CRUSADES

I. THE INSTITUTION OF THE CRUSADE

Origins. The roots of the institution of the crusade are to be found in the political, cultural and theological developments that shaped Western European society during the eleventh century. Throughout the medieval West the political fragmentation following the break up of the Carolingian empire led to a decentralization and diffusion of political power both in terms of geography and social hierarchy. As a result of these long term developments a substantial share of the execution and administration of political and economic power passed to a new knightly elite which had emerged by the eleventh century. These knights, called milites (singular miles ), did not only claim an important position in the social hierarchy, they also developed the means to defend and enlarge their political and economic power. The typical knight of the eleventh century distinguished himself by his military prowess as a mounted soldier, his social connections with other knights and his close association with ecclesiastical institutions,

in particular local monasteries. Political life was dominated by violent conflicts between smaller or larger groups of knights who were increasingly capable and willing to co-ordinate and apply the military force supplied by mounted combat troops and vested in fortified strongholds that became the centre of knightly power. At the same time, the association with ecclesiastical institutions was an important element of knightly identity and group solidarity. There was an acute awareness that life in all its aspects was to a great extent dependent on a favourable disposition of God's grace. The patronage of monastic institutions and the veneration of saints by way of pilgrimages, prayers and donations was high on the agenda of knights seeking to confirm and consolidate their power and identity. It was this new knightly elite of the eleventh century that was targeted and who responded most enthusiastically when Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade in 1095. The knights' military expertise and experience, their desire to acquire power and honour and their religious orientation made them the ideal candidates to embrace crusading as a means of fulfilling their personal, political and religious ambitions.

The second factor which made the emergence of the institution of the crusade possible consisted in the farreaching changes that affected the Catholic Church in the century preceding the First Crusade. The so-called Gregorian Reform, which made itself felt from about the 1140s, was an attempt by religious leaders, and in particular the papacy, fundamentally to reorganise the Church both in terms of religious practice and administrative organisation. The first main element of these reforms concerned a variety of aspects of the Church's internal conduct and government ranging from moral issues such as sexual behaviour to measures aimed at improving clerical education and ensuring the independence of individual churches and ecclesiastical offices. The aim was to ensure that the Church could fulfil its pastoral and intercessionary roles in a responsible and efficient manner. The second main element of the reform programme was to assert the moral and political leadership of the papacy in an attempt to guarantee ecclesiastical independence and foster the collective institutional identity of the Church throughout Europe. This involved the organisation and support of military ventures aimed at guaranteeing the integrity of the possessions of the papacy and the defence of the Church against attacks by lay people as well as heretics and non-Christians. In Italy the popes even staged their own military campaigns for this purpose. In order to overcome the traditional notion of warfare and the use of violence as intrinsically sinful, the popes of the second half of the eleventh century, in particular Pope gregory vii (1073–1085), began to view and promote warfare in the service of the Church as an acceptable form of violence. By focussing on the motivation of the individual participants and the underlying cause of wars fought in defence of the Church and faith, Pope Gregory VII even formulated the theory that military service could in such conditions be seen as penitential. Although revolutionary, the idea of penitential warfare in the service of the Church could be incorporated into a long tradition of patristic thought about the legitimate use of violence in the context of just or holy wars. The ideological foundations for these intellectual developments went back to St. augustine of Hippo, whose works were studied in scholarly circles close to the papacy. It was the idea and practice of penitential warfare in the service of the Church, developed in the Gregorian reform movement, which made it possible for Pope urban ii (1088–1099) to formulate the idea of crusade and institute the practice of crusading in 1095.

