God's War: A New History of the Crusades (144 page)

Recent research has identified large quantities of surviving manuscripts recording a range of associated liturgical rites centred on general or specific supplications for divine aid on behalf of the Holy Land or the Turks.
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They reveal the extent of strenuous, regular religious activity, conducted in parish churches, monasteries and cathedrals across western Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, directed towards the object of crusading, the liberation of the Holy Land or defence against pagans, infidels or Turks. Although there are examples of papal orders to conduct Holy Land masses not being carried out, as in the diocese of Rouen in the 1330s, the nature and weight of the records suggest prayers and masses were not being copied out in some arcane collective antiquarian homage to past, dead usages but represent a set of living observances.
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The Holy Land supplicatory devices appeared in a number of liturgical categories. The
clamor
to invoke God’s help for the Holy Land was inserted in the mass between the consecration and the breaking of the Host before the Communion. It appeared in various standard forms in manuscript and printed missals from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, those derived from the English dioceses of Salisbury, York and Hereford being particularly prominent. Associated with the rite of taking the cross, these prayers were inserted into the mass on special occasions. By contrast, normal celebrations of the Eucharist could be dedicated as a whole to the special votive aim of the recovery of the Holy Land. Provision for such special masses was included in the instructions for the preparations for a crusade by John XXII (1333), Urban V (1363) and Gregory XI (1373). Such special masses could be directed towards a particular crusade or, especially in the fifteenth century, to less precise assistance to the Holy Land. The later fifteenth century saw an increase in dedicated masses against the Turks, but they were also invoked against Hussites and, more vaguely, ‘pagans’ and ‘infidels’.

A more remarkable use of masses for the Holy Land were the so-called Gregorian Trentals, originating in England in the later fourteenth century. These comprised clusters of thirty masses to be said for the soul of the dead after the death or burial of the testator who endowed the services. Within the mass, prayers were included for the liberation of the Holy Land alone or combined the liberation of the Holy Land with the liberation of the soul of the departed from ‘the hands of demons’, i.e. in purgatory. The destination of the soul and the Holy Land were equated, the pagans by analogy liturgically demonized. In England alone there survive eighty separate liturgical sources for this habit, as well as almost 150 wills, mainly from the fifteenth century. Calixtus III appears to have encouraged the practice during his crusade efforts in 1455. In England, at least, these daily masses could be sung 365 days a year.

Although such liturgies stretched the link between crusade ideology and crusade action to an extreme, they testify to the inescapable power and penetration of the image of the liberation of the Holy Land, which did not depend on sporadic official preaching or fundraising to hold the thoughts of the faithful. Further confirmation of this can be found in wills across western Europe, certainly in the fourteenth century, bequeathing money for the crusade as well as for Holy Land masses. However, the lack of association with active crusading suggests that the liberation of the Holy Land provided a spiritual metaphor, both for the liberation of the individual soul from the consequences of sin, as in the English Gregorian Trentals, and, more widely, for the struggle against the ungodly. This passive response was evinced most clearly by Holy Land bidding prayers. These were vernacular intercessory prayers said in parish churches across Europe on Sundays and feast days directly after the sermon. From the late thirteenth century they became a habitual part of the general supplicatory apparatus of church liturgy. They were far from calls to crusade, unlike elements elsewhere in the liturgy.
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The only action prescribed for the recovery of the Holy Land was prayer, an ultimate distillation of the growing passivity that the extension of crusade institutions in the thirteenth century inadvertently encouraged. Once again, the recovery of the Holy Land appears as a symbol of God’s favour and the acceptability of the prayers of the faithful. This tradition sustained the image of crusading as a central Christian devotional activity long after fighting for the cross had become a rarity. However, on all sides of the confessional divides that opened up in the sixteenth
century, such externalized manifestations of corporate religion, using a physical act – the recovery of the Holy Land – as a means of securing grace and salvation, became increasingly unconvincing as more and more articulate believers turned towards systems of devotion that concentrated more directly on the interior personal experience of God and faith. Furthermore, different categories of ‘ungodly’ entered Christian demonology, replacing the old stereotypes and analogies, rendering crusade polemical imagery redundant.

