God's War: A New History of the Crusades (143 page)

CONTINUING TRADITIONS

As in previous centuries, crusading continued to run in families and in regions. This could impose a sense of obligation, almost of responsibility, especially as stories of past crusading heroism circulated widely in literature, polemic and preaching. Parish churches and family homes were festooned with relics of past crusades and crusading ancestors. Tradition caused successive kings of France to be proclaimed as bearing an especial responsibility for crusading in the east, not least by themselves. The duty formed part of their kingship, a proprietorial association carefully nurtured by the first two rulers of the cadet Valois dynasty, Philip VI in the 1330s and John II in the 1360s. More junior branches of St Louis’s descendants were no less infected, notably Louis I of Bourbon and his grandson Louis II, the al-Mahdiya commander. Across Europe similar family histories encouraged members from all stations of the nobility and aristocracy to maintain the tradition, some, such as the Beauc-hamps, Mowbrays and Percys in England, or the Briennes in Champagne, boasting holy war pedigrees that stretched in some cases from
the early twelfth to the late fourteenth centuries. In the fourteenth century, families’ engagement scarcely abated.
¹⁵
Although some used holy wars as a finishing ground for a knightly education, others found them sterner training. For casualties of Nicopolis or young Geoffrey Scrope of Masham in Yorkshire, killed in the forbidding wastes of Lithuania in 1362, as for those western recruits who fought with the Hospitallers in defence of Rhodes against the Mamluks in 1444, such as Daniel Habin of Majorca, who lost a hand, or Matthew of Transylvania, deprived of the use of his right arm, these wars were no games.
¹⁶
The decline in active crusading was the result of a reduction in opportunity not, as often asserted, the other way round. In relation to eastern crusades, at least, the continuing lure of the Holy Places alone testifies to lively interest. From the 1330s and entrenched by the 1370 Cypriot-Egyptian treaty, the Mamluk rulers of Palestine followed the precedent of Saladin in allowing western Christians access to the Holy Sites at a price. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed a resurgence of large-scale western pilgrimages to Palestine and Egypt and a welter of published accounts of pilgrims’ experiences as well as formal itineraries. Many of these pilgrims at other times also fought against the infidel, but not in the Holy Land.

Compensation for the absence of active crusading was found in the round of indulgences on offer and liturgies performed. Occasionally the crusading element in the prevailing cultural
milieu
found more targeted demonstration. In 1407–8, partly as a public relations exercise, the Hospitallers of Rhodes constructed the fortress of St Peter at Bodrum, classical Halicarnassus, on the mainland opposite Cos. To pay for the hugely expensive building work, which included reusing dressed stone from the nearby mausoleum, the Hospitallers launched an appeal, backed by papal indulgences. English contributions alone helped to pay for a tower on whose walls twenty-six coats-of-arms were set up in stone, including those of King Henry IV, his four sons and the families with recent or ancient crusade pedigrees, such as the Montagues, Courtenays, Nevilles, Percys, Beauchamps and Hollands. Possibly copied for an armorial roll, they may represent the chief contributors. One set of arms was those of the FitzHughs. Henry FitzHugh had sent equipment to Bodrum in 1409; Sir William, probably Henry’s son, and his wife bought Bodrum indulgences in 1414. Bodrum retained strong links with the English section (or
langue
) of the Hospitallers throughout the
fifteenth century, William Dawney and John Langstrother, later prior of the English Hospitallers, holding the command there in 1448 and 1456 respectively.
¹⁷

Regional commitment varied but also demonstrated tenacious links with the past. The dukes of Burgundy played on their inheritance as counts of Flanders of the Flemish crusading legacy during attempts to arouse their subjects’ support for a crusade in the 1450s. For a venture directed to the relief of Constantinople, it was convenient and appropriate to invoke the memory of Baldwin IX, the first Latin emperor. Each area seemed to require its crusade heroes – St Louis in France; Richard I in England; the Iberian champions of the
reconquista
, etc. – even ones with spurious credentials, such as St Ladislas in Hungary. The Low Countries, western Germany, Champagne and northern France, the heartlands of the First Crusade, remained fertile recruiting grounds. Grafting crusading enthusiasm on to social groups not attuned by long experience proved less easy, as the relative indifference of the Polish or Hungarian nobilities in the later fifteenth century testified. Long absence of concerted preaching or actual recruitment could relegate active crusading to an increasingly eccentric if no less sincere minority, as in England after the 1330s and even more after 1400. Conversely, as in Iberia in the later fifteenth century, crusade enthusiasm could be revived by government commitment and action. Either way, cultural recognition, once established, proved extremely tenacious, even when producing only fitful ignition of official or public activity.

