Pope Innocent III and the Crusades Revisited

Religion as an Agent of Change Crusades – Reformation – Pietism Edited by Per Ingesman LEIDEN | BOSTON For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Contents Preface vii List of Contributors ix 1 Introduction 1 Per Ingesman 2 The Long March of Religious History: Where have We Travelled since the Sixties, and Why? 31 Hugh McLeod Part 1 The Crusades 3 Pope Innocent iii and the Crusades Revisited 55 Christoph T. Maier 4 Caffaro of Genoa and the Motives of Early Crusaders 75 Jonathan Phillips 5 Opening up the World and the Minds: The Crusades as an Engine of Change in Missionary Conceptions 105 Felicitas Schmieder Part 2 The Reformation 6 What is Lutheran Confessional Culture? 127 Thomas Kaufmann 7 The Creation of a Calvinist Identity in the Reformation Period Ole Peter Grell 149 8 Changing Identities in the English Reformation 166 Peter Marshall For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV vi contents Part 3 Pietism 9 Piety or Pietism? A Comparison of Early Modern Danish and Dutch Examples of Interconfessional Religiosity 189 Fred van Lieburg 10 The Impact of Pietism on Culture and Society in Germany 211 Martin H. Jung 11 Crusading, Reformation and Pietism in Nineteenth-Century North Atlantic Evangelicalism 231 John Wolffe 12 Religion as an Agent of Change – Concluding Remarks 257 Arne Bugge Amundsen Index 271 For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV chapter 3 Pope Innocent iii and the Crusades Revisited Christoph T. Maier Pope Innocent iii is rightly considered one of the most influential individuals for the development of the medieval crusade movement. Historians, including myself, have gone to print extolling Innocent’s achievements in reshaping and redefining the crusade around the year 1200, after the first one hundred years of its varied and turbulent history.1 One English historian even claims that during the twelfth century people were not actually sure what they were doing when going on what was later, and certainly from Innocent iii’s pontificate onwards, called a crusade.2 Most historians do not go this far, but they recognise Innocent iii’s crucial role in giving the crusade movement its distinctive character. As concerns theology, spirituality, canon law regulations, propaganda and finance, Innocent imposed onto the crusade movement a rigid institutional grid that was aimed at making crusading more efficient and facilitating papal leadership and control. This went hand in hand with a systematic expansion of the crusade movement to include fighting non-Christians not only in the Mediterranean but also along the Baltic Sea, heretics in France and political enemies of the papacy in Italy. Whichever way you look at it, Pope Innocent iii was one of the most forceful agents of change within the medieval crusade movement.3 But why come back to Innocent iii and why in this context? The question of change is the central focus of all history, but what do we actually mean by historical change? Generally speaking history changes in two principal ways. Firstly, change is one of the central elements of the historical process which individuals and communities are subject to and which we as historians describe and analyse. Secondly, historical change is mediated by changes within memorial culture. History can only be perceived and rendered meaningful by the workings of memory both past and present. Historical memory is what determines the nature of our sources, present memory is what we ourselves engage in when writing or talking about history. Thus history can only 1 Maier 1999a. 2 Tyerman 1995 (reprinted in Tyerman 1998). 3 The most comprehensive work on Innocent iii and the crusades is still Roscher 1969. For references to more recent studies, see Maier 1999a; Moore 2003; Sommerlechner, ed. 2003; Smith 2004. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi �0.��63/9789004303737_004 For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 56 Maier change if the sources record change and if historians detect and describe change. Historical change in fact is a complex business since it happens somewhere in between the mechanisms underlying the historical process and the process of committing history to memory. The following discussion of the contribution of Pope Innocent iii to the development of the concept and practice of crusading is meant to illustrate this. The paper takes its point of departure in the debate among crusade historians about what constituted a crusade in the Middle Ages. By means of a case study of an episode told by Orderic Vitalis about one early twelfth-century crusader, the paper then tries to demonstrate how people in the Middle Ages themselves perceived what it meant to be a crusader. The central section of the paper consists of an analysis of Innocent iii’s letters, claiming that by about 1200 the papal curia had developed a relatively precise terminology for the ‘crusader’ (crucesignatus) based on the crusader’s vow and its inherent privileges and obligations as defined by canon law, whereas there was no equivalent terminology for the ‘crusade’ as a particular type of war campaign. The paper concludes that this should make modern crusade historians aware that changing their own analytical tools might well contribute towards better understanding the complicated historical phenomenon that are the crusades. Crusades, Crusaders and Crusade Historians Both Innocent iii and the crusades are deemed powerful agents of historical change. Innocent iii’s role in altering the world he lived in did not stop with the crusade movement. A sharp academic, a skilful administrator and a shrewd politician, Innocent iii in fact influenced historical processes far beyond the realm of the crusades. As for the crusades themselves, they belong to a movement which spanned centuries and affected the lives of a great number of people in Western Europe and beyond. There is, however, a controversy about how and to what extent the crusade movement changed around the year 1200. This controversy has as much to do with questions arising from the intricacies of the historical process relating to the crusades as with the ways in which historians have interpreted them. For the past decades the historiography of crusading has been overshadowed by the question of how to define a crusade. For a long time the major point of dispute has been whether crusades were in essence military expeditions to the