Holy Warriors (30 page)

“AN EXAMPLE OF AFFLICTION AND THE WORKS OF HELL”

O
n January 8, 1198, Lotario de Conti di Segni was elected Pope Innocent III. At thirty-seven years old he was one of the youngest men ever to hold the title; during his dynamic pontificate (1198–1216) crusading reached new levels of intensity and diversity, both in theory and in practice: the enemies of the Church—inside and outside Christendom—were identified, challenged, and, in some cases, defeated. Innocent was convinced that the faithful could overcome the loss of Jerusalem and the failure of the Third Crusade. He believed passionately that God had called the crusades and that it was the duty of all Christians, not just the warrior classes, to support the true cause. Yet for the crusades to succeed, people had to win divine favor and to do this required a society purified from sin. This ambitious agenda often brought him into conflict with secular powers and, at times, Innocent’s desire far overreached his means but he, of all popes, had a clear aim in mind: “to eliminate from the Holy Land the filth of the pagans.”
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Innocent’s pontificate saw crusading unleashed in new directions: against heretics in southern France (the Albigensian Crusade), against political opponents of the papacy in southern Italy, and, more by accident than design, against the Christian Byzantine Empire, an event that culminated in the horrific sack of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade. He also encouraged crusading in northeastern Europe and Spain, as well as the Holy Land. So great was contemporary enthusiasm for holy war that one of the most legendary episodes of the medieval age, the Children’s Crusade—
a mass migration of the young intent upon reclaiming Jerusalem—also took place during his pontificate.

Events in Rome during May 1212 reveal Innocent’s way of thinking and provide a truly startling demonstration of his understanding of a Christian society working through God to defeat His enemies—on this occasion in Spain.
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The struggle against the Iberian Muslims was at a critical point and the pope knew that King Alfonso VIII of Castile planned to fight a major battle in southern Spain the week after Pentecost on May 20. By way of securing divine favor for the Christians, Innocent decided to stage an enormous procession in Rome.

Records show that Innocent ordered the entire population of Rome—probably about fifty thousand people—to gather on May 16: men, women, and the male clergy were instructed to assemble at three churches. Mass was sung and the processions set out. Each party marched behind a particular cross; nuns led the secular women, the men were led by Hospitaller brothers, and the clergy headed by monks. No one was permitted to wear gold, jewelry, or silk; everyone was to walk barefoot, to pray and to repent of their own sins and the sins of man, and to ask for salvation. As thousands of voices rose and fell in prayer and lamentation it must have created an amazing ebb and flow of sound. The three processions snaked their way through the streets of Rome and channeled their spiritual energy toward the heavens; eventually they reached the open space in front of the Lateran Church where all fell silent. Meanwhile the pope, the bishops, and the cardinals emerged from the chapel of the Sancta Sanctorum bearing a relic of the True Cross and then joined the waiting crowd in the Lateran square. Innocent preached a sermon that almost certainly emphasized Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and explained how a crusader would follow Christ and serve and repay Him through his efforts on earth. The assembly then divided. The women went to the Church of Santa Croce where they heard Mass and a prayer for God’s intercession on behalf of his warriors in Spain, after which they dispersed. The men entered the Lateran Church, still in their subgroups of clergy and laymen, where Innocent presided over Mass; next
they went to Santa Croce where the intercessory prayer was said to end the proceedings. Once home, unless sick, everyone was to fast on bread and water. While we can presume that children, the aged, and the infirm did not participate, and that some individuals must have chosen not to join in, the likelihood was that the majority of Rome’s inhabitants were involved. For Innocent even to conceive of the idea of directing an entire city to pray for a conflict taking place hundreds of miles away (and one with no direct Roman interest in it) shows the spectacular breadth of his vision of Christian brotherhood. Praying for crusaders overseas was not an innovation, but this rigidly prescribed focus by one city was indeed a novelty. No realistic parallel can be drawn in the western world today; maybe a major state funeral will interest large parts of a capital’s population or perhaps protests against a particular event, such as kidnappings in South America, have a similar effect, but the idea of trying to compel an entire city to gather for a higher cause is outside of our experience.

The Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa did not take place until July 1212, but—crucially for Innocent’s way of thinking—the Christians prevailed. The triumphant pope read Alfonso’s letter to the people of Rome and the victory, self-evidently, was proof that the procession had influenced the result. Thus, if people’s spirituality was directed correctly—and that meant the prayers of the entire community—then God would favor them.

At the start of Innocent’s pontificate, the chances of a successful campaign appeared less propitious. A crusade to the Holy Land directed by Henry VI of Germany had promised much but after his advance forces recaptured Beirut and Sidon, the emperor’s death in 1197 (before he set out in person) brought the enterprise to a close.
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The Holy Land remained in Muslim hands, therefore. In Iberia, Christian forces had been smashed at the Battle of Alarcos (1195) and the six rival rulers of the kingdoms of Spain continued their long-running feuds. Around the same time, a smaller, but no less significant, struggle took place in southern Italy, and its proximity to the papal lands spurred Innocent into a rapid—and, in the long term, highly significant—extension of the concept of crusading.
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On the death of Henry VI, a dispute arose over possession of his southern
Italian and Sicilian lands. Henry’s marshal, Markward of Anweiler, wished to be regent for the child heir, Frederick (later Emperor Frederick II), and possibly planned to rule in his own right. Markward allied with Philip of Swabia, another claimant to the German throne, and together they threatened to squeeze the papal lands in central Italy into oblivion. Markward’s brutal military campaigns made strong progress and the pope became so desperate that he contemplated unleashing the ultimate weapon in his spiritual armory: the crusade. In March 1199 Innocent claimed, rather tendentiously, that Markward impeded the planning of the new campaign to the Holy Land and he threatened holy war against the German.