It would thus be wrong to seek the origins of the crusade as an institution solely in a reflex to the call for aid issued by the Byzantine Emperor alexius i (1081–1118), who asked Western Christians for military assistance in repelling the Muslim advances in Asia Minor. People in the West had for some time been developing a renewed interest in the Levant, most noticeable in the revival of large scale organised pilgrimages to Jerusalem, and they were aware of the growing domination of Muslim forces in the Near East. Already in 1074 Pope Gregory VII entertained plans to launch a military expedition under papal leadership to come to the aid of the Eastern Christians, but nothing came of this initiative. It was not until 20 years later that Urban II was able to formulate and propagate a project for a military expedition to Palestine, which met with an overwhelming and unexpected response from thousands of men and women across Europe. In planning the First Crusade Urban managed to amalgamate a number of elements developed by his predecessors which caught people's imagination and played to their ambitions. He primarily called upon knights to abandon their violent conflicts with their neighbours and exercise their military prowess in the service of the Church. Rather than fighting for the pope and his patron St. Peter, which had been the appeal of previous papal campaigns, Urban now asked people to fight in God's name for the good of the whole Church by defending the honour of the Christian religion against the Muslims and recapturing the most holy sites of Christianity in Jerusalem. In terms of ideology and propaganda, this was a new departure. The idea of becoming a soldier of Christ (Latin miles Christi ) and fighting a military campaign to restore God's honour where it mattered most, i.e. the Holy Land where Christ had lived and saved humankind, was a powerful propaganda concept to which people responded enthusiastically. At the same time Urban defined service on crusade as an obligation towards God following from a voluntary vow the crusaders took similar to the wellknown vow taken by pilgrims. In addition, the pope promised the participants the remission of all their penitential obligations for the sins that they confessed. The crusade thus offered a way of dealing with the terrifying consequence of sin both before and after death. By defining the First Crusade in the way he did, Pope Urban II played both to the military ambition and the religious sensibilities of many of his contemporaries, in particular the arms-bearing knights, but also many other lay people and members of the clergy. Guibert of Nogent (ca. 1055 to 1125), a monk and contemporary observer, described the effect of the crusade as follows: "In our time God instituted holy warfare, so that the armsbearers and the wandering populace, who after the fashion of the ancient pagans were engaged in mutual slaughters, should find a new way of attaining salvation; so that they might not be obliged to abandon the world completely, as used to be the case, by adopting the monastic way of life or any other form of professed calling, but might obtain God's grace to some extent while enjoying their accustomed freedom and dress, and in a way consistent with their own station." Although the institution of the crusade was triggered by events taking place in the Near East and had its first powerful military impact far away from the European heartland, the crusade grew out of the social, religious and cultural conditions of Western European society in the eleventh century. As the subsequent history of the crusades shows, the crusade was fundamentally an institution of Western Latin Christendom, having a strong impact on the way in which internal and external conflicts with other Christians and other religious groups, in particular the Muslims, were conducted throughout the late middle ages and beyond.

Definition. The defining elements of the institution of the crusade were already integral to the First Crusade of 1095 to 1099. Although the exact juridical formulation of all aspects of the crusade was not completed until the first half of the thirteenth century, Pope Urban II laid down the institutional foundations of the crusade which were pivotal for its initial success and its long and varied history. The crusade was thought of as a war called upon and authorised by God himself through his first vicar on earth, the pope. It was directed against enemies of the Catholic faith and the Church and was aimed at restoring God's honour on earth. Because of this, and because of its primarily defensive character, the crusade was considered legitimate warfare in accordance with the medieval theory of just and holy wars. Following from the representation of the crusade as God's war, the participants were considered to be God's soldiers or soldiers of Christ (Latin milites Dei, milites Christi ). Their task and their status was defined by the act of taking the cross, which meant that the crusaders made a binding vow to participate in the crusade on the conditions set for each campaign. This vow had to be taken in the presence of a bishop or a representative of the pope, such as a crusade preacher or a papal legate, and the sign of the cross had to be displayed on the crusader's garments as public confirmation from the moment of taking the vow to the end of the crusading campaign. Hence the Latin word crucesignatus, meaning "the one signed with the cross," used to designate a crusader from the end of the twelfth century. A crusade vow was binding and could only be dispensed by papal authority if it was commuted to other forms of penance or redeemed by sending a substitute on crusade or paying money in aid of the crusade. In return for his or her service on crusade, a crusader was granted a number of privileges by the pope. Like the crusade vow the privileges accompanying the participation in a crusade were derived from the model of pilgrimage, although they went beyond what pilgrims were generally offered. Most important among these privileges was the plenary indulgence for the remission of all the penalties affecting people on account of their sins, in their lifetime or after death. Although the theological concepts underlying the indulgence changed considerably throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the majority of people at the time understood the indulgence as a way of escaping punishment for their sins imposed by the Church or directly by God either on earth or in purgatory. In short people conceived of the plenary indulgence as a "remission of all sins" (Latin remissio peccatorum ) that they confessed to a priest when they took their crusading vows. The belief that by participating in the crusade it was possible through the plenary indulgence to wash away the taint of sin and dispense with any further penance to a large extent accounted for the unexpected initial response and the enormous appeal of the crusades throughout the later middle ages. In addition to the indulgence, crusaders were granted a number of legal privileges aimed at encouraging them to take the cross and to facilitate their absence from home. For the duration of the crusade, the Church through their courts granted legal protection to the crusaders, their families and dependants and their possessions. This also meant that law suits pending against crusaders were postponed until after the crusade. Crusaders were also freed from feudal duties, tolls and taxes as well as interest payments and repayment of any debts they had incurred. Lay people were also permitted to dispose of property which was under normal circumstances considered inalienable, while clerics were given the right to use the income of their benefices during their absence on crusade. Given the enormous cost of a crusade and the great danger of not returning alive from an expedition, the privileges regulating financial and legal matters were crucial in attracting potential crusaders, who had their families and finance to consider when deciding whether to take the cross. The crusade campaigns as a whole also profited from propaganda, financial and liturgical support, which became regular elements of the institution of the crusade. The pope proclaimed a crusade by issuing a papal bull detailing the causes and conditions of each expedition, which would be sent to potential military leaders and chosen propagandists. Crusade propaganda usually took the form of organised preaching campaigns, in which people were directly encouraged to take the cross. Whereas at the beginning crusade propaganda was most forcefully conducted by individual, and often charismatic, preachers such as bernard of clairvaux, from about the 1230s the bulk of the propaganda activity passed over to the preaching orders of the Dominicans and Franciscans, whose vast resources of trained preachers made the spread of crusade propaganda particularly effective. Crusade preaching went hand in hand with the collection of voluntary donations and vow redemption payments, volunteered by or enforced from those incapable of joining a crusade army, as well as taxes imposed on clerical incomes in support of the crusade. These moneys were often passed directly onto prominent crusaders to help finance their large contingents of retainers and mercenaries. At the same time, the popes organised the liturgical back-up on the home front for crusaders in the field. During crusade campaigns prayers were to be said and processions held regularly throughout the churches of Christendom with even more elaborate liturgical exercises to be performed by monks. These intercessionary liturgies were believed to sway God's favour in support of the crusade and were therefore considered to be crucial to a successful outcome. In sum a crusade was a war authorised by the pope and fought in order to defend and protect the honour of the Catholic Church and faith. It was represented as a war conducted on God's behalf by people who thought of themselves as God's soldiers. The participants of a crusade took a binding vow and enjoyed a number of spiritual and temporal privileges, most importantly the plenary indulgence. At the same time crusades benefited from financial, liturgical and propaganda support centrally organised by the papacy and its agents.