One sign of this came in the way crusading acted as a mechanism of social advancement. Service in holy war acted as a means of entry to the ranks of the knightly and respectable for parvenus, a ticket of admission into the secular social elite. Such rites of social passage could include meritorious service in national or royal wars, but crusading, as indicated by the emphasis placed on it by numerous lay orders of chivalry, attracted especially rewarding recognition. Nicholas Sabraham, a veteran of Crécy in 1346, made his fortune at war for three decades, from the 1330s, on English campaigns in Scotland, France and Spain. He also fought in Prussia, joined Peter of Cyprus’s crusade to Alexandria in 1365 and from there went to serve on Amadeus of Savoy’s expedition of 1366–7 to the Dardenelles and Bulgaria. Most of the crusades offered few, if any, easy pickings. A professional soldier very different from the gilded crusading youths with whom he rubbed shoulders, Sabraham
nonetheless was called to give evidence in a great armorial dispute held in the English Court of Chivalry in 1386, where he carefully described his crusading exploits.
¹⁸
They were a guarantee of his gentility of deed regardless of birth. Across the English Channel, Bertrand du Guesclin, the chief military commander and strategist under Charles V, by no means from the top drawer of the French nobility, attempted to enhance his status when fighting for French allies in Spain in 1366 by associating the Spanish war against the English with a crusade to Granada. Bertrand was even crowned ‘king of Granada’ by his employer, King Henry II of Castile.
¹⁹
The image of holy wars of the cross required little explanation or special pleading to attract admiration.

THE IMAGE OF CRUSADING

The commitment of individuals and communities to the ideals and occasional practice of crusading found expression in art and literature. At the end of Thomas Malory’s
Morte d’Arthur
(finished 1469/70), Sir Bors, Sir Blamore, Sir Ector and Sir Bleoberis finish their careers fighting ‘miscreants and Turks’ in the Holy Land.
²⁰
Judging by the contents of contemporary late fifteenth-century libraries, this was a historical but not cultural anachronism. Texts of crusade history and advice continued to be written, copied or, later, printed with undiminished energy into the sixteenth century, when new genres of vernacular literature emerged regarding the Turkish menace, particularly in Germany. Especially popular across Europe were histories and legends of the Holy Land crusades, not just with kings, princes and courtiers. Chronicles of Jerusalem, probably William of Tyre, found their way into the possession of local gentry in Norfolk and Bedfordshire in England. The Norfolk gentleman John Paston II owned a chronicle, in English, about Richard I. The printer William Caxton translated William of Tyre in 1481.
²¹
Historical knowledge was assumed. Entertaining Peter I of Cyprus to dinner in London in the winter of 1363–4, Edward III of England teased his guest that, if Peter succeeded in recovering Jerusalem, Cyprus, ‘which my ancestor Richard entrusted to your predecessor to keep’, should be restored to the English king.
²²

