Europe: A History (74 page)

The conduct of the Crusaders was shocking—not only to modern sensibilities, but equally to contemporaries. St Bernard himself was moved to denounce it. They ravaged the countries through which they marched—Bohemia, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Byzantium. In 1096 they killed up to 8,000 Jews in their progress through the Rhineland—the first major series of Europe’s pogroms. Their naval expeditions devastated the Mediterranean ports. They fought among themselves no less than against the Infidel. They fleeced their subjects to fill their coffers. ‘I will sell the city of London’, said Richard Cceur de Lion, ‘if I can find a buyer.’ The cost in wasted lives and effort was incalculable. One German emperor was drowned in a river in Cilicia; a second held the King of England to ransom; a third was excommunicated as he set sail for Palestine. Murder and massacre in the service of the Gospel were commonplace. Seventy thousand civilians were said to have been butchered in cold blood in the initial sack of Jerusalem. ‘The lives and labours of millions who were buried in the East, would have been more profitably employed in the improvement of their native country.’
²⁹
‘Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.’
³⁰

Yet the horrors along the crusaders’ road often mask the deeper causes of their motivation. Religious fervour was mixed with the resentments of a society suffering from waves of famine, plague, and overpopulation. Crusading was a means to sublimate the pains of an indigent existence. In this, the well-fed knight with his well-shod retinue was far outnumbered by the hordes of paupers who followed in his wake. The ‘People’s Crusades’ and ‘Shepherds’ Crusades’ continued long after the major expeditions. For them, Jerusalem was the visionary city of Revelation, where Christ beckoned. The Crusades were ‘an armed pilgrimage’, ‘a collective
imitatio Christi
, a mass sacrifice which was to be rewarded by a mass apotheosis at Jerusalem’, the inspiration of ‘the messianism of the poor’.
³¹
Successful crusaders of the knightly caste might be portrayed in stone in their parish church,
their legs piously crossed in death. Most of their companions never came home, presumed dead. Of course, the concept of crusading was not limited to the Holy Land. The Latin Church gave equal weight to the northern crusades in the Baltic (see pp. 362–4) and to the ‘third flank’ in the
Reconquista
in Spain (see p. 345).

The impact of the Crusades was profound. The Latin kingdom of Jerusalem (1099–1187) was the first experiment in a ‘Europe Overseas’.
³²
The eastern Mediterranean was reopened to trade and travel. The Italian cities, especially Venice and Genoa, flourished. The collective identity of the Latin Church was consolidated under papal leadership. The Crusades supplied a vast fund of heroism and curiosity which underlay the growth of medieval romance, philosophy, and literature. Yet the Crusades also served to strengthen the nexus between Western Christendom, feudalism, and militarism. They gave rise to the military orders. Through the misconduct of the Latins, and the disgust of the Greeks who witnessed the misdeeds, they rendered the reunification of Christendom virtually impossible. Above all, they reinforced the barriers between Christianity and Islam, poisoning relations in which Westerners were cast in the role both of aggressors and of losers. In short, the Crusaders brought Christianity into disrepute.

The military orders, especially the Hospitallers and the Templars, were central to the debate on crusading ethics. The ‘Knights of the Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem’ were created in 1099 after the first Crusade. They included military, medical, and pastoral brothers. After the fall of Acre they escaped to Cyprus, ruled Rhodes (1309–1522), and eventually Malta (1530–1801). The ‘Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon’ came into being in 1118 for the purpose of protecting pilgrims on the road to Jerusalem. They diversified, however, into banking and real estate, growing immensely rich from properties all over Christendom. They were suppressed in 1312 on false charges of magic, sodomy, and heresy brought against them by the King of France. Their emblem, two knights riding on one horse, goes back to the first Master, Hugues de Payens, who was so poor that he shared his horse with a friend. It was a curious bent of the medieval mind that men could reconcile monastic vows with soldiering. Both the Hospitallers and the Templars were international bodies with depots in all the countries of the West. The Teutonic Knights, in contrast, were diverted at an early stage to the Baltic (see below). The military orders of Santiago, Calatrava, and Alcantara did not operate outside Spain.