Scope. The history of the institution of the crusade began in the late eleventh century and continued until the sixteenth century, while the idea of crusading, embodied for example in the military alliances of the Holy Leagues and the military orders, lasted even longer into the modern era. Crusading in medieval Europe and the Near East underwent periods of varying intensity. The First Crusade (1095–1099), attracting perhaps as many as 120,000 men and women, arguably produced the largest single crusade expedition ever, but the intensity of overall crusading activity was probably never higher than in the first half of the thirteenth century, when many crusades were operating in different parts of Europe and its border regions: against Muslims in Egypt, Palestine and in the Iberian Peninsula, against Byzantine Christians in Greece, against heretics in southern France, Germany and Hungary, against the Mongols, against the non-Christian peoples of the Baltic and against the political enemies of the papacy in the Empire. There was never a lack of crusading initiatives from popes and other religious and political leaders throughout the later middle ages. But the realisation and success of crusade campaigns very much depended on the actual threats posed and the willingness and ability of political leaders to organise crusades effectively. Thus crusade expeditions to the Levant lost their force with the fall of the Latin establishments in Palestine at the end of the thirteenth century as people realised that it would take an enormous effort to dislodge the Muslim domination in the Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless numerous small crusading projects to the area were promoted throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, often in collaboration with the military orders. The steady advance of the Turkish empire in the Balkans and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 were responsible for a number of new crusade projects to the East at the end of the middle ages. In other theatres, the crusades against political enemies flourished during the time of the Great Schism in the fourteenth century, while the growth of the Hussite heresy in the first half of the fifteenth century gave rise to five successive crusades between 1420 and 1431. The most extensive and from a military perspective most successful crusading campaigns were fought in the Iberian Peninsula from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries and in the lands along the Baltic in the thirteenth and fourteenth. In both these areas the crusades were bound up with colonising projects and missionary activities and were thus part of a continual process of conquest which was systematically promoted by political leaders eager to extend the frontiers of Christian Europe.

