God's War: A New History of the Crusades (78 page)

These categories existed beyond clever theological dialectic, or even the formalized pleadings of preachers, evangelists and recruiting agents. The German lyric poet Walter von der Vogelweide numbered among his patrons Dukes Leopold V (d. 1194) and Leopold VI of Austria (d. 1230), whose combined crusading experience covered the Third, Fourth and Fifth Crusades, as well as campaigns in Spain and Languedoc. Walter’s
Palestine Song
illustrated this fourfold potency of the Holy Land, attractive to the sinner as the place of God’s incarnation where earth and heaven touched and, as such, the rightful possession of Christianity:

Now my life has found a purpose,
for my sinful eyes behold
that pure land and very country,
of which glorious things are told.
This has been my prayer of old:
I have seen the place which God
in a human form once trod.

Many a rich and splendid country
have I seen, but of them all
you deserve the highest honour,
where such wonders could befall.
That a maid to birth could bring
one who was the angel’s king –
was not this a wondrous thing?

Christians, Jews and also heathen
Claim this land as rightly theirs.
May God make our cause to triumph
by the threefold name he bears.
All the world has come to fight,
but to us belongs the right;
God defend us by his might!
⁵

Such commitment required direction, focus, organization and explanation if the obligations of service were to be translated into effective military, material or devotional action. Preachers such as Gerald of Wales and James of Vitry described this process as a form of conversion. Innocent III referred to Holy Land crusaders as having ‘converted to penance’. The Cistercian chronicler Gunther of Pairis (d.
c.
1210) described his abbot, Martin, ‘converting many to the militia of Christ’ at Basel in 1201. Another Cistercian, Caesarsius of Heisterbach, in his
Dialogus Miraculorum
(
c.
1223), placed his discussion of crusading under the heading ‘Concerning Conversion’ (
De conversione
). Caesarius and James both likened becoming a
crucesignatus
to entering a monastic order, crusaders in general, not just those who had taken vows in the military orders, constituting a distinct
religio
.
⁶
In the two decades after the Third Crusade, this construction of crusading and the realization of Innocent III’s theology of God’s war were given ceremonial and administrative substance by the development of specific ecclesiastical institutions. Coupled with the political consequences of the Third Crusade and a newly confident papacy after Innocent’s accession in 1198, these turned ideology into regular church practice.

INNOCENT III AND THE BUSINESS OF THE CROSS

Lothar of Segni was elected pope on 8 January 1198, taking the name Innocent III. The nephew of Clement III, he had been associated with the Roman Curia since the late 1180s, a cardinal since 1190. Trained in theology at Paris and, probably, law at Bologna, aged only thirty-seven, Innocent revivified the papacy. His immediate predecessors had tended to be cautious, experienced old men – Celestine III had lived into his
nineties – seeking to protect rather than promote or extend papal interests. The three pillars of Innocent’s pontificate were the assertion of papal authority – he popularized the title ‘Vicar of Christ’; the development of spiritual and ecclesiastical reform though evangelization and canon law; and prosecution of the crusade, which incorporated both.

