A History of the Crusades (41 page)

The most significant breakthrough, however, came in funding. All the changes mentioned in the previous paragraph were expensive, and in order to handle the ever-mounting costs of crusading the Second Lyons Council proposed a tax on the laity throughout Christendom. This foundered on the rocks of suspicion and particularism, but the council achieved a lasting success with its other main financial measure, a six-year tenth levied on the entire Church. Clerical income taxes had been recognized for some decades as the only reliable means of ensuring a continuous flow of funds for the crusades, but the procedures for assessing, collecting, and transmitting the funds had to date been haphazard. It was Gregory X’s greatest contribution to the movement that he grasped the nettle of placing this taxation on a firm institutional basis. The pope set up twenty-six collectorates and,
in his bull
Cum pro negotio
of 1274, laid down detailed guidelines for the assessment of clerical revenues for tax purposes. In the years following Gregory’s death in 1276 his successors had to make amendments to his procedures, but by the death of Boniface VIII in 1303 the papacy possessed a comprehensive system of taxation on which it could draw to finance crusading ventures. Indeed, this system had by then come through its first major trial, in the shape of the numerous tenths and subsidies which the popes levied in order to finance the series of crusades which they waged against the rebel Sicilians and their allies between 1282 and 1302.

Papal taxation of the Church was an extraordinary achievement. It can appear deceptively simple. In 1292, for example, the annual revenues of the bishop of Rochester were assessed at £42 2s. 2d., including rents, fisheries, mills, markets, and courts; it followed that he had to pay £4 4s.2 d. a year towards the tenth which Pope Nicholas IV had granted to Edward I for his crusade project. But this apparently straightforward reckoning was beset with difficulties. Should the tenth be based on an assessment of income made by an impartial investigator, which was time-consuming and quickly out-of date, or should payment be made retrospectively on the basis of a cleric’s conscience and his knowledge—not always accurate of course—of what his income for a given year had been? How should assessors and collectors be found and remunerated, and how should their work be monitored? How could the proceeds best be secured and transferred? In addition to this, there were two enormous groups of problems relating to the taxpayers and the secular leaders who received the money for crusading purposes. The means of resistance employed by clerics, from evasive measures and subterfuges to open defiance, were numerous and astute. And at the other end of the process, it was necessary to devise some means of ensuring that money handed over was actually spent on a crusade, that accounts were kept and checked, and that unspent proceeds were returned.

These problems proved to be beyond solution: tax-evading clerics, fraudulent collectors, highwaymen, insolvent banking companies, and rulers who purloined crusade taxes, were
unchanging features of the European socio-economic landscape throughout the late Middle Ages. Like most medieval systems of taxation, the papacy’s taxation of the Church was ramshackle, much-criticized and resented, costly yet inefficient. But for all its faults, it did provide a large proportion of the funds on which crusading had now come to depend, and it therefore made possible the continuation of the movement. It also, of course, actively stimulated that continuation. The levy of universal sixyear tenths for the crusade, not just at Lyons in 1274 but also at Clement V’s general council at Vienne in 1312, brought into existence vast sums of money which were supposed to be spent on a passage to the East, and therefore helped to keep this issue alive in the political sphere. And the readiness of the papal curia to grant an individual ruler a tax on his clergy, either directly for a crusade or for a cause which was depicted as essential preparation for such a venture, had much the same effect. The presence of the crusade in late medieval Europe was perhaps more than anything else that of the armies of collectors, bankers, and bureaucrats who busied themselves assembling and distributing the money without which nothing could be done.

To a large degree, Lull’s
potestas
was money, and there was not enough of it for a recovery crusade; or more accurately, the political conditions of Europe around 1300 made it impossible for it to be sufficiently concentrated. The growing self-confidence and acute domestic needs of Christendom’s lay rulers meant that while they would accept papal taxation of the Church in their lands, particularly if they could hope to enjoy at least a share of the proceeds, they would not permit the export of those funds for use by another ruler who was supposedly organizing a passage to the Holy Land. No designated leader of a recovery crusade could therefore manage, in practice, to gather in the resources needed. Philip VI, who probably came nearest, in the early 1330s, to initiating a recovery
passagium
, tried to bypass this problem by collecting lay taxes within France, and by pressurizing the papal curia into bringing in funds from outside France and her satellite states. But the latter measure could not succeed because the papacy’s influence in the political sphere had weakened too much. There was a double irony here.