With the crusade being an institution of the whole Church universally proclaimed by the pope, participation was in theory open to all members of society. Although most crusading centred around an élite of military leaders who recruited their followers from particular social circles and geographical areas, most of the larger crusade armies, especially in the first centuries of crusading history, comprised participants from across the social scale and from many different countries. This accounted for the sometimes huge size of crusading armies, which proved problematic in terms of organisation, logistics and military strategy. Regarding their material resources, their particular motivation and their military ability, crusaders often differed considerably from each other. With popular enthusiasm powered by eschatological expectations at one end of the scale and keen military leadership geared at individual glory and political profit at the other, it could prove difficult to wage effective warfare. Largely due to Pope Innocent III's reforms, embodied in the constitution "Ad liberandam" at the Fourth lateran council in 1215, the crusades were set on a new footing in the thirteenth century in terms of propaganda, finance and logistics. By calling upon the mendicant orders of the Franciscans and Dominicans to preach the cross, thirteenth century popes managed to increase and target crusade propaganda. By introducing crusade taxes on clerical income and allowing the redemption of crusade vows in return for financial subsidies the financial requirements of crusaders could be met more readily. Attempts were also made to prevent those who could make no proper military contribution to the crusade from joining the armies. Women, old people and the sick were encouraged to stay at home, redeem their vows for money and support the crusade armies with prayers. From this there developed a vision of Christian society as a whole engaged in and organised for the crusade. While the clergy and the religious orders were involved in propagating and financing the crusade as well as organising liturgical support at home, lay members of society were expected to contribute to the best of their means and abilities as leaders and fighters in the actual armies or by financial contributions and prayers. The papacy thus also responded to more general developments in warfare which demanded better trained and more professional, and thereby more expensive armies, often including a mercenary element of considerable size. At the same time an upsurge in popular religious sentiment and devotion caused many people to respond eagerly to the offer of a plenary indulgence as a reward for their financial and intercessionary contributions to the crusades. Nevertheless, crusade armies never lost their popular elements altogether and occasionally spontaneous "popular crusades" were started without papal authorisation, such as the Children's Crusade of 1212 and the Crusades of the Shepherds in 1254, 1309 and 1320. Pope Innocent III's initiative paired with his rigorous leadership provided the crusade with a solid institutional foundation and explains the enormous popularity of the crusades in the first half of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless his reforms also sowed the seeds of structural weaknesses in the institution of the crusade that were to be felt throughout the later middle ages. While the downsizing and professionalisation of crusade armies was aimed at making the crusade a more effective instrument of warfare, crusading still demanded enormous organisational and financial resources. These often proved too difficult to provide and meant this that many crusade projects could never be realised as planned. Especially the crusades for the recovery of the Holy Land after the end of the thirteenth century fell victim to the unwillingness of the leading rulers of Europe to cooperate and their inability to set aside the military force and finance necessary for such a large scale enterprise. But even if the far-reaching aims of many crusade projects were never reached, religiously powered enthusiasm for the crusade never abated in the late middle ages and affected all sections of society. This does not of course mean that crusading went unopposed in medieval society. Criticism of crusading was almost as old as the crusade itself. Although fundamental opposition to the institution of the crusade and its aims was relatively rare, single aspects of the institution provoked frequent criticism. Crusades against heretics and other fellow Christians, for example, were not universally approved of. But the sharpest criticism was levelled against the misappropriation of crusading funds for other purposes and also against the practice of granting crusade indulgences in return for money payments, which became increasingly common in the later Middle Ages.

With the reformation and the counter reformation of the sixteenth century the institution of the crusade came to an end in most parts of Europe. The unity of Western Christianity and the papacy's effective political leadership—two important factors upon which the crusade was built—had ceased to exist. Remnants of crusading were to be found in the Holy Leagues created at the end of the seventeenth century to repel the last Turkish attacks on the Habsburg Empire and the military orders who were engaged in anti-Muslim warfare until the late eighteenth century. The crusade, however, left its imprint on Western European society. In the early modern era elements of crusade ideology appeared in the propaganda and warfare of many of the budding dynastic nation-states and marked the confrontation of Catholic forces with non-Christian cultures in the process of the European expansion overseas. More generally speaking, "the ideas, iconography, and language associated with crusading survived, to fertilise the thinking and behaviour of all Christians engaged in military struggles which they considered to be inseparable from their religious beliefs, spanning time and space from Early Modern Europe to contemporary Latin America" (N. Housley).

II. CRUSADES AGAINST MUSLIMS

Near East. Pope Urban II proclaimed the First Crusade on Nov. 27, 1095, at the Council of Clermont. In response to a request for military assistance from the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, Urban called upon Westerners to help their fellow Christians in the Near East to free themselves from Muslim rule and liberate the Christian holy sites in Palestine, in particular Jerusalem. Thanks to the promise of spiritual and temporal privileges for the participants and owing to the religious fervour stirred up by Urban's appeal, a large number of people, probably as many as 120,000 men and women from all walks of life, took the cross. They joined one of the armies that left Europe in three big waves between 1096 and 1101, marching to Palestine through the Balkans and Asia Minor. In military terms, the First Crusade was an overwhelming success, which ultimately led to the establishment of the so-called Crusader states in the Levant. On July 15, 1099, the crusaders conquered Jerusalem, having previously defeated a number of Muslim armies along the way and taken Antioch as well as Edessa. These unexpected results helped cement the view that the crusade was willed and supported by God, which from then onwards became a pivotal element of crusade ideology. Despite being a military and for many of the participants also a personal success—those who died on the way were considered martyrs, those who returned home heroes—victory came at a price. Not only did many of the crusaders and their families make enormous sacrifices to finance their participation, many also died in the cruel conditions of the long journey and on the battlefields. This was particularly true for the popular contingents led by the charismatic priest Peter the Hermit. Those who found riches and power in the newly established states, notably a number of French and Italian knights, were few and far between. There were also numerous tensions among the leaders of the crusade armies and the collaboration with the Byzantine Greeks at times turned into open hostility. The religious fervour of many of the participants, fuelled by eschatological and revivalist tendencies, was also responsible for the cruel attacks on Jewish communities in France and Germany perpetrated by crusaders along the way. Considered to be enemies of the Christian religion, Jews were again and again seen as legitimate targets of crusader aggression throughout the later middle ages, despite attempts by the Church hierarchy to stop such attacks.