Innocent regularly described crusading as the
negotium crucis
, the business of the cross, or, more pointedly, the
negotium crucifixi
, the business of the crucified, specifically Christ but also, by analogy, all Christians.
⁷
In a theological work written before his election as pope,
c.
1195,
De miseria humane conditionis (Concerning the misery of the human condition
), the young Cardinal Lothar, explained, ‘the just man “denies himself” crucifying his body on the cross of its own vices and lusts so that the world is crucified to him and he to the world’.
⁸
The metaphor of the cross – or, as Innocent saw it, its spiritual reality – ideally suited the crusade projects. In some circles they became synonyms. Caesarius of Heisterbach was one of a long line of theorists and propagandists who used
crux transmarina
and
crux cismarina
to describe crusades to Outremer and in Europe. The absence of a formal canonical word defining the activity, as opposed to its participants (
crucesignati
), did not prevent the emergence after the Third Crusade of a vernacular crusade vocabulary based on the cross: the verbs
croisier
,
croier/croisé
in northern French (
langue d’oil
); the nouns
crozeia
,
crozea
and
crozada
in southern French (
langue d’oc
).
⁹
Taking the cross was, after all, the earliest ceremony that distinguished this form of religious activity, invented by Urban II. Now, a century later, the Latin term
crucesignatus
became firmly entrenched, a consequence of the insistence on the image of the cross in crusade propaganda and exhortation after 1187. This chimed theologically with the emphasis on the wider personal commitment of the faithful Christian servant of the Lord, who bore a cross in imitation as well in honour of Him. A contemporary (
c.
1200) English liturgy for the ceremonial adoption of the cross listed its virtues in this vein: ‘an especial means of assistance, a support of faith, the consummation of his (the crusader’s) works, the redemption of his soul and a protection and safeguard against the fierce darts of all his enemies’.
¹⁰
As military ensign, mystic symbol, badge of penance, talisman or charm, no icon was more potent. Although ubiquitous in liturgy and as a public Christian symbol, worn equally by the non-crusading religious orders, members of confraternities or reformed heretics, the
cross, with its particular association with the Jerusalem, lent the crusade an almost infinite plasticity of application, association, meaning and metaphor while retaining its precise central point of reference.

Innocent III established an institutional framework within which his crusading theology found concrete expression, even if much of his construction rested on earlier foundations. There was little absolutely original in his policies. He was a codifier as much as an innovator. Nonetheless, Innocent’s contribution could be regarded as a sort of creation. The bull
Quia Maior
of 1213 and the decree
Ad Liberandam
of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, contained a set of coherent legal, liturgical and fiscal provisions that brought together a range of previous expedients to form the basis and model for future crusades. Earlier propaganda themes were rehearsed: service to God; the offer of salvation; charity to oppressed Christians; the Holy Land as Christ’s patrimony; a test of religious devotion.
¹¹
The apparatus of inducement was given a new clarity, putting an end to a century of papal obfuscation, hesitation and reluctance to define whether the crusade indulgence remitted the sin or the penalty of the sin. Through the power vested by Christ in the pope, full remission of all orally confessed sins (annual oral confession was to become mandatory for Roman Catholics at the 1215 Lateran Council) were granted to those who took the cross and campaigned in person; to those who sent and paid for proxies to fight in their stead; and to those proxies. Those who provided
matériel
, donations and alms for the crusade were to receive an indulgence proportionate to their contribution, picking up an idea canvassed as early as 1157 by the English Pope Hadrian IV and repeated by Innocent himself in 1198.
¹²
Consonant with his desire for military effectiveness and his theology of the Lord’s war, Innocent, extending and clarifying a precedent set by Clement III, invited ‘anyone who wishes’ to take the Cross ‘in such a way that this vow may be commuted, redeemed or deferred by apostolic mandate when urgent need or evident expediency demand it’. The means of redemption was payment. Vow redemption helped alter radically the funding of crusading, the manner in which the cross was preached, the methods of recruitment and planning, and even the reputation of the exercise itself as the system became vulnerable to charges of ‘crosses for cash’.

Characteristic of Innocent III and his fellow Paris-trained ecclesiastics was the practical and social application of theology. Financing the
crusades formed a part of this. In 1199, Innocent unsuccessfully attempted to levy a compulsory fortieth on clerical surpluses to pay for mercenaries for the crusade.
¹³
Quia Maior
suggested a voluntary aid, with equal lack of response, so the decree
Ad Liberandam
imposed a three-year tax of a twentieth on the church to be collected by centrally appointed papal officials. Equally practical were the restatements in 1213 and 1215 of the temporal crusader privileges of immunity from taxes and usury to Jews, moratorium on debts and general church protection for the crusaders and their property. While bishops were to enforce some of the provisions, the secular arm was called upon to police those against Jewish credit collection. Secular individuals and communities were encouraged collectively to supply warriors, as in 1198. Following a similar injunction of 1199, special chests were to be deposited in parish churches to receive indulgence-earning almsgiving for the Holy Land, visible reminders of a permanent obligation.

