Holy Warriors (39 page)

By July 1212 the Christians had made steady progress southward and they brought their opponents to battle in mountainous terrain near Las Navas de Tolosa, roughly midway between Christian Toledo and Muslim Granada. The kings of Castile, Aragon, and Navarre all took to the field, although most of the French were absent after a dispute over the distribution of booty. The crusaders confessed their sins and called for divine help in their struggle; their prayers were soon answered when the Christian cavalry burst through the enemy lines and put them to flight. Al-Nasir fled, leaving many splendid treasures, including the beautiful tapestry that covered the entrance to his tent, an object that still hangs in the monastery of Las Huelgas near Burgos.
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His silken tent, golden lance, and standard were all sent to the papal court and an exultant Innocent translated and read out Alfonso VIII’s victory letter to a public assembly—irrefutable evidence that the procession and prayers in Rome had induced divine favor.
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Alfonso’s message resounded with crusading imagery: “Our Lord slew a great number of them with the sword of the cross,” and although his estimates of the enemy dead—100,000—and the Christian losses—only twenty to thirty—may have been somewhat exaggerated, the point was made: the Muslims had suffered a savage defeat and the Christians could establish firm control over much of southern Iberia. While Innocent saw the victory at Las Navas de
Tolosa as an inspiration to the Christian cause, he adduced it as a reason to suspend the crusade in the peninsula and to concentrate on the Holy Land. Progress halted for a couple of decades until the capture of the Balearic Islands (1235), Cordova (1236), Valencia (1246), and Seville (1248). Protected by the Sierra Nevada mountains, however, the kingdom of Granada remained in Muslim hands for more than two hundred years, meaning that the reconquest was far from complete. The battle at Las Navas de Tolosa has become a seminal moment in Spanish history because it was the point at which the divided kingdoms began to work together; indeed, within a few decades the absent rulers of León and Portugal found their way into the story of the battle as well, accounts of which almost entirely exclude the role of the papacy because in terms of generating a national identity it was the Spanish alone—“Soli Hispani”—who had fought for God, the Catholic faith, and Spain.
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In the course of the Second Crusade, Pope Eugenius III had brought the war against the pagans of northern Europe into parity with the campaigns in the Holy Land and Spain. This situation did not, however, continue and there was no ongoing papal initiative in the region.
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Local princes and churchmen organized further campaigns of conquest and conversion to Livonia, southern Estonia, and Prussia. During the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, efforts at missionary work gathered momentum as the Church sought to provide proper instruction for the people now under Christian authority. Innocent quickly appreciated the need to defend these new acquisitions; he also tried to counter the trend of forcible conversion, something contrary to canon law. In papal thinking, however, the need to preserve these Christian outposts justified the use of violence, “to root out the error of paganism and spread the bounds of the Christian faith.”
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The pope granted partial indulgences to various expeditions in the Baltic: in other words they did not receive the full forgiveness of sins and the protection of property granted to crusaders in the Holy Land, Spain, or against the Cathars of southern France. While the Baltic campaigns shared the idea of service to God they were not, at this point, regarded as equals. Innocent had created a hierarchy of crusading with the Baltic placed behind these other
holy wars; presumably a judgment on their perceived spiritual merits and the threat posed to the Christian faith therein.

In the decades after Innocent’s pontificate this approach changed when Honorius III (1216–27) brought the Baltic crusades back on a par with the campaigns to the Holy Land, probably a reflection of his interest in the emergent mendicant orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans.
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Missionary work needed support, and crusades could help to defend both the newly converted and the missionaries themselves. In the 1230s the Teutonic Knights arrived in Prussia. Originally founded during the Third Crusade, this new group of warrior-monks soon established itself as an important institution in the Levant.
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Given its national origins it also became a natural outlet for crusading ideas in the Baltic and Prussia and the papacy provided it with considerable support and freedom of action.
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By 1245 Innocent IV had awarded the Teutonic Knights the right to recruit crusaders at any time, thereby removing the need for him to grant permission for a specific campaign. The war against the pagans became, therefore, a perpetual crusade, a ceaseless struggle against the enemies of the faith. As the experience of the Holy Land showed, taking territory was one thing, but holding it was often a much harder matter. Yet the Teutonic Knights soon became such a powerful and wealthy institution they were capable of doing just this, and the order secured promises from the papacy and the German Empire that it could keep the conquered lands for itself. As we shall see, this was hugely significant because in later centuries it meant the Teutonics became a sovereign power in their own right in northeastern Europe.