Holy Land for the liberation of Jerusalem or whether crusades were also fought against other non-Christian groups on the European periphery, on the Iberian Peninsula, in Eastern Europe and the Baltic, and against heretics and enemies For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 57 of the papacy within Christendom. The other key issue concerns the difference between crusades and other forms of religious warfare in the Middle Ages.4 A few years ago Giles Constable divided crusade historians into four different groups according to their stance with regard to these two principal issues.5 Traditionalists, according to Constable, are those who claim that crusades were uniquely aimed at recovering the Holy Land from the Muslims. For them the First Crusade of 1095–99 started a tradition of military expeditions, which embodied the true goal and spirit of crusading, namely the recovery of Jerusalem and the establishment of Christian rule in the Holy Land. Traditionalists consider later adaptations of crusading to various other conflicts between Christians and non-Christians or within Christendom as a corruption of the original ideal of the crusade. Pluralists take the view that crusading during the twelfth century developed into a flexible military institution, which the popes employed against a variety of enemies of the Church within and outside Christendom. Pluralists see different strands of crusading emerging soon after the First Crusade, such as the Spanish crusades against the Muslims on the Iberian Peninsula, the crusades against heretics in Europe, the Baltic crusades and the political crusades against enemies of the papacy in Italy and elsewhere. Despite their differences, traditionalist and pluralists share the view that the crusade was a clearly defined institution based on the popes’ authority and leadership and anchored in, as well as regulated by, canon law. This sets them apart from the generalists who do not insist on an institutional definition of the crusade but view crusading as belonging to a tradition of religiously motivated wars, which were allegedly fought at God’s command and with his authority. Such wars, including the crusade, were, so the generalists argue, primarily predicated on the impulse of faith and its underlying theology rather than political authority and legal foundation. By the same token the popularists or internalists employ a psychological approach viewing the crusades first and foremost as a result of widespread religious enthusiasm or a particular type of medieval religious revivalism. Although it is always problematic to pigeon-hole individuals into rigid categories, it is probably safe to say that the majority of academically engaged crusade historians nowadays subscribe to a broadly pluralist position, recognising that crusading was rooted in institutional foundations and that crusades were also fought outside the Holy Land. This does not mean, however, that the 4 These debates have recently been summarized and discussed in Tyerman 2011. 5 Constable 2001. An extended version of this essay was subsequently published in Constable 2008, pp. 3–43. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 58 Maier question of how to define a crusade has been solved. Most historians agree that a crusade was characterised by a number of institutional elements, which afforded crusade status to a specific military campaign: official authorization by the pope, the recruitment and participation of crucesignati and crucesignatae (i.e. crusaders), the belief that the campaign was fought for the good of the Catholic Church and the conviction that those who participated did so in return for a spiritual reward in the form of an indulgence. The fundamental problem about defining a crusade, however, arises from the fact that there was no contemporary term for what we now call a crusade. Even though the equivalent of the term crusade appeared in both vernacular languages and Latin from the thirteenth century onwards, it was never widely used in the Middle Ages and was only rarely employed in a categorising sense for designating a type of war. This has not escaped historians, but the conclusions that they have drawn from this vary greatly.6 Few have reacted as strongly as Christopher Tyerman, who has gone so far as to claim that contemporaries had no clear concept of crusading up until the thirteenth century. Once in place, according to Tyerman, the concept of the crusade developed as an intellectual construct representing a reality, which ultimately lacked fundamental institutional coherence.7 Tyerman’s ideas of the crusade having been ‘invented’ and the concept of crusade having then been gradually developed to suit changing intellectual discourses and political concerns throughout the centuries of crusading and writing about the crusade carry a certain post-modernist gloss which automatically attracts attention. But his provocative views have not afforded him much sympathy or support from other crusade historians. This is mainly due to the fact that Tyerman’s basic argument is hardly conclusive. In his view, a clear difference between crusade and (armed) pilgrimage was not made until the 1180s in the context of what is traditionally called the Third Crusade.8 Only from then onwards did the term crucesignatus/a appear regularly in chronicles, papal and royal documents for describing someone who had formally taken a vow obliging him or her to wear the cross and participate in a military campaign designated by the papacy.9 Whilst this is borne out by the evidence, the suggestion of a clear and significant break towards the end of the twelfth century, as postulated by Tyerman and Markowski, is not convincing. In fact, the term cruce signatus, 6 Markowski 1984; Trotter 1988, pp. 31–70; Tyerman 1995; Cosgrove 2010; Weber-Vivat 2011; Weber 2013. 7 Tyerman 1998. 8 Tyerman 1995, pp. 574–57. 9 Markowski 1984, pp. 162–64. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 59 written in two words, was already used in the context of the First Crusade by Pope Urban ii himself.10 In my view it is not important whether crucesignatus/cruce signatus was written in one or two words in the twelfth century, given that it is an age in which we cannot expect consistent spelling or spelling rules. What is significant is what the word represented, namely the fact that people took the cross with a clear idea in mind. As Markowski has shown, terminology centred on signing or taking the cross to describe those who took the vow to crusade was widespread throughout the twelfth century.11 In fact, as early as 1095 the core institutional elements of crusading were in place: the grant of a crusading indulgence and the privileges and obligations which defined the status of a crucesignatus/a.12 With regard to the individual participant, there existed a clear idea of what a crucesignatus/a, i.e. a crusader, was. Throughout the twelfth century, whenever the pope authorised the preaching of the cross for a specific military venture, people became crucesignati/ae by publicly taking a vow and wearing a cross of cloth on their garments as a sign of that vow. Even if the term crusesignatus/a was not widely used prior to the end of the twelfth century, the symbolism and ritual of becoming a crusader was. The symbolism of the cross reflected the content and meaning of the vow. It stood for the close relationship between the crusader and God and represented the obligation to fight for the Christian community, i.e. the Church, and the privilege of joining in the salvific powers of Christ’s act of redemption. Even if the ritual of taking the cross and the crusading indulgence were still evolving, there is no evidence that people in the twelfth century did not know what they were doing when they took the cross. The Example of Helias of La Flèche A good example of this is the case of Helias of La Flèche, count of Maine between 1092 and 1110, who was amongst the first generation of crusaders.13 According to the chronicler Orderic Vitalis, Helias claimed to have taken the cross from Pope Urban ii himself.14 Most probably, this happened when Urban 10 11 12 13 14 Markowski 1984, p. 158. Markowski 1984, pp. 158–160. Maier 2001. Riley-Smith 1997, p. 210. Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980, vol. v, pp. 228–229: […] consilio papae crucem Domini pro seruitio eius accepi, et iter in Ierusalem cum multis nobilibus peregrinis Domino Deo deuoui. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 60 Maier visited Le Mans between 16 and 18 February 1096 during the pope’s tour of Southern and Western France, which followed his crusading appeal at Clermont the previous November.15 Helias of La Flèche, a middling nobleman whose power base centred around the lands between Brittany and the Isle-de-France, belonged to the group of people who were a primary focus of Urban ii’s recruitment drive for the planned expedition to Jerusalem. One of Pope Urban’s key stratagems consisted in trying to harness the military prowess of the nobility by redirecting their destructive energies away from the protracted infighting at home to the defence of the Christian religion in the East.16 Count Helias was a prime candidate for this. Politically ambitious, he was enmeshed in a number of armed conflicts with the king of England, the duke of Normandy and other members of the nobility of Western France while trying to establish, defend and expand his position as count of Maine throughout the 1090s.17 Helias of La Flèche also came from a section of society that was likely to respond enthusiastically to Pope Urban ii’s crusading appeal. Although we know altogether little of Helias’s outlook on life, Orderic Vitalis in Book x of his Ecclesiastical History described him as ‘a man distinguished for his great respect for religious observance, who governed his people for their good in the fear of God’.18 Even though Orderic was clearly prejudiced in favour of Helias when describing the conflicts with his political enemies, the chronicler’s general assessment of his character and actions does not contradict other sources.19 Helias’s piety may have been marred by his violent life-style, but this was not uncommon for the leading nobility of his age. There is every likelihood that Helias counted among those early crusaders whose motivation for taking the cross was engendered by a close affinity with religious institutions and a genuine concern for pious issues. As Marcus Bull so convincingly demonstrated in the case of southwestern France, those traits often went hand in hand with crusading.20 But Helias of La Flèche did not go to Jerusalem. According to Orderic Vitalis he refused to leave his lands and go to the East because he felt his position as count of Maine threatened by his rival Robert of Bellême and indirectly also by King William of England who supported Robert.21 This was not unusual behaviour; 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Latouche 1910, p. 45; Becker 1988, vol. ii, p. 445. Fulcher of Chartres 1913, pp. 136–137; Baldric of Bourgeuil, pp. 14–15; Robert of Reims, p. 728. Latouche 1910, pp. 45–53; Barlow 1983, pp. 270, 367–368, 381. Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980, vol. v, p. 229: […] uir multis erga Dei cultum honestitatibus uiguit, populique regimen in timore Dei salubriter seruauit. Barlow 1983, p. 381. Bull 1993. Barlow 1983, pp. 367–368. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 61 at times even the ecclesiastical authorities actively discouraged those who had taken the cross from going on crusade in order to preserve the integrity of their lands.22 According to Orderic, Helias’s decision not to go to the East was not a stance against crusading, in fact quite the opposite. In a long, almost certainly imaginary speech, Orderic has Count Helias justify his refusal to go to Jerusalem in front of King William: My desire was to fight against the pagans in the name of the Lord, but now it appears I have a battle nearer home against the enemies of Christ. Every man who opposes truth and justice proves himself an enemy of God, who is truth itself and the sun of justice. He has seen fit to entrust to me the stewardship of Maine, which I should not weakly relinquish for any light cause, for fear of leaving God’s people at the mercy of predators, like shepherdless sheep among wolves. Hear, all you nobles who are present, the plan that I have been inspired by God to make. I will not abandon the cross of our Saviour, which I have taken as a pilgrim, but will have it engraved on my shield and helmet and all my arms; on my saddle and bridle also I will stamp the sign of the holy cross. Fortified by this symbol I will move against the enemies of peace and right, and defend Christian lands in battle. So my horse and my arms will be clearly marked with a holy sign, and all the foes who attack me will fight against a soldier of Christ. I put my trust in him who rules the world, believing that he knows the secrets of my heart, and wait for a better time when through his mercy I may fulfil my vow.23 22 23 See, for example, the case of Geoffrey of Anjou in 1131 described in von Moos 1965, pp. 144–146. Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980, vol. v, pp. 230–231: Contra ethnicos in nomine Domini dimicare uolebam, sed ecce nunc uiciniorem contra inimicos Christi reperio pugnam. Omnis enim qui ueritati resistit iusticiaeque inimicus comprobatur Dei qui uera ueritas est et sol iusticiae. Ipsi michi Cenomannorum preposituram dignatus est commendare, quam aliqua usus leuitate non debeo insipienter relinquere ne populus Dei predonis tradatur sicut oues lupis absque pastore. Consilium uero quod celitus inspirata concepi mente universi optimates qui astatis palam audite. Crucem Saluatoris nostri qua more peregrini signatus sum non relinquam, sed in clipeo meo galeaque et in omnibus armis meis eandem faciam, et in sella frenoque meo sacrae crucis signum infigam. Tali karactere munitus in hostes pacis et rectitudinis procedam et Christianorum regiones militando defendam. Equus itaque meus et arma mea notamine sancto signabuntur, et omnes adversarii qui contra me insurrexerint in militem Christi praeliabuntur. Confido in illo qui regit mundum, quod ipse nouit cordis mei secretum, et per eius clementiam opperiar tempus opportunum, quo possim optatum peragere uotum. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 62 Maier Taken at face value, Helias’s speech appears to be the single-minded statement of an ardent crusader who, frustrated by circumstances, decided that his journey to Jerusalem must wait while he leads his own, more urgent war as a crusader at home. His words and arguments are carefully chosen to convey the seriousness of his undertaking and the purity of his motivation. Helias makes it clear that his action against the enemies of Christ in his own lands was predicated on his position as count. Having, as he insists, been invested with the office by God himself and thus being God’s vassal, Helias automatically turns his own enemies into enemies of Christ, against whom crusading is justified. At the same time, Helias is concerned about portraying his relationship with God as one of duty and obedience. Crusading against his own enemies at home does not mean that he is rejecting the obligations towards God inherent in his original crusading vow: once his homelands are safe, he will go to the East. By the same token, Helias vows to honour his status as a soldier of Christ, i.e. a crusader, by publicly displaying the cross of Christ, the crusader’s sign representing his devotion to the cause of God and the penitential and salvific character of his undertaking. Since the speech was most certainly made up by Orderic Vitalis, we do not know whether the thoughts and sentiments which it conveys were anywhere close to Helias’s own or not. This part of the Ecclesiastical History was written in the mid-1130s when Orderic cast his own order and interpretations on events of almost forty years earlier.24 We do not know whether or not Helias of La Flèche really turned himself into a crusader against his Christian enemies only months after taking the cross to fight the Muslims in the East. But Orderic obviously thought that the logic of Helias’s decision as told in this story made sense and could be considered as an acceptable, if possibly extreme, application of the idea of crusading. Helias of La Flèche’s story in Orderic’s Ecclesiastical History makes it clear that very early on, and certainly by the time Book x was written, the idea of crusading could be perceived as a flexible concept that was not tied to any particular political or geographic context. At the centre of the idea of crusading lay the concept of the Christian holy warrior. A crusader was thought of as a ‘soldier of God/Christ’ (miles Dei/Christi) who stood in a personal relationship with God. He took it upon himself to fight against ‘God’s enemies’ (inimici Dei) and was rewarded by God with a full remission of sins. This close personal relationship between crusader and God was founded on a combination of the idea of war instigated by God as found in the Old Testament and the power of 24 For the date of Book x, see Chibnall’s comments in: Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980, vol. v, pp. xi–xiii. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 63 Christ’s act of redemption embodied in the New Testament. In essence, this basic concept of crusading was probably in place when Pope Urban ii for the first time called upon people to take the cross at Clermont in November 1095. Based on the pope’s role as God’s representative on earth, the papacy gave the concept of the Christian holy warrior its focus. To become a crusader meant to take upon oneself the obligation to fight for the honour and defence of the Christian religion against an enemy of Christ as defined by the pope; this obligation took the form of a vow which bound the crusader to the authority of the Church in terms of canon law; in return the crusader was awarded privileges guaranteed by the Church. The promise of the remission of sins formally turned the crusade into a penitential exercise. In order to confirm their identity and legal status, crusaders wore the sign of the cross, which was a symbolic representation of their military service for God as well as the redemptive powers of Christ of which they were privileged recipients.25 In Helias’s speech the idea of crusading was transferred to a new context while painstakingly preserving the ideological skeleton which defined the act and purpose of crusading: his campaign originated in a personal relationship with God, it was directed against enemies of Christ, and his status and intention as a crusader were represented by the symbolism of the cross. Of course, Helias’s expedition lacked the authorization and approval of the Church authorities and, as a consequence, there is quite rightly no talk of any formalised spiritual privileges, which could only be granted by the pope. But Helias’s state of mind and his intentions are portrayed as those of a ‘real’ crusader. Orderic Vitalis obviously projected into it the idea of crusading against Christians after having witnessed three decades of practical crusading and having benefited from the theological refinement of the crusading idea in the early twelfth century. It is easy to condemn Helias’s speech to the realm of pure fiction. But there still remains the question of how believable Orderic’s portrayal of Helias would have been to his contemporaries. Could the count of Maine realistically have turned himself from a crusader against the Muslims of the East into a crusader against his fellow Christians? There are other indications that the basic idea of crusading was understood by the early participants when some of them extended their mission as God’s warriors beyond the pope’s target and ransacked Jewish communities in France and Germany along the way to the Holy Land.26 On the one hand the Jews were attacked for booty helping poor crusaders finance their expedition. On the 25 26 For Pope Urban ii’s definition of crusading, see Riley-Smith 1986. For the argument that a fully-fledged concept of crusading was already in place by 1095, see Maier 2001. Chazan 1987; Riley-Smith 1984. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 64 Maier other hand these hostile acts against a non-Christian section of the population were a means of asserting these crusaders’ identity as soldiers of God by declaring the Jews their most immediate enemies of Christ and thus the first victims of their crusade. Given the widespread belief that contemporary Jews shared the guilt and responsibility for the role the Jewish people had played in the death of the historical Christ, the Jews were a ready target for the crusaders’ feelings of superiority and revenge. Such spontaneous attacks against Jews happened not only on the First Crusade, but also throughout the history of crusading.27 The attacks against Jews by the first crusaders were not part of Pope Urban’s plan and were condemned by the Church authorities. Those crusaders who took part in the atrocities against the Jews were thus autonomously extending their mission as soldiers of God beyond the pope’s original target. In this their actions were not dissimilar to Helias of La Flèche’s decision to crusade against his political enemies at home as reported by Orderic Vitalis. Despite the fact that they had vowed to join the expedition for the recovery of the Holy Land from the Muslims, they clearly did not consider their role necessarily to be limited to the declared context of the military enterprise they had signed up for even if this technically violated the pope’s authority. In essence, their vocation was of a universal nature, as they thought of themselves as soldiers of God, who had promised to fight God’s or Christ’s enemies and were in return rewarded by God’s promise of the forgiveness of their sins. Because the concept of the Christian holy warrior was ultimately a universal one, it was also open to individual interpretation. If people on their way to the Holy Land in 1096 were engaged in interpreting their role as crusaders in an autonomous fashion, could not Helias of La Flèche have done the same thing around the same time when he decided to campaign against the enemies of Christ at home before setting out to the Holy Land? There certainly was a difference between the two situations. In the case of the attacks against the Jewish communities during the First Crusade, the crusaders in question chose to turn against an established enemy of the faith. Hostility against Jews in Europe had been growing throughout the eleventh century and the Jewish communities of the 1090s were, therefore, among the obvious possible targets of Christian holy warriors who saw themselves as fighting for their God and the good of their religion.28 Helias of La Flèche’s interpretation of his crusading role was not as straightforward. The people against whom Helias fought as a crusader were Christians. They were not heretics or schismatics, but Catholic adherents of the Roman Church; they were not even under 27 28 Hiestand 1999; Mentgen 1999; Maier 1999b. Callaghan 1995; Moore 2007, pp. 26–42; Chazan 1987, pp. 27–37; Chazan 1997, pp. 6–18. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 65 excommunication or other forms of ecclesiastical censure. Justifying fighting them as a crusader was difficult. The Helias of Orderic’s chronicle took a short cut by declaring himself God’s vassal by virtue of being a count, thus postulating that anyone who fought against him became an enemy of God. As an argument this was not very convincing because Helias’s definition would have made it possible to turn a great number of political enemies of Christian rulers anywhere into legitimate targets of crusading action. The example of Helias of La Flèche shows us that the concept of being a crusader was very well understood in the early twelfth century. His idea of becoming a crusader in his own land might violate the papal authority as far as the target of his campaign was concerned. But he basically still submits to the chief structural idea of what crusading was all about: becoming a warrior of God by taking a vow to fight God’s enemies and publicly displaying this status by wearing the cross which represented the legal status and spiritual privileges inherent in the vow. Helias’s case is a perfect example illustrating that being a crusader was no grey zone in the twelfth century, as Christopher Tyerman claims. Even if there were people in the twelfth century who went on military campaigns to the Holy Land without having taken the cross, this does not mean that there was uncertainty about what crusading was all about. It simply goes to show that, for whatever reason, some people going on campaign to the Holy Land decided to take the vow and become crucesignati/ae with all the obligations and privileges attached whereas others did not. Innocent iii, Crusades and Crusaders And this takes us back to Pope Innocent iii and the problem of defining the crusade. It is true that it was ultimately Innocent who was responsible for providing a reliable definition of the duties and privileges of a crusader. These were set down in the papal letters proclaiming the Fifth Crusade Quia maior published in 1213 and Ad liberandam included in the constitutions of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.29 Ad liberandam in particular became the legal reference for generations of crusade preachers who expounded and explained the status of a crusader for propaganda purposes.30 In it the legal status of a crusader who had taken the crusading vow was defined in great detail. Whatever 29 30 For Quia maior, see Tangl 1929, pp. 88–97. For Ad liberandam, see Wohlgemuth, ed. 2000, pp. 267–271. Maier 1994, pp. 102–103, 118, 158; Brundage 1969, pp. 81–83. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 66 Maier uncertainties crusaders might have had about their particular role and identity in the twelfth century were now done away with. This is also borne out by the terminology Innocent iii used in the official papal documents. In a recent article Walter Reid Cosgrove examined the terms used in the pope’s letters to describe the crusade and crusading.31 While the detailed results of his examination are very valuable, I do not agree with the conclusions he has drawn from them.32 Of course it is correct to say that there was no uniform terminology for referring to the crusaders and the military campaigns they fought on the pope’s behalf. Cosgrove is also correct in saying that statistical word counts are not sufficient for attempting to answer the question of how a crusade was defined.33 But rather than discounting the evidence of Innocent iii’s letters by stating that the pope’s loose usage of crusading terminology does not fulfil our own rigid expectations for a terminological definition of the institution of crusade, we should ask what Innocent iii did or did not define in his own medieval perspective of the early thirteenth century. The evidence collected by Cosgrove shows a clear tendency towards using phrases connected with the cross when writing about crusaders and their campaigns: crucesignatus, cruce signare, crucem assumere/ accipere/ recipere/ suscipere, signum crucis affigere, excercitus signatorum.34 These expressions must be considered together rather than divided into separate groups, as Cosgrove does, because all these expressions describe crusaders or groups of crusaders with reference to the symbolism and ritual of taking the crusade vow. Even if Innocent iii also used other words and phrases for referring to a crusader, the expressions connected with the signing of the cross took centre stage because it was in fact the vow which defined a crusader: a crucesignatus/a was someone who formally took the vow of the cross to fight in a military campaign designated by papal decree, was bound by its obligations and enjoyed its privileges set down in canon law. The evidence of Innocent’s letters thus confirms and consolidates a tradition that existed from the very beginning of the crusading movement. A crucesignatus was what we nowadays call a ‘crusader’. But even if Innocent iii’s letters make it clear that there was a distinct idea of the ‘crusader’ based on the term crucesignare/cruce signare, there was no equivalent for referring to what we nowadays call a ‘crusade’, i.e. the military campaign in which crusaders fought. As in other twelfth century writings, there are a number of ways of referring to what we now call a crusade. Most of 31 32 33 34 Cosgrove 2010. Cosgrove 2010, pp. 106–107. Cosgrove 2010, p. 102. See the examples quoted in Cosgrove 2010, pp. 99–106. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 67 them were derived from the concept of fighting God’s or Christ’s war, such as for example bellum Domini. This reflected the ideology underlying these military campaigns; they were called exercitus Christianorum, exercitus Domini, milites Christi etc., suggesting a sacred mission. The idea of forming an army under divine leadership of course also accorded with the concept of crucesignati fulfilling their votive obligation vis-à-vis God and his Church. Thus a crusading army was often simply referred to as an exercitus signatorum. Alternatively it could be addressed as peregrinatio in parallel with the crusader being called a peregrinus (crucis).35 Both these terms were also used throughout the twelfth century. They expressed the fact that crusaders belonged to the many groups of people travelling with a religious purpose and, just as ordinary pilgrims, were given a special status, both socially and legally, through the protection of the Church. Fact is that, although there was a word for crusader, crucesignatus/a, there was no equivalent term for the crusade, certainly not in the papal documents prior to the fourteenth century. There were isolated instances of the use of words in vernacular French and Occitan such as croiserie, which might pass as medieval equivalents for the modern term ‘crusade’. But croiserie crops up very rarely and was often not used in the sense of our modern ‘crusade’. Rather, most words like croiserie referred to the act of bestowing or preaching the cross and are thus conceptually linked to croisé(e), the vernacular version of crucesignatus/a.36 In other words there was no equivalent for the modern concept of ‘crusade’ at the time of Innocent iii. In the later Middle Ages during the fourteenth and fifteenth century the Latin word cruciata, from which our modern ‘crusade’ is derived, did appear. But even then the word was used infrequently and without clear-cut meaning. Like the earlier vernacular versions of the words, cruciata primarily seems to have been closely linked to the idea of the dispensing of crusading indulgences.37 The problem might well be that we are looking for something for which the contemporaries in the Middle Ages had no need. If there had been a specific reason or a practical purpose to find a word for what we today call a crusade, people would presumably have come up with one. It seems that people did not conceptualise war campaigns in such a way as to single out crusades as distinct types of warfare that merited a special label. There is no indication that in the eyes of the contemporaries Urban ii at Clermont in 1095 devised a new type of war. There was after all nothing new in popes calling for people to rally for military 35 36 37 See ibid. Trotter 1988, pp. 58–61. Weber-Vivat 2010, especially pp. 19–20; now also Weber 2013, especially pp. 509–517. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 68 Maier action in the name of religion and the Church at the end of the eleventh century.38 What was different, if anything, was perhaps the dimension of the planned expedition to liberate Jerusalem in 1095. What was new was the fact that people who joined the expedition to Jerusalem had taken the cross and made vows as armed pilgrims. When in the second half of the thirteenth century, Humbert of Romans quoted the example of Urban ii in 1095 in his De predicatione S. crucis, he did not talk about the ‘first crusade’ – the prima cruciata – but about the prima crucesignationis inventio – ‘the first time people were signed with the cross’.39 Humbert of Romans’ evidence suggests that people took what one might call an individualising view on the new institution that was to be the crusade in our modern eyes. The novelty was that participants had taken vows, were on a religious mission and received an indulgence. Similarly at the beginning of the twelfth century, Guibert of Nogent called the First Crusade a ‘new way to salvation’, which allowed people ‘not to [be] obliged to abandon the world […] by adopting the monastic way of life […] but […] obtain God’s grace […] while enjoying their accustomed freedom and dress, and in a way consistent with their own station’.40 What was new after 1095 in the eyes of these near contemporaries was the status of people participating in the campaigns, not the campaigns themselves. This view is also supported by the fact that the canon lawyers of the twelfth century apparently felt no need to form a separate category for ‘crusade’ when discussing topics like the Just War.41 Had there been the sense of a new distinct institution developing from the campaign we call the First Crusade, canon lawyers would probably have latched on to it. Thus it seems that people around 1200 did not think in terms of crusade. The particular brand of religious warfare which had been promoted by popes since 1095 was distinct because of the appearance of a new brand of religious warriors, those signed by the cross, the crusaders. The mentality of these religious warriors was based on the idea of fighting for God and was represented by the 38 39 40 41 Riley-Smith 1986, pp. 4–8; Althoff 2013, chaps. 1–5. Humbert of Romans 1495, chap. 10. Guibert of Nogent 1996, p. 87: At quoniam in omnium animis haec pia desivit intentio et habendi cunctorum pervasit corda libido, instituit nostro tempore prelia sancta deus, ut ordo equestris et vulgus oberrans, qui vetustae paganitatis exemplo in mutuas versebantur cedes, novum repperirent salutis promerendae genus, ut nec funditus, electa, uti fieri assolet, monastica conversatione seu religiosa qualibet professione, seculum relinquere cogerentur, sed sub consueta licentia et habitu ex suo ipsorum officio dei aliquatenus gratiam consequerentur. Hehl 1994, pp. 305–311, especially p. 311. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 69 sign of the cross, which symbolically reflected the forces of redemption and forgiveness of sins. Thus crusading was something that mattered between the individual warrior and his or her God. Irrespective of the objective or the outcome of a military campaign, the crusader served God as a soldier and received a plenary indulgence in return. The exact context in which this happened was of minor importance. What mattered was that the pope as God’s representative on earth authorised the campaign and officially allowed participants to take the vow of the cross if they wished to do so. But this did not necessarily mean that everybody who joined a campaign for which the pope had authorised the crusading vow became a crusader. If we divorce ourselves from the need to equate crusading with an institution called the crusade, it might be easier to deal with some of the alleged incongruities which historians like Christopher Tyerman detect when describing twelfth century crusading. If we accept that crusading has more to do with an individual mission and vow than a particular type of war, there is no inherent contradiction if people involved in the campaigns to the Holy Land and elsewhere did not become crusaders. Becoming a crusader meant obligations as well as privileges and there might well have been reasons for individuals to forgo both. Becoming a crusader was a personal choice to take or to leave and there is no evidence to show that those who joined what we call a crusade army had to take a crusading vow. In a tentative way we can probably compare the medieval concept of crusading with the modern concept of jihad. Modern jihad does not signify a particular war campaign but there are numerous individual jihadists involved in what some radical Muslims see as the defence of their religion, from the Taliban in Afghanistan to the members of Al Qaeda and the various types of suicide bombers. Just as with crusading, the jihad has an individualising appeal linked to the idea of personal quest and sacrifice rather than a particular objective or context. Which once again brings us back to Pope Innocent iii. As I have explained above, Innocent did not define the crusade as an institution of war; he defined crusading as an individual activity. In doing so he was very thorough in assigning different roles to different people. The constitution Ad liberandam called on people to become crusaders in person, to help finance crusaders if they could not pay for their own campaigns, to gift money to the campaign, and to pray for people on campaign. Generally speaking Innocent iii’s approach to crusading was a pastoral one. He was concerned with the theology and spirituality of crusading, in essence promoting it as imitatio Christi. For Innocent crusading meant fulfilling one’s role as an individual within a vast collective effort that went far beyond single war campaigns. Indeed, Ad liberandam has hardly anything to say about the Fifth Crusade for which it was issued. For Innocent For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 70 Maier crusading was not primarily military engagement but a devotional activity based on a very generalised idea of imitatio Christi.42 The assumption that Innocent iii gave the crusade a clearer, more precise definition as an institution must be questioned. This is only true in a legal sense in as far as the individual crusader was concerned. During Innocent’s pontificate the crusaders’ privileges were clearly and comprehensively defined for the first time, from the indulgence to the legal protection of the crusaders’ goods and families. But the fact that people could now participate in crusading away from the battlefield compromised the image of the crusader as a religious warrior. Introducing commutations and in particular the widespread redemption of crusading vows for money broke the martial mould of crusading. In the thirteenth century many who took the cross never had anything to do with the military campaigns.43 Still, crusading was probably more widespread and more popular in the thirteenth