Throughout the twelfth century a succession of large and small scale crusades to the Near East took place, aimed first at enlarging and later defending the Latin establishments in the Levant. During the first half of the century, smaller crusades took place such as the one led by King Sigurd of Norway in 1107 to 1110 and a crusade proclaimed by Pope Calixtus II resulted in expeditions in 1123 to 1124 and 1125 to 1126. After the re-conquest of Edessa by Muslim forces in 1144 Pope Eugene III issued the earliest extant crusade bull (Quantum praedecessores ) launching the Second Crusade. This expedition, led by King Louis VII of France, who was later joined by King Conrad III of Germany, was part of a major crusading effort on several Christian frontiers in Spain, Eastern Europe and the Levant. The German and French crusade armies in the East failed to secure northern Syria and were beaten in 1147 and 1148 respectively. The unexpected defeat of two royal armies provoked massive criticism of the crusade as an institution, much of which was aimed at Bernard of Clairvaux, the chief ideologue and propagandist of the Second Crusade. Despite the need of the Latin establishments for military assistance, crusade activity to the Levant was low until the very end of the twelfth century. The frequent calls for crusades by the papacy went largely unheeded, with the exception of a small crusade force led by Philipp of Flanders in 1177. It was not until the victory of Saladin's Muslim forces over the army of the crusader states at Hattin and the subsequent loss of Jerusalem in 1187 that crusading to the Levant resumed on a large scale. Pope Gregory VIII's bull Audita tremendi issued in October of that same year triggered what was perhaps the greatest crusading effort in aid of the Holy Land ever to occur, known as the Third Crusade. Between 1190 and 1197 two German emperors and the kings of France and England took the cross and organised major crusade campaigns heading for Palestine. While neither Emperor frederick i nor his successor Henry VI reached the crusader states—Frederick drowned on route in Asia Minor and Henry died prior to departure—their respective armies played an important part in recapturing Acre, Sidon and Beirut for the Latins. The crusade armies of King Philipp II of France and King Richard I of England also failed to regain Jerusalem in 1191 to 1192, but their victories over the Muslims crucially helped to secure and consolidate the survival of the crusader states in the coastal regions of Palestine for another one hundred years and also put Cyprus under Latin rule, which lasted until the sixteenth century. The Fourth Crusade (see below), proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in 1198, was famously diverted to Constantinople and only a few elements of its army ever reached Palestine.

The thirteenth century marked the heyday of crusading to the Eastern Mediterranean. Until the 1270s major crusade armies left for the Holy Land every decade, while numerous smaller expeditions took place in between; these included the unauthorised and ill-fated expeditions known as the Children's Crusade of 1212 and the Crusade of the Shepherds of 1251, which despite their utter failure in military terms bore witness to the fanaticism of crusaders from the lower echelons of society. However, internal strife, wars between the leading powers in the West and competition from other crusades meant that the large-scale effort necessary to re-conquer Jerusalem and save the crusader states from succumbing to the mounting pressure from Muslim forces never took place. Nevertheless, temporary military success was provided and, here as in other crusade theatres, individual participants could fulfil their religious vocation and gain their spiritual rewards independent of the outcome of each crusade. The Fifth Crusade, proclaimed in 1213 and lasting until 1221, constituted an ultimately futile attempt at breaking the Muslim domination in the Levant by attacking Egypt. Bogged down in the Nile delta, the crusaders hoped for help from Emperor Frederick II, who had taken the cross in 1215 but again and again delayed his departure until he was excommunicated by the pope in 1227 for his failure to fulfil his vow. Nevertheless, having married Isabella of Brienne, the heiress to the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, the emperor was eager to impose his domination in the East and went on crusade in 1228. His excommunication prevented Frederick from gathering enough military support to wage a war, but he managed to negotiate a ten-year-truce with the Muslims and the return of Jerusalem to the Latins in 1229. In view of the end of the truce, two sizeable crusade armies sailed to Palestine in 1239 to 1240 led by Theo bald IV of Champagne and Richard of Cornwall respectively. Having regained territories previously lost to Christian control and negotiated a new truce, this crusade was successful on the whole, even though its military achievements did not last long. By 1244 Muslim forces had retaken Jerusalem and some of the territories secured by the recent crusade. In reaction, King Louis IX of France committed himself to a grand crusading project which he organised with unprecedented care. In 1248 his crusade left from the port of Aigues Mortes, specifically built for the use of the royal army, reaching Cyprus and finally Damietta in Egypt in June 1249. Once again and despite the enormous efforts put into this expedition the strategy of attacking the Muslim forces from the Nile turned out a failure. Louis himself was taken prisoner and had to be redeemed for a large sum of money, while the ambitious military aims of his crusade were all but abandoned. Nevertheless, the French king stayed in Palestine until 1254, once more negotiating a truce and assisting the crusader states in strengthening their defences. He also established a permanent French garrison, which stayed until 1286. More than any other medieval ruler, Louis IX was personally committed to the crusade. But his second attempt at bringing aid to the Holy Land in the late 1260s also failed. Planned in conjunction with King James of Aragon, his brother King Charles of Sicily and Prince Edward, son of King Henry III of England, Louis IX's second crusade only got as far as Tunis, where the crusade army was ravaged by plague, with the king himself dying on Aug. 25, 1270. Only Edward's army reached Palestine where it fought a number of battles before returning to Europe in 1272. The remainder of the thirteenth century was marked by unsuccessful attempts to stop the continuous Muslim conquest of the Latin establishments in Palestine which was finally completed when Acre fell in 1291. At the Second Council of Lyon in 1276 Pope Gregory X, one of the most fervent supporters of the crusade to the Holy Land, once again tried to launch a pan-European expedition, but his death in the same year meant that his high-flown plans bore no fruit.