With his crusades against Markward of Anweiler, the Cathars of southern France, the Muslims of Spain, as well as the ill-fated Fourth Crusade, we can see Innocent III’s near-obsession with fighting the enemies of the faithful. To this list one might add calls for a crusade against heretics in Milan in 1212–13 and hints that he considered a campaign against King John of England for his persistent disobedience to papal instructions.
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The popular enthusiasm for the Children’s Crusade was a manifestation of continued public support for holy war, and in April 1213 Innocent issued
Quia maior
,
one of the most powerful and forceful crusade appeals of all time.
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Innocent’s sense of passion blazed forth and he demanded action to recover the holy places, “because at this time there is a more compelling urgency than there has ever been before to help the Holy Land in her need.” He argued that God could have saved Jerusalem if he had wished, but because of man’s sins he had created a test of their faith and now offered the people who fought for him a chance of salvation. To the individuals who rejected this opportunity Innocent had a threat: “those who refuse to pay him the servant’s service that they owe him in a crisis of such great urgency will justly deserve to suffer a sentence of damnation on the Last Day of severe Judgement.” The pope castigated ungrateful Christians for rejecting Christ’s “ancient device” that would deliver salvation to them. He sought to arouse their feelings by describing the slavery and suffering of captive Christians and he delivered a scathing denunciation of “the false prophet Muhammad, who has seduced many men from the truth by worldly enticements and the pleasures of the flesh,” a typical attack on the alleged immorality of the Muslims. Innocent even cast the situation in an apocalyptical framework when he reminded his audience that, according to the Revelation of Saint John, the end of the beast, that is, Muhammad, would happen in 666 years, of which almost six hundred had passed.

Innocent sought to capitalize on the hunger for crusading apparent in the Children’s Crusade by taking the radical step of broadening his appeal beyond the usual warrior classes. He indicated that those who were unsuitable, or unable to go in person, but who paid for a soldier to go in their place would also receive full remission of their sins. He also offered partial remission of sins to those who provided money for other crusaders. Innocent’s vision of Christianity pulling together was restated in his commands that communities should organize processions, prayers, and almsgivings to show their support for the crusade and to gain God’s favor—in other words, events similar to the display in Rome in 1212. Innocent offered some practical ideas too. He urged abbots, bishops, and all the clergy, as well as cities, villages, and castles, to contribute to the crusade. He also asked the Italian mercantile cities to provide vessels for the campaign, which showed the importance of shipping as the method of transportation to the eastern Mediterranean. As noted above, he temporarily suspended the crusades in Spain and southern France on the basis that they were making good progress and the needs of the Holy Land were more urgent.

To bring the spiritual attention of the Catholic Church into proper focus, Innocent then organized the Fourth Lateran Council, an event advertised years in advance, to give himself a platform to address the largest gathering of churchmen and lay leaders in the medieval period.
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This most dazzling of public ceremonies took place over several days in November 1215 when more than four hundred bishops, archbishops, patriarchs and cardinals, numerous representatives of cathedral chapters and monasteries, as well as envoys from the rulers of France, Germany, Hungary, Jerusalem, Cyprus, and Aragon, plus Count Raymond VI of Toulouse (keen to defend himself against accusations of heresy), gathered to hear Innocent set out his vision for the faithful. This was an astounding display of papal power and undoubtedly the apogee of Innocent’s—and probably any medieval pope’s—pontificate. The new crusade loomed large on the agenda and Innocent added a boost to
Quia maior
by legislating that the clergy should give one-twentieth of their annual income to the crusade—a very unpopular move among the clerics, but a way to show lay people that the Church (with its obvious wealth) truly supported the expedition. The pope promised that he and the cardinals would make an even bigger donation to the campaign—one-tenth of their income; he also commanded the secular authorities to prevent Jews from charging interest on loans to crusaders.
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At the forefront of his message was a total obligation on mankind to obey the divine mandate of the crusade. Once again he castigated those who were unwilling to take the cross: the sense of threat in Innocent’s crusade appeals was something barely apparent in earlier papal bulls and showed his unwavering belief in the necessity and moral right of the cause. His final strictures demanded a four-year peace throughout the Christian world, an attempt to head off another common reason why crusades had struggled; those who broke this order were threatened with excommunication.