century than ever before. Not only were there many new ways of acquiring a crusading indulgence, there were also many more opportunities for becoming a crusader than in the twelfth century. There was a proliferation of wars for which the popes authorised the recruiting of crusaders and the sale of redemptions. Crusaders went off to the Holy Land, Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, the Baltic to fight the various enemies of their religion and church.44 But then again, these wars were not called crusades and they were not fought by crusaders alone. Depending on each context, the composition of the armies probably varied greatly. Even though it is difficult to assess the exact composition of medieval armies, it is probably safe to say that expeditions to the Holy Land usually contained a sizeable proportion of crusaders, whereas campaigns in Europe included a fair mix of crusaders, feudal followers (who might or might not have taken the cross) and mercenary troops.45 Conclusion Pope Innocent iii did not define or invent the crusade, although he crucially contributed towards giving crusaders and crusading a distinctive character. Crusading was an individual vocation based on a vow and a special type of 42 43 44 45 For these points, see Maier 1999a. Maier 1999a, pp. 359–360. Maier 1994, pp. 32–95. For the composition of armies in the Italian crusading campaigns, see Housley 1982, pp. 145–172. For the Baltic and Spain, see also Urban 2006, pp. 159–198, 275–288 and GoñiGaztambide 1958. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV Pope Innocent Iii And The Crusades Revisited 71 penitential exercise. It established a particular type of medieval religious warrior, the miles Christi or soldier of Christ, who played an important but variable role in religious conflicts initiated or supported by the popes. But there is no evidence that Innocent iii, or indeed the later Middle Ages as a whole, developed a consistent terminology of the ‘crusade’. The modern use of the term ‘crusade’ meaning a specific type of war did not become common until much later. Late medieval and early modern authors normally used the word bellum sacrum for what we call the crusade. ‘Crusade’ was in fact not systematically employed until the first histories of the crusade appeared in French in the late seventeenth century, first and foremost among them Louis Maimbourg’s Histoire des Croisades.46 The German term ‘Kreuzzug’ and the English ‘crusade’ were not widely used until the eighteenth century.47 The problem of trying to define the crusade thus is a modern one. There is no indication that in the Middle Ages people grappled with the concept; it did not seem to be of great importance which military venture might or might not have been a crusade. There was no coherent discourse about the crusade as a type of war. People discussed the concept of the crusader, i.e. the status of the crucesignatus/a, in particular the crusading indulgence. But the wars we now call crusades were not perceived as a specific type of war. The Holy Land ‘crusade’ was a war about the state of the Terra Sancta and, as the ‘crusade’ in Spain, about the question of superiority vis-à-vis Islam; in the Baltic ‘crusades’ the wars were about the defence and expansion of Christendom; in the antiheretical ‘crusades’ the issue was the unity of the Church, and the ‘crusade’ against schismatics was about the power and authority of the papacy. What have we gained from postulating that there were only crusaders, but no crusades in the Middle Ages? Should we change the history of the crusades into the history of the crusader? And would that really change the way we understand and describe the Middle Ages? It certainly would be very difficult to do away with the popular perception of crusades as defining features of medieval culture, highlighting the medieval clash of cultures between East and West. It would also be difficult to ban the crusades from the arsenal of popular arguments used to prove how primitive, uncivilised and backwards the Catholic Middle Ages were. Becoming aware that the crusade was not a medieval concept might, however, contribute towards progress among academic historians of crusading. For far too long an important part of the scholarly discourse on crusading has been dominated by the issue of what defines the crusade as an 46 47 Maimbourg 1684–85. For the historiography of the crusades during the early modern period, see Tyerman 2010, pp. 37–66, and Boehm 1957, pp. 52–73. For use by the Author only | © 2016 Koninklijke Brill NV 72 Maier institution and the rifts this has created between different schools subscribing to a traditionalist, pluralist or generalist approach.48 Discussing the ramifications of crusading, i.e. the various aspects of the cultural practice of the miles Christi, rather than squabbling about what was and was not a crusade, might unite rather than divide scholarly energies. Also, and probably just as importantly, abandoning the concept of ‘crusade’ as an analytic category might open up the study of crusading towards other fields of medieval history. There has been a tendency to pigeonhole the study of the crusade as a subject very much apart from other medieval topics. This is true for historians of the crusade, who have been very content to carve out their own area of research, exclusively addressing issues that have been raised within the tightly knit circle of crusade historians. Conversely, historians of other areas of medieval history sometimes tend to ignore the work of crusade specialists because their own questions do not easily fit the narrow agenda of crusade research. Historical change, as I pointed out at the beginning, is not only predicated by the sources that describe the changes of historical processes. Change in history sometimes means changing the way we look at a historical process. Bibliography Primary Sources Baldric of Bourgeuil. ‘Historia Jerosolimitana’, RHC, vol. iv, pp. 9–111. Fulcher of Chartres 1913. Historia Hierosolymitana (1095–1127), ed. Heinrich Hagenmeyer. Heidelberg. Guibert of Nogent 1996. Dei gesta per Francos: et cinq autres textes, ed. Robert B.C. Huygens (Corpus Christianorum. Continuatio mediaevalis, 127 A). Turnhout. Humbert of Romans 1495. De predicatione Sancte crucis. [Nürnberg]. Orderic Vitalis 1969–1980. The Ecclesiastical History, ed. and transl. by Marjory Chibnall, 6 vols. Oxford. 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