By the autumn of 1199 Markward—perhaps foolishly—had made an alliance with Muslim groups in Sicily, and in November the pope responded to this by offering people who fought his German enemy the same indulgence as those who went to the Holy Land. He wrote: “He [Markward] has called on their [Saracens] help against the Christians . . . and so as to stimulate their spirits more keenly . . . he has spattered their jaws with Christian blood and exposed Christian women to the violence of their desire. . . . Who would not rise up against him who rises against all and joins the enemies of the Cross so that he might empty the faith of the Cross and, having become a worse infidel than the Infidels, struggles to conquer the faithful?”
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Markward’s treaty with the Muslims gave Innocent an obvious reason to initiate a crusade; primarily, however, it was the danger posed to papal lands that pushed him to act. In doing so, Innocent gave life to the idea that political opponents of the Church were appropriate targets for a holy war, a concept that—ironically—in future would find its greatest expression in the conflict with Innocent’s young ward, Frederick. There is little evidence that the localized crusade against Markward ever really blossomed. The pope used the French nobleman Walter of Brienne, from a proud crusading dynasty in the county of Champagne, to try to protect his interests. Walter duly raised an army and between 1201 and 1203 he managed to hold off the German until the latter’s death as a result of surgery for kidney stones. The contemporary
Gesta Innocenti
reported that at one battle Walter “received the blessing and indulgence from the papal legate . . . [and that] a shining golden cross was seen carried miraculously before the count”.
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The indulgence hints at a crusading ethos, while the reference to a golden cross certainly indicates a belief in divine favor. Walter himself succumbed to wounds suffered in a battle in 1205 but his family’s service would not go unnoticed.
Four years later, the French crown and the nobility of Jerusalem, with Innocent’s blessing, chose his younger brother, John of Brienne, to marry the heiress to Jerusalem and to take the crown of the holy city.

While these events were of considerable concern to Pope Innocent, they were of secondary importance compared to his efforts to regain the Holy Land. The limited progress of the Third Crusade and the German Crusade of 1196–97 meant it would require another major expedition to take back Jerusalem.
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Within months of his accession as pope, Innocent issued a new crusade appeal,
Post miserabile
. Its compelling language exhorted the faithful to act and it railed against the destructive infighting that so crippled the response of the rulers of England, France, and Germany:

To shame his audience into action Innocent even pretended to quote a Muslim who mocked the Christians’ failures. The pope also criticized the arrogance of earlier crusaders (presumably a reference to the dissent between Richard and Philip during the Third Crusade) and urged new recruits to set out in the correct frame of mind, unclouded by vanity and greed.

Innocent dispatched preachers to France, England, Hungary, and Sicily, although he ignored Spain, where the reconquest continued, and Germany
because it was torn apart by civil war. The death of Richard the Lionheart in April 1199 and tensions over Philip’s marital status prevented two obvious candidates from taking the cross, but in November 1199 the elite knighthood of northern France assembled for a tournament at Écry-sur-Aisne, just north of the city of Rheims, in the county of Champagne. There is a paradox here because during the twelfth century the Church consistently censured tournaments as events that promoted the sins of pride, envy, and murder. In contrast, the contemporary nobility were—with no exaggeration—addicted to the thrill and opportunity of such occasions. They were the perfect platform on which to gain status and, more pertinently, to train for war. The massed charges by teams of up to two hundred knights, in an arena that ranged across several miles, was the closest possible replica of real warfare. The idea of a tournament was to capture and ransom opponents, rather than to kill them, but deaths were not uncommon. After such competitions the nobles gathered to feast, dance, and listen to stories and songs—particularly epics that told of the heroes of the First Crusade such as the
Chanson d’Antioche
. This was, Church disapproval aside, the ideal environment in which to nurture crusading enthusiasm and it is no coincidence that the two comital houses with the greatest crusading traditions, the counts of Flanders and Champagne, were ardent tournament-goers.
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Count Thibaut of Champagne and Count Louis of Blois both had splendid crusading lineages. Thibaut’s father had ruled Jerusalem from 1192 until 1197 when his dwarfish entertainer toppled from a balcony and pulled him to his death. At twenty-eight years old Louis was already a veteran of the Third Crusade, a campaign that had seen his father’s death at the siege of Acre. Once these men took the cross several other important nobles followed suit, including Geoffrey of Villehardouin, a senior figure on the expedition and the author of a memoir of his experiences.
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(Rather than the Latin texts composed by clerical writers that so dominated accounts of crusading during the twelfth century, the growth of vernacular literacy among laymen meant that accounts of the sort Villehardouin wrote became more common.) Simon de Montfort, a noble from the Île-de-France, was another to join the crusade at Écry, and within a couple of months Count Baldwin of Flanders also committed himself to the expedition. Thus it was the nobility of northern France who came to form the nucleus of the Fourth Crusade.
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