These material considerations were balanced by the organization of penance and preaching more systematically than before to ensure the
negotium crucis
became a permanent feature of lay devotional life, ‘to fight in such a conflict’, Innocent proposed, ‘not so much with physical arms as spiritual ones’.
¹⁴
Special prayers and liturgical devices had been instituted by Gregory VIII and Clement III. Within the liturgy of the Cistercian Order in the 1190s prayers for
crucesignati
and ‘pro terra Ierosolymitana’ were introduced. Bidding prayers and
clamor
now included the needs for the Holy Land.
¹⁵
Quia Maior
provided for monthly penitential processions throughout Christendom, accompanied by preaching, fasting and almsgiving. A new intercessory ritual was added to the daily service of the mass between the Kiss of Peace and the reception of the Communion. In addition to a specially composed intercessory prayer calling for the restoration of the Holy Land, this included the familiar crusading Psalm 79, ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps.’ The rite underlined the association of the crusade as a physical public duty and personal spiritual obligation with the mass. Confession, penance and the mystical presence of Christ Crucified (transubstantiation was another dogma accepted by the 1215 Lateran Council) provided an appropriate ceremonial as well as spiritual context for, as the intercessory prayer of 1213 put it, the liberation of ‘the land which thine only-begotten son consecrated with his own blood’. A few
years later, masses for the Holy Land were marked by the ringing of a bell during the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.
¹⁶
Such formal rituals acted within the wider process of crusade evangelism, to which Innocent gave clear direction by constructing an elaborate network of crusade preachers in every province and diocese of western Christendom under the direction of papal-appointed legates. In these ways, the cause of the Holy Land became a habitual feature of the parochial liturgical round in ways it had not been before 1187. The business of the cross was the business of Christianity.

This had extensive practical consequences. Until the Third Crusade, application of crusaders’ privileges had lagged behind the rhetoric of holy war in establishing recognized, coherent conventions. Given the infrequent nature of large-scale wars of the cross, this was unsurprising. This changed with the enormous convulsion of 1187–92, when tens of thousands of
crucesignati
were recruited in all parts of western Christendom. The implications did not end with the Treaty of Jaffa. The failure to recapture Jerusalem embedded the recovery of the Holy Land into western European politics, with hardly a year passing without an attempt to mobilize a new expedition somewhere in Christendom. The human detritus of the Third Crusade included not just those who departed on that campaign, with their relicts and dependants at home, but also the substantial numbers of
crucesignati
, who for reasons of accident, poverty or convenience had failed to fulfil their vows in the first place. Church authorities repeatedly attempted to insist on the performance of crusade vows, a problem that had dogged every expedition; the First Crusaders at Antioch in January 1098 had complained about the backsliders at home, threatening them with excommunication. After the Third Crusade, the problem appeared endemic. Celestine III in 1196 and Innocent III in 1200 and 1201 addressed the issue by instructing local ecclesiastical authorities to force compliance on pain of excommunication, to persuade lapsed
crucesignati
to send proxies, or, in Innocent’s instructions, to allow the poor and infirm to redeem their vows.
¹⁷
Lists of defaulting crusaders drawn up by the Third Crusade veteran Hubert Walter, from 1193 archbishop of Canterbury, reveal the social range of the business of the cross as well as some of its attendant problems. In a list of forty-seven names from Cornwall, local artisans featured prominently – miller, blacksmith, tanner, tailor, cobbler, etc. – as well as four or five women
crucesignatae
. Crusaders may have lacked social
elevation, but they needed legal freedom and economic substance. This social profile was repeated in a similar list from Lincolnshire, where the main cause of non-fulfilment was poverty. Such evidence confirmed the need for central funding Innocent III had identified in 1199 when he proposed the clerical crusade tax.
¹⁸
These lists of English crusaders, paralleled in the records of secular government, reveal two important features of crusading at the end of the twelfth century; its wide social embrace and, in common with governments across Europe, its increasing bureaucratization.