It was Philip VI’s own uncle, Philip the Fair, who had glaringly highlighted this weakness in the course of his great struggle with Pope Boniface VIII; and the reason for Philip VI’s pressure was the creation of a papal taxation system which displayed the impressive extent of the authority which the papacy still wielded, by contrast, within the Church.

Not surprisingly, few contemporaries had a clear perception of these subtle but vital shifts of power and authority, or of their impact on the crusade; the impression they received was of muddle, prevarication, and dissimulation on the part of their rulers. To use Anthony Luttrell’s striking phrase, it was ‘an epoch of crises and confusions’. Project after project was mooted with the aims of recovering the Holy Land, assisting Cyprus and Cilician Armenia, or seizing Constantinople back from the Greeks, these latter goals being viewed as preparatory to the former. Nearly all were abandoned, building up a massive fund of disillusionment. To rub salt into the wound of popular frustration, much crusading of one sort or another did take place; in 1309, for example, there were no fewer than three campaigns, in northern Italy, Granada, and the Aegean Sea. Above all, the fall of the Templars in 1307–12 provoked consternation and disarray. If it resolved, for some, the problem of who was to blame for the events of 1291 and settled, by
force majeure
, the vexed question of unifying the military orders, it also raised disturbing questions about the power and motives of the French crown. Faced with the repeated postponement of crusade programmes, the diversion of crusade funds by both popes and secular rulers, and the daunting strategic and financial problems involved in recovering the Holy Land, there is no doubt that some despaired of the latter. As we know from Humbert of Romans’s rejoinder to the critics of crusading, as early as 1274 some people agreed with Salimbene of Adam that ‘it is not the divine will that the Holy Sepulchre should be recovered’.

In the last resort, the crisis which confronted the crusading movement towards the close of the thirteenth century was not resolved. Instead, two things happened. First, following the collapse of Philip VI’s crusade project in 1336, when the pope indefinitely postponed it, the recovery of the holy places slipped
down the agenda. It survived, mainly for reasons of clerical convenience, in the terminology used to define the indulgence and privileges of each
crucesignatus
. More significantly, it continued to exert a powerful hold on the minds of some enthusiasts, such as Philip of Mézières; and at times, notably during the early 1360s and mid-1390s, it briefly re-emerged as a topic of discussion and planning in Christendom’s courts. But in general it became subsumed under other, more realistic goals. Secondly, as we shall see below, the new ideas, approaches, and structures which had been formulated under the pressure of defeat and in the hope of clinging on to or recovering the Holy Land, both invigorated existing areas of crusading and helped to create new ones. This is not a point to be stretched too far: it was local circumstances, active papal policy, and the deep-rootedness of crusading within the religious and social culture of Catholic Europe, which carried it beyond the painful hiatus of 1291. But there is a lot to be said for stressing the adaptability, as well as the sheer resilience, of the movement.

The middle decades of the fourteenth century were particularly difficult ones for the crusading movement. The Anglo-French war, the collapse between 1343 and 1348 of the Italian banking houses on whose resources and expertise papal taxation of the Church strongly depended, the Black Death (1348) and the resulting dislocation of economic and social life, all dealt hammer-blows to the political and financial initiatives on which large-scale crusading hinged. Viewed against this gloomy backcloth, the range and vitality of crusading in the fourteenth century were remarkable. This activity took place both within existing traditions and in new forms and contexts. Its ebb and flow was heavily influenced, if not dictated, by the pace of the war in France, but subject to this constraint it displayed great exuberance. The days have long since passed when this period could be relegated to the status of an aftermath or Indian summer in the history of the crusades.