The double conquest of Constantinople in 1203–4 well illustrates the doubtful virtues of the crusading movement. The army of the Fourth Crusade, which had congregated at Venice, soon fell prey to the schemes of the ageing Doge Enrico Dandolo and of the German King Philip of Swabia, who was married to Irene of Byzantium. The Doge saw a chance to enlarge the Republic’s possessions in the Levant; the King saw a chance to restore his exiled nephew to the Byzantine throne. So, in return for the hire of a fleet, the Crusaders had to agree to share their booty with the Venetians and to back the restoration of Alexius IV. In addition, when they failed to pay for their ships, they were obliged to seize the
Hungarian port of Zara in Dalmatia as collateral. In July 1203 they sailed through the Dardanelles without resistance and stormed the sea-walls. But a palace revolution in Constantinople, where Alexius IV was strangled, robbed them of their victory; and in April they had to repeat the exercise. This time the city of Constantine was comprehensively ransacked, the churches pillaged, the citizens butchered, the icons smashed. Baldwin, Count of Flanders, was crowned ‘Basileus’ in St Sophia by a Venetian Patriarch. The Empire was parcelled out into Venetian colonies and Latin fiefs. At which point, at Adrianople in April 1205, the crusading army was annihilated by the Bulgars. They never came within a thousand miles of Jerusalem. They had committed ‘the Great Betrayal’.
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The Fourth Crusade left two Roman Empires in the East: the Latin ‘Empire of the Straits’ at Constantinople and the Byzantine rump ruled from Nicaea in Asia Minor. The former survived for sixty years until, in 1261, in the temporary absence of the Venetian fleet, the latter recovered its position. In the long run, Venice was the sole beneficiary.

None the less, the fiasco of the Fourth Crusade coincided with what many regard as the political apogee of the Latin Church—the Papacy of Innocent III (1198–1216). Born Lotario d’Anagni, Innocent was an instinctive power-broker who came nearest to the ideal of subordinating all rulers to ‘theocratic government’. In Germany he contrived both to crown one of the imperial contenders, Otto of Brunswick, and then to depose him. In France he refused to approve Philippe-Auguste’s matrimonial arrangements and, having placed the country under interdict, eventually forced the King to restore his Queen after a twenty-year separation. In England, after another lengthy struggle with King John, he again wielded the interdict and forced the King to submit. England joined Aragón, Sicily, Denmark, and even Bulgaria as vassals of the Holy See. The Xllth General Council of the Church, which convened in the Lateran in November 1215, saw 1,500 prelates from all over Christendom meekly adopting the Pope’s proposals.

In reality, the Latin Church was rather more influential in high politics than in the lives of ordinary men and women. The hierarchy was often out of touch with the people. Heresy, pagan reversions, fantastic superstitions, and fierce resentments of the Church’s wealth were prevalent. To combat the crisis, Innocent III gave his blessing to two new orders of mendicant brothers, who were to live exemplary lives of communal service among the masses. The Order of Preachers (OP), the Black Friars or Dominicans, was founded by a Castilian, St Dominic Guzman (1170–1221), who fixed their rule in two general Chapters in 1220–1. Ever since they have been specially devoted both to evangelizing and to study. The Order of Friars Minor (OFM), the Minorites or Grey Friars, was founded by St Francis of Assisi (c.1181–1226) and received their papal charter in 1223. Ever since, they have been specially devoted to moral teaching. Both Dominicans and Franciscans accepted men and women, and were sworn to corporate and individual poverty. Until further developments were halted in 1274, they were joined by other mendicants
including the Poor Clares, the Carmelites or White Friars, and the Austin Friars. Unlike the monks, whose piety was sometimes suspect, the ‘jovial friar’ was as popular with the laity as he was unpopular with the high clergy.