Crusading to the East from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century was fuelled by the continuing enthusiasm in Europe for the recovery of the Holy Land, but its scope was checked by the political situation and the military conditions in the Levant. First the Mamluk and later the Turkish empire proved too potent for the limited crusade efforts the European powers were ready to commit to the East. Most crusade projects were relatively small expeditions undertaken in conjunction with the Italian city states, the kings of Cyprus or the Order of St. John (later Order of Malta), who all had tangible economic and political interest in the area. The main aims of these various crusades were either the recovery of Jerusalem via Egypt or the defence of Latin Greece from Turkish pirate action. Thus, for example, Dauphin Humbert II of Viennois gathered a crusade force to attack Smyrna in 1345 to 1347 and King Peter I of Cyprus led a crusade in 1365, which temporarily conquered Alexandria. The steady advance of the Turkish empire in the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries met with a renewed crusade response from Europe, which ultimately remained limited, despite numerous initiatives by the papacy. In 1396 a crusade army was beaten at Nicopolis in Bulgaria, failing to halt the Turkish progress through the Balkans. Similarly a large crusade force led by the king of Hungary was defeated at Varna on the Black Sea fifty years later in 1444. Following the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453, a crusade mainly made up of Hungarian participants was gathered and led by the charismatic preacher John of Capistrano. This played a major part in successfully defending Belgrade and thus contributed towards stopping the Turkish advance. But despite further forceful initiatives by popes like, for example, Pius II and despite the ambitious plans by political rules like Emperor Maximilian I, the crusades to the Eastern Mediterranean were not revived after the fifteenth century even though the ideology and to some extent also the practice of crusading continued to play a part in the Holy Leagues and the military activities of the Order of Malta.

Iberian Peninsula. Crusading against the Muslims in the Iberian Peninsula was an integral part of the Reconquista, which began long before the institution of the crusade was born. Shortly after the First Crusade, at the beginning of the twelfth century, the popes began to assign crusade status to the military campaigns for the reconquest of Muslim territories organised by Iberian kings and noblemen. The crusade and its ideology thus became part of the ongoing process of Christian colonisation of the Iberian Peninsula which lasted until the very end of the fifteenth century. Whereas much of the Reconquista was fought by feudal armies and urban militias, crusaders from Spain and elsewhere played an important part in supplying additional military support when it was most needed. In terms of men, money and ideology the institution of the crusade thus made an indispensable contribution towards the Reconquista. The first major crusade campaign in the Iberian Peninsula was fought in Andalucia in 1125 to 1126 by King Alfonso I of Aragon, closely followed by the campaigns in the context of the Second Crusade in the 1140s, during which Almeria, Santarem, Lisbon and the remaining Muslim territories of Catalonia were conquered. Like in other crusading theatres, the first half of the thirteenth century was a period of intensive crusading in the Iberian Peninsula. A large army made up of French, Spanish and Portuguese crusaders defeated the Muslims at Las Navas de Tolosa in July 1212, a victory which marked the turning point of the Reconquista and broke the Muslim dominance in Spain. Both King James I of Aragon's conquest of Majorca in 1229 to 1231 and Valencia 1232 to 1253 and King Ferdinand III of Castile's conquest of Badajoz in 1230, Jérez in 1231, Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248 were achieved with massive assistance by crusaders. In the second half of the thirteenth century, the Spanish rulers even made attempts to attack Muslim strongholds across the Straits of Gibraltar, drawing on crusading support readily granted by the papacy. With the exception of the conquest of Algeciras in 1344 the Reconquista came to a temporary halt between 1275 and the final decades of the fifteenth century. The Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula was finally ended with the conquest of Granada in 1492. The conflict with the Muslims in the Western Mediterranean, however, did not stop after the end of the fifteenth century, with the crusade playing an important part in the Spanish and Portuguese kings' wars against the Muslims in Northern Africa in the sixteenth century. But the crusades to Morocco and later against the advancing Turkish empire in Northern Africa, fought amongst others by Emperor Charles V and King Sebastian of Portugal, were largely unsuccessful and came to an end in the late 1570s. Throughout the later middle ages the Reconquista not only relied on the military support of crusaders, but also on the important financial contribution the crusade was able to provide through the systematic sale of indulgences (cruzadas ) and the frequent imposition of crusade taxes.