Innocent intended the crusaders to gather at Brindisi in southern Italy in June 1217 and he hoped to send God’s army on its way in person. In the event, he did not live to see his grand plan fulfilled. In April 1216 the pope addressed an enthusiastic crowd of potential crusaders at Orvieto and, in pouring rain, as the throng clamored to take the cross he insisted on fixing the insignia to everyone who had taken their vows. Soon after it was apparent that he had caught a chill, but the pope traveled on to Todi and then to Perugia, where his condition began to weaken considerably and he died on July 16, 1216. By some astonishing error, no one was left to guard his body
in the cathedral and the following morning the corpse of the most powerful man in Christendom lay almost naked, stripped of its precious clothes and starting to putrefy: “How brief and how vain is the treacherous glory of the world” as one contemporary observed.
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His pontificate had been a period of astounding energy, confidence, and challenges for the Church. Innocent truly believed that as the Vicar of Christ he was responsible for the souls of everyone, that all Christians should be subject to his authority, and that the crusade was a means by which he could maintain and extend this guardianship. As we have seen, he made some progress in Iberia and (at the time of his death) against the Cathars, but the Fourth Crusade was a disaster and the Fifth Crusade would struggle to gather momentum against a background of turmoil in the German Empire and the continued warfare between England and France. As the pope himself wrote in one of his treatises: “I have done as well as I could, but not as well as I wished.”
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“STUPOR MUNDI”
—THE WONDER OF THE WORLD

“T
he emperor, as the custodians [of the Dome of the Rock] recall, had a red skin, and was bald and short-sighted. Had he been a slave he would not have been worth 200 dirham. It was clear from what he said that his Christianity was simply a game to him.”
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This dismissive and derogatory description by a contemporary Damascene writer hardly brings to mind a crusading hero in the mold of Richard the Lionheart—yet it was Frederick II of Germany who recovered Jerusalem, rather than the great warrior-king. The fact that Frederick achieved this while an excommunicate and without striking a single blow signals what an intriguing and controversial personality he was. To his enemies in Christendom he was a heretic, a false crusader, a friend of Muslims and Mongols, a man hostile to the Church; for some, he even represented an apocalyptic figure; the fourth beast in the vision of the prophet Daniel. To his admirers, however, he became known as “stupor mundi” (the wonder of the world); a linguist, a patron of science, a philosopher, a mathematician, an astrologer, the author of the definitive treatise on falconry: an archetype for the renaissance man. He was also a victorious crusader and the most powerful ruler in medieval Christendom.
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Frederick spent the majority of his childhood and adolescence in the cultural and ethnic melting pot of southern Italy where Byzantine, Norman-Sicilian, and Islamic influences overlapped and blended to glorious and, usually, harmonious effect. The royal palaces were modeled on the cool chambers and highly decorated buildings of North Africa; Muslim and Christian officials worked alongside one another and some of the imperial
bodyguard were followers of the Prophet too.
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Frederick himself was fluent in Arabic—surely the greatest advantage of all in his dealings with the Muslim world simply because the barrier of language is such a potent cause of fear and mistrust. The emperor was a highly educated, literate man who also spoke the Sicilian dialect, as well as Latin, Greek, French, and German. He engaged in debates and correspondence about issues such as the location of Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell. He also enjoyed entertainments, particularly dancing, although his reported enthusiasm for the performances of female Muslim artistes atop large glass balls formed just one of several charges of immorality laid against him by the papacy. There seems little doubt that the women at his court lived in some form of harem, kept in seclusion and cared for by eunuchs. One must be careful not to paint too rosy a picture of Frederick’s involvement with Arab peoples because in 1224 he savagely attacked a group of Sicilian Muslims who had resisted royal rule. It would, however, be fair to say that he was entirely familiar with the culture of the Muslim Near East and he had a manifest appreciation of what was important to its people.