God's War: A New History of the Crusades (98 page)

The political legacy of the Albigensian crusades was less equivocal than the religious, suitably for a series of military campaigns in which the secular repeatedly dominated the spiritual. This is not to decry the sincerity of those who saw themselves as soldiers of Christ, nor of those laymen and clerks who genuinely feared the cancerous growth of heresy. However, it remains inescapable that the Albigensian crusades failed to destroy heresy while succeeding in annexing Languedoc to the Capetian
dynasty. This may not have been the intention of the crusaders of 1209, yet Innocent III had persistently tried to involve Philip II, recognizing the force of using a strong state to recreate a strong church. It is equally apparent that this new order established the necessary conditions in which heresy could be destroyed. To the committed, this may mitigate the religious failure of the Albigensian crusades.

The crusades did not destroy a region. The economy of Languedoc proved very resilient.
⁹⁵
Once the fighting was ended, prosperity returned. What was lost was religious and political pluralism, always hard to sustain, not just in thirteenth-century Europe. The career of Oliver, heir to the Corbières lordship of Termes, famously charted the process.
⁹⁶
Termes had been a Cathar centre lost to the crusaders in 1210. By the early 1220s, Oliver had regained it after submitting to Capetian authority in 1219. However, throughout the 1220s, Oliver supported Languedoc resistance, first Raymond Trencavel, then, after 1226, Raymond VII of Toulouse, while retaining close links with Cathar
perfecti
. Despite losing Termes and being forced to renew fealty to the French king in 1228, Oliver continued to oppose the new regime and the Inquisition from his vertiginous stronghold of Queribus, north of Perpignan, which became a refuge for Cathars and other political dissidents. After joining the revolts of 1240 and 1242, Oliver was excommunicated. Reconciliation with the Capetian authorities ironically only came with his agreement in 1247 to join Louis IX’s crusade to Egypt. Many Languedoc rebels, including Raymond VII, found the Holy Land crusade imposed as a penance. Oliver seems to have taken to it. He stayed east until 1255 and returned to Outremer in 1264, 1267–70 and, in 1273–4, as commander of the French garrison at Acre, where he died in 1274. The
quid pro quo
for his service was the return of lands in Languedoc and his and his family’s absolute loyalty and orthodoxy: no more independence in politics or religion. Oliver’s late devotion to holy war suggests a fluid but serious piety grounded in the reality of temporal opportunities. Not a pacifist, he serially supported two highly contrasting strands of thirteenth-century belief, Catharism and crusade, each determined by conflicting political allegiance but indicating that the contending ideologies reflected a shared cultural desire for active religious purity.

Oliver was not alone among Cathar sympathizers or even
credentes
in taking the cross as a positive sign of reconciliation with the church.
However, such a path was denied the hapless Raymond VI, one of the most excommunicated men of the middle ages. His fate was to find himself in an impossible position. Unable to mount effective diplomatic or military resistance to his enemies, neither could he achieve what they asked of him even if he had been disposed to do so. The contrast with his father Raymond V’s attempt to suppress the Cathars in 1179 probably lay not with Raymond VI’s personal religious tastes; he was an active patron of the Hospitallers. Rather, by his accession in 1194, the Cathars had become too entrenched socially as well as religiously. Short of a disruptive and devastating conquest of his own lands, for which he had neither the appetite nor the resources, it is hard to see what Raymond could have done to appease Innocent III’s implacable legates and their military enforcer Montfort, who, in any case, was after Raymond’s lands. The personal bitterness directed at Raymond is difficult to understand; his iconic significance less so. He was the epitome of the
fautor
, the heretic’s accomplice. As such, there appeared no forgiveness, even beyond the grave. In 1222, Raymond had died technically excommunicate, prevented by his final stroke from making oral confession to the abbot of St Sernin.
⁹⁷
His body, covered in a pall provided by the Hospitallers, was refused burial. Despite repeated appeals by his son and numerous ecclesiastical inquiries, his coffin remained unburied in the precincts of the Hospitaller house in Toulouse, where it was still to be seen over a century later, the shrouded body half-eaten by rats. By 1515, the worm-ridden coffin had collapsed in pieces and the bones had gone, except for the skull. This was kept by the Hospitallers, who, as late as the 1690s, used to show it off to the morbid and the curious.
⁹⁸
There was something appropriate in this exhibition of antiquarian bad taste. The gruesome relic represented both the eternal vengeance of a church so badly rattled that it could not forgive or forget and the only too obvious corruption of the flesh. A Cathar might have drawn a succinct moral.