Central ceremonies of crusading persisted. As in bidding prayers, the emphasis on the cross displayed in crusade sermons became integrated into more general evangelism and penitential exhortation centred on the cross’s redemptive powers; parts of many crusade sermons were interchangeable with those concerned with moral reform. Sermons delivered or circulated in manuscript to provide models for local exhortation displayed a traditional formalism of structure and content, evident, for example, in England, in crusade sermons well into the fourteenth century. In fact, the heavily allusive metaphorical language of crusade was developed more by desk-bound or court-based propagandists, mostly laymen, than working preachers, who tended to operate within a tight academic tradition. Despite the crafted crusade preaching of, for instance, the fourteenth-century English Dominican John Bromyard, or the Frenchman Pierre Roger, the future Pope Clement VI, subsequently, the true heirs of the great crusade preachers of earlier generations were figures such as Mézières. Statistics of sermons in northern France between 1350 and 1520 indicate only a tiny proportion concerned the crusade, indulgences, Saracens or heretics.
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The crusade preaching tour and sermon, like the sale of indulgences, became routine aspects of administration, no longer the necessary focal point of recruitment and propaganda, sometimes omitted altogether. The exception of John of Capistrano’s popular evangelism in Hungary in 1456 exposed the contrast with other crusade initiatives where, if present at all, sermons were delivered to elite court audiences, with no thought to mass communication. Increasingly, the commonest public encounter came with the pardoner or indulgence salesman, not the preacher.

Other aspects of crusade organization, including privileges and taking the cross, similarly varied in intensity and application. Processions inspired by specific crusading campaigns were conducted at Douai regularly during the mid-fifteenth century. Such public demonstrations
assumed greater significance in the absence of frequent recruiting drives. The near-permanent sale of indulgences, in many regions robustly popular in terms of profit, operated at a different, less intense level of public or personal involvement.
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With fewer people actually taking the cross, the associated privileges tended to fall into disuse. One much exploited privilege of
crucesignati
allowed them to delay answering law suits, known as essoin of court. In his
Mirror of Justices
, Andrew Horn (d. 1328), fishmonger and Chamberlain of the City of London, described, as a matter of course, the essoin of crusaders engaged in ‘a general passage to the land of Jerusalem’. By the end of the century, such assumptions may have became genuinely anachronistic. In France by the 1380s, for instance, the lawbook known as the
Grand Coutumier de France
omitted any mention of crusaders from its detailed list of essoins.
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The habit of taking the cross had become too infrequent.