III. CRUSADES AGAINST CHRISTIANS

Heretics. Canon 27 of the Third lateran council of 1179 provided limited military support for bishops fighting heretics in their dioceses, while offering a limited indulgence for those participating in these campaigns. This prepared the ground for full-scale crusades to be directed against heretical Christians. The use of military force to combat heresy was justified by arguing that heretics disregarded doctrine and disobeyed the ecclesiastical hierarchy, thus threatening the unity and integrity of the Catholic Church. In connection with the Inquisition, the crusades against heretics were part of the brutal suppression of dissident Christian communities by the medieval Church. It was in fact Pope innocent iii who proclaimed the first anti-heretical crusade against the dualist Albigensian heretics of southwestern France in 1208, granting participants a plenary indulgence in return for 40 days service in the crusade armies. The crusades against the Albigensians intermittently operated between 1208 and 1226 with several campaigns led by the Northern French nobility, most notably Count Simon of Montfort and King Louis VIII. But although the crusade campaigns ended in military defeat for the heretics, the Albigensian faith survived into the early fourteenth century, when it was finally eradicated by the Inquisition.

Small scale crusades were fought against the heretical Bosnian church and also against the Drenther and the Stedinger peasants in the Netherlands and in Northern Germany between 1227 and 1234. The cross was also preached against small groups of heretics in Northern Italy in the 1250s, and in 1306 to 1307 a crusade was launched against the followers of Fra dolcino in Piedmont. In Eastern Europe crusades against heretical groups survived into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with the cross being preached against Cathars in Hungary in 1327 and a crusade army fighting against heretical movements in Bohemia in the 1340s.

The five crusades fought against the hussites between 1420 and 1431 arose from a combination of religious and political developments in Bohemia. King Sigismund of Hungary fought these crusades with the assistance of a number of German princes in the hope of imposing his political authority by suppressing the religious unorthodoxy of the Hussites, who also entertained strong anti-Imperial sentiments. Despite its initial success the five crusades against the Hussites failed to eradicate the heretical movement in Bohemia. The wars against the Hussites were the last crusades against heretics of the late Middle Ages. But with the sale of crusade indulgences and the use of crusade rhetoric, elements of the antiheretical crusades surfaced again in the Catholic response to the Reformation in the sixteenth century as well as in the Thirty-Years' War of 1618 to 1648.

Schismatics. Crusades against schismatics were proclaimed against exponents of the Greek and Russian Orthodox Church as well as against opponent Catholic factions during the Great Schism of the fourteenth century. As early as 1107 to 1108 Bohemund of Taranto led a crusade force against Byzantines in Northern Greece, albeit without tangible military results. The first full scale crusade against the Byzantine Empire came in the course of the Fourth Crusade. Proclaimed by Pope Innocent III in 1199, this expedition was originally planned as a crusade to the Holy Land led by the Counts of Champagne, Blois and Flanders. When the crusaders gathered at Venice in 1202, it soon became clear that they did not possess the financial means to pay for transport to the Levant. In a deal, the Venetians offered their fleet in return for military assistance first in attacking the Christian city of Zara in Croatia and later the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. The Venetians were eager to promote their own interests by helping Alexius IV, who had fled to the West and promised to support the crusaders, to regain the Byzantine throne. After the conquest of Constantinople, relations with the new Byzantine emperor, however, turned sour and the crusaders ended up ousting the new ruler. After three days of terrible pillaging, the crusaders installed Baldwin of Flanders as the first Latin emperor. Pope Innocent III reluctantly accepted the diversion of the Fourth Crusade, justifying the attacks on the Greeks as schismatics. With the creation of the Latin Greek empire a new crusade theatre was in fact established. The survival of the Latin empire and the Latin principalities of Southern Greece heavily depended on military assistance from the West. From the 1230s to the 1250s a large number of French crusaders were involved in repelling Byzantine attempts to re-conquer Constantinople. The massive crusading support for the Latin empire planned by Pope Urban IV in the 1260s came too late, however. In 1261 Michael Paleologus recaptured Constantinople. Although Urban IV immediately renewed his call for a crusade, it was not until the beginning of the fourteenth century that a last unsuccessful attempt was made to re-establish the Latin empire of Constantinople.

Other wars against Orthodox Christians on the frontiers of Catholic Europe in the fourteenth century were also assigned the status of crusades. Thus King Amadeus IV of Savoy led crusaders to Bulgaria in 1366 to 1367 and several crusading campaigns were fought by the Scandinavian kings against the Russian rulers of Novgorod between 1348 and 1351.