Contemporary news from the eastern front was equally avidly devoured, by word of mouth or in writing. Jean Waurin’s account of
the anti-Turkish wars of the 1440s reached the English court under Edward IV. Guillaume de Caoursin’s eyewitness account of the siege of Rhodes (1480), with vivid woodcut illustrations, reached a wide international audience within a decade of its appearance, soon being translated, for example, into English in 1484.
²³
Printers other than Caxton cashed in. The mid-fourteenth century pseudonymous compendium of crusade exhortation, pilgrim guide and stories of the mythic marvels of the east known as
The Travels of John Mandeville
remained an international best-seller for 200 years, transmuting into a series of at least fourteen separate versions in twelve different languages to suit contrasting tastes, purposes and regions. There was even a ‘textless’ pictorial ‘Mandeville’ derived from a Czech redaction. Some of its versions, at least, stressed the need for ‘the right children of Christ… to challenge the heritage that Our Father left us and do it out of heathen men’s hands’.
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Visual representations of crusading had long been popular. Many manuscript and printed books were embellished with especially luminous portrayals of famous crusading moments. Some of these suggest how, aesthetically, the past was hardly distinguished from the present, figures being shown in anachronistically contemporary dress. Late fifteenth-century illuminations depict Heraclius, the seventh-century Byzantine emperor whose return of the Holy Cross to Jerusalem opens William of Tyre’s chronicle, sporting the heraldic device of fifteenth-century Habsburg German emperors. Stained glass, murals, sculpture and decorative tiles all provided media for commemorating a heroic past that allowed some to dream of a heroic future. In the 1390s, Thomas of Woodstock adorned his castle at Pleshey with fifteen tapestries on the romances of Godfrey of Bouillon.
²⁵
Seventy years later, the demand for such artefacts led to the London merchant Sir Thomas Cooke being arraigned for treason because he refused to sell to Edward IV’s mother-in-law an arras ‘wrought in the most richest wise with gold of the story of the siege of Jerusalem’.
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Dramatic tableaux and ritualized plays supplied another medium to remind audiences of the significance of their crusading heritage. In 1378, Charles V of France entertained the emperor Charles IV of Germany in Paris with a lavish production of the siege of Jerusalem, possibly stage-managed by Philip of Mézières.
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The impact of this presentation was later enshrined in manuscript illuminations of the event. On one
level a wallow in shared chivalric nostalgia, the Paris production possessed a practical resonance. Both the French and German courts had been involved in actual crusade planning in the 1360s and were subject to more recent appeals for action against the Ottomans. Such play-acting could reduce the huge gap in time and circumstance, in a manner parallel to the static impression of time often given in church sermons; the past was somehow contemporary, whether biblical or crusading. These displays possessed purpose: to create a sympathetic atmosphere for the circulation of crusading ideas and to demonstrate continued official commitment, even of a generalized sort. Charles V was the first king of France not personally to be involved in crusading or crusade planning since Louis VI (d. 1137). The Paris
fête
asserted his credentials nonetheless. Elsewhere, such dramatic performances promoted more immediate causes, as at Mons in 1454, when the Burgundian court witnessed a pageant on the Fourth Crusade, Baldwin of Flanders and the 1204 capture of Constantinople.
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These extravagant theatricals raise questions of seriousness and sincerity. They were showy entertainments, not recruiting platforms. Yet they revealed the cultural vivacity of crusading and a receptiveness to retaining at least a sentimentalized idealism within which wars of the cross could be thought of as possible as well as admirable. In the light of those who fought and died in such wars, this playfulness contained a serious message.

CRUSADES AND SALVATION

Evidence from popular devotional practices confirm that two central elements of the appeal of crusading retained potency throughout the later middle ages and beyond: the offer of remission of sins and fear of the infidel, usually couched in terms of the recovery of the Holy Land. Of all the continuities of crusading, its promotion by the church remained the clearest and most ubiquitous. The apparatus of privileges remained in place. Clerical taxation became habitual, if localized. The offer of indulgences remained part of a general penitential system, increasingly commercial as redemption of vows or even the performance of any particular meritorious act gave way to simple sale and payment. The doctrine of a Treasury of Merits, a sort of divine bank account laid up by God to be drawn on by the penitent faithful, was perfected
by Clement VI. This further institutionalized crusading indulgences. Preaching, donations and legacies persisted. The chests set aside for contributions stayed in parish churches. The increasingly bureaucratic procedures of the papacy and local dioceses still administered the crusade, its promotion, privileges, organization and finance. At the most mundane, parochial level, the liturgy for the recovery of the Holy Land and appeals to God to turn back the infidel reached the daily lives of the faithful throughout Christendom until the Reformation tore it apart.