19

The Fifth Crusade 1213–21

Writing in an optimistic mood in 1208 to the crusade enthusiast Duke Leopold VI of Austria, Innocent III characterized holy war as an imitation of Christ, an act of unconditional devotion. In recognition of this he sent Leopold a cloth cross and letters conveying the plenary indulgence.
¹
This innocuous exchange encapsulated the distinctive elements of Innocent III’s crusade policy: theological precept, moral conviction, papal authority, pastoral care, administrative control and bureaucratic precision. The developments set in train by the Third Crusade reached new levels of thoroughness as Innocent sought to accomplish what he had failed to achieve in 1202–4, the destruction of Ayyubid Egypt, the recovery of Jerusalem and the spiritual renewal of Christendom. To this end, the so-called Fifth Crusade, planned in 1213, launched in 1215 and fought in a series of running expeditions between 1217 and 1229, marked the climax in papal cooperation with secular power. Innocent is often depicted as the most successful promoter of papal monarchism, wishing to control, even exclude, lay domination in his crusading policy after the debacle of 1202–4. It is frequently asserted that the Fifth Crusade represented the church’s greatest and last serious attempt to run a holy war though its own leadership. Yet although the last acts of the Fifth Crusade were conducted in a hail of mutual recrimination and mistrust between popes and the emperor, Frederick II, leading to the bizarre, but not entirely unprecedented, scene in 1228 of a Holy Land crusade under an excommunicated leader, as with the Albigensian wars, Innocent III and his successor Honorius III based their policy on trying to obtain the cooperation and support of lay monarchs. The Fifth Crusade was intended to marry the universal ambitions of the papacy with the imperialism of the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and southern Italy. Innocent’s involvement of the young Frederick II opened the prospect
of a new order in Christendom. A mutually advantageous acceptance of the respective authority of pope and emperor would be signalled by the fulfilment of the eastern aspirations of Conrad III, Frederick I and Henry VI no less than those of Urban II, Eugenius III or Gregory VIII. The failure of the enterprise, and the reciprocal demonization that dominated papal-Hohenstaufen relations for the subsequent fifty years, obscured this central feature of Innocent’s conception. If historical turning points exist, the Fifth Crusade was one; the direction of international high politics could have been set on a very different course.
²

The organization and conduct of the Fifth Crusade witnessed growing bureaucracy. In concert with developments in secular government and law, increasingly the crusade was becoming a written phenomenon.
³
Preachers received licences and based their sermons on circulated papal bulls. Recruitment and finance was sustained by central and local record keeping, lists of
crucesignati
, accounts of moneys raised and expended, and written authorization for individuals’ legal and fiscal privileges. While the creation of new technologies of record may not coincide with changes in what is being recorded, the weight of writing indicated the growing institutionalization of crusading as a social and religious activity.

THE CHILDREN’S CRUSADE Of 1212

Crusade preaching, taxation and liturgical propaganda reached an extended audience beyond the ranks of those who were able to join up: the poor, the old, the landless, the rootless and the young, all in their ways disenfranchised from direct involvement in the increasingly highly structured armies of the cross. The broader social and religious demands of crusading stimulated engagement in what would later be described as civil society, as observers, commentators, critics and participants, by sections of the community not necessarily included in the ruling hierarchies. The Albigensian crusades were attended by so-called
ribaldi
, low-born camp followers, as well as local peasants.
⁴
The organization of some contingents, such as the fleets from northern European waters, revolved around sworn communes, wide consultation across social
groups and a measure of general debate, even occasionally, as at fraught moments during the Fourth Crusade, public consent.
⁵
The collective commitment to the crusade evinced in communal ceremonies of dedication, in cities from London to Cologne to Venice, was matched by the development of regular parochial rituals of devotion and support. Taking the cross, like sermons, assumed the witness of congregations. Innocent III’s offer of the indulgence to those not themselves soldiers of the cross and the spread of crusade taxation further lent the
negotium sanctum
a genuinely popular, public dimension. Political and social anxieties could be articulated through support for the transcendent cause of the Holy Land by groups habitually excluded, ignored, marginalized or simply disorganized by virtue of low material status. An extraordinary demonstration of this penetration of the crusade into wider political consciousness and communal action came with the phenomenon known as the Children’s Crusade.
⁶