The ceremony of taking the cross, the defining ritual of crusading, remained available for the faithful, penitent or adventurous, but, as an active expression of interest in holy war, appears increasingly exceptional compared with earlier centuries. In December 1382, Bishop Henry Despenser of Norwich took the cross in St Paul’s cathedral, London. He apparently had experienced some difficulty locating an order of service, given its recent rarity. In fact, copies of the ceremony existed in many English cathedrals and abbeys. Different English rites for taking the cross existed in York, Lincoln and Salisbury (Despenser found his version in the liturgy books of the monks of Westminster).
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Although notable for their absence during the 1390 al-Mahdiya and 1396 Nicopolis expeditions, or as part of the Burgundian court’s display of crusade enthusiasm in the 1450s, examples of individuals and groups taking the cross show how the practice continued, as among the Hungarian peasantry in 1456 or the citizens of Ghent in the 1460s. Individual vows to fight the infidel can be found from France and Bavaria in the fourteenth century to Englishman and Scotsmen in the 1450s and worsted weavers from Norfolk in 1499.
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Rites for taking the cross continued to be copied into diocesan service books throughout the period, alongside the wider Holy Land liturgy. When Innocent VIII standardized the rite in the Roman Pontifical, he acknowledged the new circumstances of the Turkish advance when he changed the preamble to the ceremony from one restricted to those ‘going to assist the Holy Land’ to those wishing ‘to assist and defend the Christian faith or the recovery
of the Holy Land’.
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The change indicated the pope believed or hoped the rite was in current use. Below the level of papal authorization, the cross could be given by local clergy to adventurers, such as Robert Almer at Canterbury in 1462, or to penitent robbers, a couple of whom received the cross at St Alban’s in 1479.
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The adaptability of the ceremony and institution was repeatedly confirmed, from new Iberian conquistadors to devout Roman Catholics fighting Protestant Huguenots in Toulouse during the French Wars of Religion in the 1560s. No less than Innocent III summoning the Fourth Lateran Council in 1213, Paul III was certain his congregation knew the significance of assuming the cross of Christ when he assembled the Council of Trent in 1544–5.
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By then, the whole idea of the redemptive merit of crusading had been challenged by critics of the Roman Church, mostly, but not exclusively, by Protestant confessional opponents. Ironically, central to the criticism lay the question of indulgences. Although those directed at serving the recovery of the Holy Land, the fight against the Turks or subsidizing the Hospitallers at Rhodes could still prove popular, the wide application and in places blatant racketeering involved threatened to discredit the whole system, as Pius II had warned.
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Thus at the very core of the crusading practices, a
de facto
separation emerged between function – fighting the infidel – and method – the offer and sale of indulgences. This occurred at the same time as other dimensions of holy war asserted themselves across Christendom, some overtly associated with crusading, some less so, some not all. Hussites and Protestants could happily fight holy wars without the apparatus of Roman Catholic crusade theology. Prayers for aid against the Turks appeared in Edward VI of England’s Protestant Prayer Book (1549, 1552). Just as not all prayers for the Holy Land indicated closet crusading, so not every expression of holy war, just war or hostility towards infidels came wrapped in formal crusading packaging. Even amongst Roman Catholics, the devolution of crusading to frontlines where combat was a matter of national survival, not religious duty, further diluted any ideological exclusivity the crusading may have possessed. The association of holy war with lay politics at once provided one of the commonest and most controversial battlefields for crusaders. As with indulgences, one of the most characteristic features of later medieval crusading proved one of the most self-defeating. To understand this, it is necessary to return to the thirteenth century.

CRUSADES AGAINST CHRISTIANS

Between the late thirteenth and early fifteenth centuries, crusades launched against Christians, in the heart of Christian society, formed the most consistent application of papal holy war. Inherent in the emergence of an ideology of holy war in the early middle ages, canonists and theologians in the thirteenth century, including Thomas Aquinas, further developed the doctrine of religious just war in Christendom. Henry of Segusio or Hostiensis argued that the
crux cismarina
, the crusade within Christendom, possessed more urgency and justice than the
crux transmarina
, or overseas crusade. In condoning papal policy, Hostiensis was reflecting traditional attitudes.
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This did not absolve them from criticism and controversy. When preaching against the Hohenstaufen in Germany in 1251, Hostiensis himself discovered wide and deep opposition to preaching the cross against Christians.
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Intellectually and legally valid, crusades against Christians never sat as comfortably in the mentalities of the faithful as wars against infidels. One of the key attractions of crusading lay in demonizing ‘aliens’ against whom the faithful could define their identity; crusades against Christians too often looked uncomfortably like crusades against themselves.

During the twelfth century, the papacy continued to sanction wars against its political opponents. Yet none, even the substantial expedition directed against the adventurer Markward of Anweiler in 1199, seems to have been accompanied by preaching, cross-taking or the full array of Holy Land privileges.
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Only with the Albigensian crusade in 1209, directed to the Christian protectors of heretics as much as the heretics themselves, was the complete Holy Land apparatus employed, its equality with the eastern war confirmed in the bull
Excommunicamus
of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). Innocent III’s desire to offer the crusade indulgence as widely as possible and his encouragement of the idea of Christian society as a church militant constantly challenged by sin and temporal enemies made the incorporation of wars against Christians a logical step. Clerical crusade taxation for political conflicts appealed to secular rulers caught up in them, as well as providing the papacy with a mechanism of control and the capacity the vast sums of church money granted to initiate military action on its own behalf. This became useful with the acquisition under Innocent III and his successors
of temporal Papal States in central Italy that required maintaining and defending.