St Francis is undoubtedly the most endearing figure of medieval Christianity. Born the son of a rich merchant of Assisi in Umbria, he changed his clothes for those of a beggar and renounced his inheritance. He was the ‘husband of Lady Poverty’. He lived for a time as a hermit in a cave above Assisi, but in 1219 accompanied a crusading expedition to Egypt. He had more direct influence on the foundation of the Poor Clares than of the Franciscans. In 1224, when he was praying on Monte Verna, his body was impressed with the Stigmata—scars corresponding to the wounds of the crucified Christ. His legendary ability to commune with Nature is conveyed in his ‘Canticle to the Sun’ and in the later
Fioretti
(The Little Flowers of St Francis and his Companions). He was the author of hymns and prayers which go to the heart of the Christian ethos:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love,
Where there is injury, pardon,
Where there is doubt, faith,
Where there is despair, hope,
Where there is darkness, light,
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console,
To be understood, as to understand,
To be loved, as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
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The friars were instrumental in another development of the age—the rise of universities. The ‘twelfth-century renaissance’ had established the principle that secular learning had value apart from theology. But it was not acceptable that educational institutions should be set up without licence of the Church. Hence the idea of a
Studium Generale
or ‘university’, divided into four or five faculties— Theology, Law, Medicine, Arts or Philosophy, and Music—incorporated by charter and regulated by a self-governing academic body. Among Europe’s senior universities, after Bologna (1088, refounded 1215) came Paris (c.1150) and then Oxford 1167). By 1300, a score of foundations had proliferated in Italy, France, England, and Spain, with many more to come. (See Appendix III, p. 1248.)

The Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) illustrates a very different aspect of medieval Christianity. In 1199 Innocent III had declared heresy to be ‘treason against God’. The target of his fulminations were the Cathars or ‘Albigensians’ of Languedoc. Spiritual descendants of the ancient Gnostics, Manichaeans, and Bogumils, the Cathars had left traces of an earlier presence in Bosnia and had been the subject of a heresy trial in Milan. They then spread rapidly in the
weaving towns of Albi, Agen, Pamiers, Carcassonne, and Toulouse, where they gained the protection of the local counts. They believed that the prevalence of evil contradicted the existence of a sole benign Creator; that good and evil, therefore, must be separate creations. They were vegetarian, ascetic, puritanical; they practised the equality of men and women; and they supported a caste of
perfecti
who administered the rite of
consolamentum
, the ‘laying on of hands’. In 1167 they had held a dissident Council, at Saint Félix de Caraman near Toulouse, which was in touch with fellow dissidents of the same persuasion in Asia Minor. The Xlth General Council of the Church, called in 1179 to discuss the problem, had made no progress; and the preaching of St Dominic was equally fruitless. In 1209 the murder of a papal legate was used as the pretext for launching a general attack.
[BOGUMIL]

Innocent III pronounced a Crusade on the same terms as the Crusades against Islam—the remission of sins and unrestricted loot. In the first phase, between 1209 and 1218,12,000 knights from France and Burgundy, under Simon de Montfort the Elder, battled the heretics under the Raymonds VI and VII of Toulouse. In the second phase, from 1225 to 1271, the armies of the King of France entered the fray. The Cathars faced the choice between abjuration or death. Many chose death. The Holy Inquisition, led by a Cathar defector, Robert the Bugger,
*
spread a veritable reign of torture and terror. In 1244, at Montségur, the holy place of the Perfects, 200 recalcitrants were burned alive in one vast pyre. Year by year, village by village, by sword and by trial, the extirpation went on. The castle of Queribus fell in 1255. By the fourteenth century the surviving ex-Cathars found themselves in the Roman Catholic fold. Their province of Languedoc found itself in the kingdom of France. The unity of France was built on the misery of the Midi.
³⁵

Crusading, however, had further uses. If it could be used against the infidel, it could also be used against the heathen nearer to home. In 1147, at Frankfurt, St Bernard had found that the Saxon nobles were much keener on attacking their Slavonic neighbours than marching to the Holy Land. A papal bull,
Divina dispensation
, was obtained, and St Bernard urged the northern crusaders ‘to fight the heathen until such time as, by God’s help, they shall either be converted or wiped out’.
³⁶
The Wendish Crusade (1147–85) saw Saxons, Danes, and Poles reducing the obstinate tribes of Mecklenburg and Lusatia to the Catholic obedience. (See Plate 26.)

In 1198 Hartwig II, Archbishop of Bremen, launched another ‘continuous crusade’ in Livonia. Assisted by an Order of armed German monks, the Brothers of the Sword, based at Riga, he created an organization which gradually brought all the north-east Baltic under Catholic control. Livonia was subdued by the Order, Estonia by the Danes, and Finland by the Swedes. Their exploits were recorded c.1295 by the nameless author of the
Livlandische Reimchronik
, who describes the urge to kill and burn in the name of the Lord: