent to the count, now in Zara, asking where they should rendezvous. Count Baldwin suggested Modon, on the southern tip of the Peloponnese. Whether it missed its aim, failed to coincide or preferred to sail to the Holy Land, perhaps wholly unaware of the Constantinople démarche, Baldwin and his fleet never met.25
Ability to plan international enterprises was exactly what Innocent III in his frequent expansive moods thought he possessed. The Fourth Crusade was not alone in proving him wrong. He effectively lost control over the course of Simon of Montfort’s conquest of Languedoc after the initial successes of the Albigensian crusade. His refusal to afford full Holy Land crusade status to German annexation of Livonia by the bishop of Riga, the merchants of Lübeck and the Cistercians failed to deter them from assuming it.26 Undaunted, Innocent not only rebranded the ideas, image and finances of crusading but reordered how they were planned. The experience of the Fourth Crusade seems to have persuaded Innocent to usurp some of the coordinating roles previously taken by secular leaders, including strategy. A general Church Council, attended by numerous secular ambassadors, observers and petitioners as well as by hundreds of clerical representatives from across western Europe, for the first time provided the administrative and political focus of crusade planning, a model copied in 1245 and 1274. In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council not only agreed to the crusade Church tax but fixed a muster date – I June 1217 – and embarkation points – Brindisi and Messina and their neighbouring ports. The pope promised that he would be in attendance to deliver his benediction. For those determined to travel by land, Innocent offered advice and a papal legate.27 The overarching ecclesiastical direction was unequivocal. Oliver of Paderborn even suggested that the Lateran Council had decided on Egypt as the crusade’s target.28 Papal agents combined preaching, tax collection and recruitment more systematically over far more territory than officials of any individual ruler could manage. Great men still took the Cross and gathered assemblies. People enlisted and raised private funds in much the same way as had their predecessors, although the balance of administrative support had tilted towards the Church. Clearly this was achieved with a degree of lay support; the choice of the ports of southern Italy and Sicily spoke of the alliance between the pope and his then-protégé Frederick II, king of Sicily as well as Germany, who, like King John of England, took the Cross in 1215 before the Lateran Council met. Although the preaching campaign went badly in France, the French king had probably been involved in negotiations allowing him to publish restrictions on the use of crusaders’ privileges six months before the council met. To underline the genesis of his plans, Innocent even cheekily suggested to the Venetians that they might wish finally to fulfil their crusade vow of 1202.29
Innocent’s grand scheme did not die with him in 1216. Many of the initial musters conformed to the established timetable even if not the location of departure. Fleets from Frisia, the Netherlands and the Rhineland set out in late May and early June 1217; Oliver of Paderborn left Marseilles on 1 June, exactly on schedule; the muster of the armies of Leopold VI of Austria and King Andrew of Hungary gathered at Split in August, the Hungarians having mustered a month earlier.30 Once again, the dynamic of constructing a crusade army or navy imposed its own rhythm. However, linking the practical mechanics of action with conciliar decrees could misfire. In 1216 papal recruiters in France ran into trouble with nobles unable to meet the June 1217 deadline. They were worried lest by missing the departure date they would be in breach of their vow and have their privileges cancelled. Similarly, there was concern that the same penalties would apply to poorer crucesignati who were ready but who could not set out because they lacked adequate additional funds promised by the council or knightly leaders.31 Increased bureaucracy and legal precision did not always reap anticipated benefits.
In many ways, the Fifth Crusade was a success. Egypt was invaded; a bridgehead was maintained for three years; during this time recruits came and went in large numbers, drawn from most parts of western Christendom; a major Nile port, Damietta, was occupied for twenty-two months; and money continued to flow east from Church taxes and crusade donations. The Fifth Crusade’s failures did not appear to lie in its preparations or on the home front. Yet, as the French episode indicated, papal oversight risked falling out of step with local opinion and increasing the complexity of arrangements. The more crusading became integrated into immediate papal politics, the more it could be operationally disadvantaged. In the preparations for the so-called Barons’ Crusade of 1239–41, Pope Gregory IX not only failed to co-ordinate the expeditions to Palestine of the count of Champagne and the earl of Cornwall, but irritated and confused actual and putative crucesignati by his attempts to divert Holy Land recruits to other papal pet projects such as the defence of Latin Constantinople or the defence of Rome from Frederick II, which were also given the status of crusades.32 While legally sound (Gregory was a canon lawyer), this made little political or operational sense. Popes could facilitate diplomacy, collect information, offer the necessary privileges, and supervise preaching and fundraising. However, the evidence of crusading in the first half of the thirteenth century demonstrated that effective crusading required the political capital and material clout of the secular powers to take the lead. Unless allied with local partisan factions, as against the Hohenstaufen in Italy and Germany, popes were ineffectual. Gregory X and Nicholas IV discovered this after 1274 and 1291 respectively. Crusades away from the Holy Land were delegated, to the local Christian kings in Iberia and, after 1218, Languedoc; to the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic; or to local Church and lay authorities in the English civil war of 1264–5 or the squalid persecution of Frisian and Netherlandish peasants in the 1230s. After 1240, realization of the limits to ecclesiastical administration of Outremer crusades confirmed the need to harness the material and political strengths of monarchs, most obviously – but not exclusively – the king of France.
The administration of Louis IX’s crusades, especially his first, can be studied in detail, showing advances in record-keeping, fundraising and techniques of hiring troops. However, a comparison with Richard I’s preparations gives pause to easy assumptions of qualitative novelty.33 Both kings established political consensus through assemblies and networks of kindred, lordship and patronage, backed by financial subsidy. Both relied on taxation and the exploitation of often predatory regalian fiscal rights, including extortion of Jewish communities. Both hired their own fleets and lavished funds on acquiring and transporting necessary war materials. Both fixed on a forward Mediterranean muster point, Messina in Sicily for Richard; Limassol on Cyprus for Louis. Before setting out, both indulged in elaborate rituals of departure focused on the receipt of the insignia of a pilgrim. Both assumed the presence alongside their own troops of forces raised by other magnates but both reinforced their authority on campaign by bailing them out. Neither ran out of funds. The size of the forces Richard led to Acre and Louis to Damietta may have been roughly equivalent, perhaps over 10,000 strong. Both adopted a measured approach to preparations, Richard arriving on station in the Levant three and a half years after taking the Cross; Louis after four and a half.
However, significant differences emerge. The Church in the 1240s played a more central role in raising and conveying funds and managing privileges. Under Richard the clergy lacked the corporate bureaucratic and institutional identity that constituted Innocent III’s legacy. This should not be exaggerated; the French clergy was subservient to their pious monarch in the 1240s, the friars in particular providing a moral dimension to the king’s pre-crusade programme of domestic reform.34 The bulk of Louis’s additional revenue for the crusade derived from Church taxation granted by the general Council at Lyons in 1245 and from ecclesiastically administered redemptions and donations, obviating the need to copy Richard’s profligate auctioneering. Louis’s propaganda portrayed him as a devout penitent, the king dressing as a pilgrim on his progress south to the Mediterranean. While Louis prayed to the relics of the Passion, Richard had carried the sword Excalibur. More concretely, although Richard had loaded his ships with necessary provisions and later transported with him siege engines and a prefabricated castle, Louis stockpiled vast dumps of food and wine in Cyprus over the two years before he arrived and prepared for the settlement of a conquered Egypt by carrying agricultural as well as war equipment in his ships.
For his fleet, Richard relied on commandeering and hiring ships in ports within his own realm, often as part-shareholder with existing owners. Through detailed and precise contracts, Louis hired ships as sole leaseholder of complete and fully equipped vessels from Genoa and Marseilles, more akin to the 1201 Venetian contracts. Richard appears to have paid below the market price for his ships; Louis may well have been exploited on costs, and probably outfitting as well, although the Genoese connection served him well when he needed credit after paying his ransom from Egyptian captivity in 1250. Most obviously, Richard was fortunate in ruling the coastline of southern Britain and western France, providing him with ports, shipbuilders, merchant vessels and seamen within his own realms. Louis lacked this luxury so, to avoid reliance on other powers or self-serving urban patriciates, he built his own port, at Aigues Mortes in the Rhone delta. This served as the first muster point (Cyprus being the second) and all hired vessels were to be delivered there. Despite its shallow harbour, prone to silting up, and tricky channel to the Mediterranean, the construction of Aigues Mortes symbolized Louis’s determination to control all aspects of preparation, a policy dictated by the lessons of the past, and the implementation of a broad understanding of logistics. Louis’s arrangements tried to narrow the scope or need for the expensive improvisations that marked Richard’s flashy crusade career. Louis IX’s crusade plans (his second of 1267–70 mirrored his first in its administrative intensity) reacted to past failures and present obstacles with sense and initiative. Men, money and materiel were carefully and smoothly co-ordinated. Louis’s first crusade had been prepared with enormous thoroughness, the best-funded, most proficiently organized large crusade of all. Louis had shown how best to plan a successful crusade. The conundrum for later observers was that it had also been a disaster.