Crusading in Iberia and Italy may be taken as examples of
continuing traditions which were given renewed vitality by the organizational advances which had occurred. In Iberia the massive gains of the mid-thirteenth century had created a complex group of problems which prevented for many generations the acquisition of further gains of any major significance. All the Christian kingdoms faced the task of absorbing their conquests; in Castile, the greatest beneficiary, this was achieved at the cost of creating an extremely powerful and intransigent magnate class which constantly defied the crown. Aragon and Portugal, fearful of Castile’s hegemonical ambitions, both encouraged this defiance and usually opposed any resumption of the
Reconquista
on the grounds that the chief result would be yet more gains for the Castilians. The Moors, on the other hand, were very conscious of their precarious situation in Granada and not only constructed formidable defences there, but made it clear that in the eventuality of a big Christian offensive they were ready to call on the assistance of their co-religionists in North Africa, even at the price of losing their own independence.

That the three big Christian states did periodically take up arms against Granada has to be attributed in part to the readiness of the popes at Avignon to grant lavish Church taxes to the enterprise. Indeed, the financial negotiations between the Castilian and Aragonese courts and the popes were as tough and hard-headed as those concerning a recovery
passagium
, and for the same reason: not because the Iberian rulers were insincere, but because they saw no reason to be bankrupted while fighting Christ’s war. During the reign of Alfonso XI of Castile (1325–50), when the nobility was temporarily brought to heel and the other Christian powers were impelled into co-operating by the threat of Moroccan intervention, these negotiations bore rich fruit: the king won one of the biggest pitched battles of the
Reconquista
at the Salado river in 1340, captured the port of Algeçiras in 1344, and was besieging Gibraltar when he died of the Black Death six years later. Thereafter, with the threat from Morocco waning, war broke out between the Christian kingdoms and the peninsula was dragged into the Anglo-French conflict as a satellite theatre of operations.

The crusades which the popes waged in Italy in the fourteenth century were, even more conspicuously than those in Iberia, fought chiefly by professionals supported by massive levies of church taxes and, on occasion, by the successful preaching of indulgences. In the thirteenth century the focal point of crusading effort in Italy was the southern kingdom, first to wrest it from the hands of the Staufen, and subsequently to keep it in those of the Angevins. In the Avignonese period (1305–1378), by contrast, crusading moved northwards to Lombardy and Tuscany. In order to create the peaceful conditions required for their return to their see, the popes had both to bring the provinces of the Papal State back under their control, and to hold in check the expansionist and destabilizing policies of the dynastic lords who were inexorably seizing control of the northern cities. The mechanism employed by the curia to achieve these objectives was a distinctive one. Time and again, powerful cardinal-legates, such as Bertrand of Le Poujet in the 1320s and and Gil Albornoz in the 1350s, were dispatched with armies of mercenaries, the money and credit facilities needed to pay them and subsidize the curia’s allies, and the crusade bulls which, it was hoped, would enable them to tap into fresh supplies of both men and money.

But fourteenth-century Italy was a maelstrom of colliding and rapidly-changing interests and ambitions. Even traditional papal allies like Angevin Naples and Florence became unreliable and, by mid-century, the entire political status quo was being subverted by the independent companies into which the professional troops hired by all sides had cohered. After the peace of Brétigny (1360), similar companies (the
routiers
) threatened the pope and his court at Avignon, and the curia began to issue crusade indulgences for combating the companies both in France and in Italy. When the Great Schism broke out in 1378, dividing Christendom into two, and later three, obediences, rival popes began to declare crusades against each other. In 1383, for instance, the bishop of Norwich, Henry Despenser, raised a crusading army in England and personally led it on campaign in Flanders. Neither the crusade against
routiers
nor that against schismatics was an innovation: both drew on traditions as old
as the movement itself. Crusading had, however, turned in on itself in a remarkable and rather unhealthy way, with not only its directing authority, the papacy, but also its chosen instrument, the professional man-at-arms, themselves becoming, in different ways, the object of crusades.