In the winter and spring of 1211–12, Innocent III’s habitual concerns at the sinfulness of the faithful, the heretics in Languedoc, the Moors in Spain and the precarious plight of Outremer were focused by papal decree and battalions of preachers on just two: the Albigensian crusades and the advances of the Almohads of north Africa in the Iberian peninsula. An intensive recruiting campaign for the Languedoc war in the Rhineland and northern France was led by James of Vitry and Archdeacon William of Paris, Simon of Montfort’s siege expert.
⁷
At the same time, Almohad victories in the autumn of 1211 prompted Innocent III to appeal for aid for the Christians in Spain, instituting a series of special penitential processions to be held in mid May. The impression of heightened crisis, reinforced by repeated calls for Apostolic simplicity and active penance, through taking the cross or collective liturgical contrition, stimulated unlicensed popular response. In at least two regions this coalesced into demonstrations of public support for the defence of Christendom from those not normally associated with leadership of formal crusading.

In the spring and summer of 1212, crowds of penitents assembled in the Low Countries, the Rhineland and northern France, areas heavily evangelized for the crusade. They called for an amendment of life and, in places, the liberation of the Holy Land. Some contingents apparently crossed the Alps into Italy in search of transport to the Levant. Details of intentions varied locally, but all these marches were seen to have been
inspired in part by the rumours of the threats to Christendom, the dissemination of a redemptive theology emphasizing the crusade as a collective penitential act and the failure of the leaders of society to perform their obligations on either count. The most striking feature of these marches lay in that they were conducted by
‘pueri’
, literally children. In fact, these
‘pueri’
may have been less juvenile than the name implied. To a Cologne chronicler, who may be reporting eyewitness memories, the
pueri
‘ranged in age from six years to full maturity’.
⁸
Norman and Alpine monks recorded that the marchers were adolescents and old people.
⁹
Accounts indicated that participants came from outside the usual hierarchies of social power – youths, girls, the unmarried, sometimes excluding even widows – or economic status: shepherds, ploughmen, carters, agricultural workers and rural artisans without a settled stake in land or community, rootless and mobile. Signs of anti-clericalism and the absence of clerical leadership accentuated this sense of social exclusion. Yet despite the absence of ecclesiastical authority, there was little church condemnation. The popular movements of 1212 demonstrated the success of Innocent’s evangelism. The marches sprang from communal anxiety, not specific social or economic hardship. Dissatisfaction with the inability of the leaders of the social hierarchy to secure victory in Spain, Languedoc or Palestine may have coincided with a more diffuse trend whereby rural populations were attracted to towns, especially at a time of increasing demographic pressure in the countryside. Yet the immediate impulse appeared to be religious.

The recorded chronology of events is confusing. There were two distinct areas of enthusiasm, one in northern France, south-west of Paris, the other in the Low Countries and the Rhineland. From chronicle accounts it is possible to argue that the Ile de France marchers combined with those from the Rhineland, or, less likely, that the Rhinelanders joined the French uprising or that the two movements remained separate, coinciding only in timing. According to the Cologne chronicler, around Easter (25 March) and Whitsun (13 May) 1212 large processions of youths from the traditional crusade recruiting grounds of the Rhineland, the Netherlands, north-eastern France and western Germany, defying family and friends, began to move in the general direction of Italy. Although some groups assembled in Lorraine, a number being stopped at Metz, the main body gathered at Cologne, where a leader emerged
called Nicholas, a youth from the surrounding countryside. As reported, their declared purpose was the relief of the Holy Land. A contingent of crusaders from Cologne under the provost of the cathedral had joined Simon of Montfort in Languedoc in April that year, but this commitment had been too restricted in scope to satisfy the spiritual expectations aroused by the attendant evangelizing.
¹⁰
Instead, the failure of the experienced, rich and proud (an apparent reference to the Fourth Crusade) was to be redeemed by the innocent, pure and humble. Some of the German marchers adopted the pilgrim’s scrip and staff as well as the cross. Their leader, Nicholas, was remembered as carrying a tau cross, a symbol elsewhere associated with Francis of Assisi and his dynamic brand of poverty and humility.