The Great Schism of 1378 to 1417 also produced two crusades, which both originated in England and were fought by supporters of the Roman faction against adherents of the Avignon popes. In 1383 Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich, led a crusade force across the English Channel to fight the count of Flanders and in 1386 to 1387 John of Gaunt invaded Castile. Both crusades were limited in scope and did not achieve any lasting results.

Political Enemies of the Papacy. The crusades against political enemies of the papacy grew out of a long tradition of armed conflicts between the papacy and its political opponents in Italy in the eleventh century. In 1135 the Council of Pisa for the first time granted a crusade indulgence to those supporting the papal cause in Italy. The first political crusade to be preached in Italy was directed against Markward of Anweiler, a German ministerial eager to assert his power in Southern Italy after the death of Emperor Henry VI and thus acting against papal claims of overlordship. This crusade, however, never got off the ground properly and became redundant after Markward's death in 1203. By the middle of the thirteenth century political crusading had come into its own. From 1239 the cross was preached in Italy, Germany and Hungary against the excommunicate Emperor Frederick II and his followers. After the emperor's death in 1250 the crusade was renewed against his heirs Manfred and Conradin. In Germany the anti-king William of Holland was the main beneficiary of the crusading contingents recruited by the papal propagandist. In Italy a number of papal armies were operating in the 1250s, but the final success for the anti-Hohenstaufen crusade was provided by the leadership of Charles of Anjou, brother of King Louis IX of France. Charles led his crusaders on a triumphal crusade through Italy, beating Manfred at Benevento in 1266, Conradin at Tagliacozzo in 1268 and finally conquering the last Hohenstaufen outpost, the Muslim colony of Lucera, in 1269. The establishment of Angevin rule in the kingdom of Sicily did not, however, put an end to political crusading in Italy. After the Aragonese conquest of Sicily in 1282, the papacy launched a number of crusades for its return to the Angevins. These crusades came to an end in 1302 when the papacy finally accepted Aragonese rule on the island of Sicily. In northern Italy, however, the crusade against papal enemies, fuelled by the popes' exile at Avignon, operated intermittently until the 1360s in the attempt to restore the papal states to Guelf rule.

In another context, it has been argued that the political conflicts in England in the 1210s and the 1260s showed elements of political crusading, with the popes supporting King Henry IIII against their internal opponents.

IV. CRUSADES AGAINST OTHER ENEMIES OF THE CHURCH

Northeastern Europe. There is evidence from as early as 1108 that the wars fought by the German nobility against the non-Christian Wends east of the river Elbe were viewed in terms of crusading. In the context of the Second Crusade the Wendish wars were explicitly granted the status of a crusade by Pope Eugene III. The Wendish crusades were closely bound up with the colonising and missionary activities in North-Eastern Germany. In the late 1140s four crusade armies were led against the Wends made up of Danish, German and Polish participants with the archbishop of Bremen and the duke of Saxony as their principal leaders. The conquest of Dobin, Demmin and Stettin as well as the Danish occupation of Rügen in 1168 foreshadowed the Christian expansion along the Baltic coast between the late twelfth and the late fourteenth centuries, which heavily relied on crusading support. The main protagonists of these colonising and missionary wars were the archbishops of Bremen, the northern German, Danish and Swedish nobility and the military orders of the Swordbrothers and the Teutonic Knights. The first wave of colonisation between the late 1190s and the 1230s led to the occupation of Western Pommerania, Livonia and Estonia. This was supported by regular crusade propaganda in Germany and Scandinavia principally organised by the mendicant orders. Whereas Swedish crusaders continued their activities in the second half of the thirteenth century by conquering large parts of Finland, the long drawn out struggle for the occupation of Prussia and Lithuania was directed and controlled by the Teutonic Knights from the 1230s onwards, sometimes in competition with the Polish nobility. While they initially drew on crusaders recruited by the mendicant orders, the organisation of crusade support was granted directly to the Knights in the second half of the thirteenth century. Until the end of the fourteenth century, by which time most of Lithuania was christianized, a steady influx of knightly crusaders from across Europe supported the Teutonic Order in their colonizing activities.

Mongols. Although no crusade army ever confronted the Mongols in the field, the crusade machinery was set in motion against them several times. When a huge Mongol army, after having devastated parts of Poland and Hungary, threatened to invade Germany in 1241, the German bishops proclaimed a crusade, which was later confirmed by the pope. King Conrad IV agreed to lead the crusade and a great number of crusaders were recruited and large sums of money collected. But the Mongols did not cross the Danube after all and the crusade never took place. Similarly a crusade was preached in the late 1250s when another Mongol invasion of Christian Europe seemed a possibility. But once again the Mongols did not move towards Central Europe and the crusade never materialized.

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[c. maier]