God's War: A New History of the Crusades (145 page)

The main wars of the cross against Christians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries revolved around the temporal position of the papacy in Italy, the defence of the Papal States, church rights, access to ecclesiastical wealth and fears of territorial encirclement. This last was no paranoid fiction. Thirteenth-century popes, such as Innocent IV, spent long periods in exile from Rome. A regularly peripatetic papacy presiding over an increasingly effective centralized bureaucracy and growing international recognition of papal ecclesiastical jurisdiction offered an irony not lost on papal adherents as much as opponents. Physical insecurity contradicted papal claims to temporal as well as spiritual plenitude of power. Directing crusades as a remedy implemented the ideological implications of papal ambition as well as confronting their material adversaries. Thus crusading became a major device in papal attempts to protect its vassals and allies. To achieve independence in Italy and primacy in Christendom, popes applied crusading to wars with the Hohenstaufen rulers of Germany and Sicily (1239–68), the Wars of the Sicilian Vespers to restore Angevin rule in Sicily (1282–1302), campaigns to secure papal interests in central and northern Italy during the evacuation of the papal Curia to Avignon (1309–77) and attempts to resolve by force the Great Schism (1378–1417), when two, then three popes claimed to be the legitimate successors of St Peter.

Papal ideology could easily become distracted to essentially secular conflicts, as in England in 1216–17 and 1263–5.
⁴⁴
Between 1208 and 1214, England had lain under a papal interdict (which meant that the church ceased to function except for infant baptism and Extreme Unction) because of King John’s refusal to accept Innocent III’s nominee Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury. John had been excommunicated (1209–13). In 1213, as part of the agreement that ended the interdict, John made England and Ireland fiefs of the papacy. After his attempt to win back lost lands in France in 1214, John took the cross in 1215, in part to gain protection against the growing threat of rebellion against his harsh financial exactions and roughshod management of his nobility. This failed to prevent England’s slide into civil war, but the alliance with the Roman church persisted. After John’s death, his nine-year-old heir, Henry III, reinforced his credentials as a deserving recipient
of church assistance by taking the cross immediately after his coronation in 1216. The crusader’s privilege paid dividends. In January 1216, Innocent III offered remission of sins to those who fought for King John; his opponents were branded as renegades hindering the crusade to the Holy Land. Indulgences were repeated by Honorius III in September 1216. Crusaders destined for the east were permitted to deflect their crusade vow to fight for the king. Contemporary chroniclers were unequivocal in describing royalists as
crucesignati
, the victors over the rebels at the crucial battle of Lincoln being depicted wearing the white crosses of the Angevins, albeit on their backs, not shoulders. Although the documentary evidence is more equivocal, it seems possible that a number of individuals took the cross to defend the English king in 1216–17. More certainly, eyewitnesses painted the conflict in explicitly crusading terms through language that sat comfortably with Innocent III’s extended use of wars of the cross.

Half a century and a weight of crusades against Christians later, there was no doubt. In the autumn of 1263, in answer to an appeal from Henry III, Urban IV appointed Gui of Foulquois (subsequently Pope Clement IV) to negotiate peace between the king and his domestic opponents, if necessary by preaching the cross against them. The rebel victory at Lewes in May 1264 denied Gui access to England and, beyond excommunicating them, there is no sign Gui preached the cross. However, as Pope Clement IV, Gui renewed the royalist crusade. In the summer of 1265, Cardinal Ottobuono was instructed to preach the cross in north-west Europe and to raise a clerical tax in England, avoiding areas of southern Europe where Charles of Anjou’s crusade to Sicily was being raised. In the event, the royalists crushed the rebels under Simon of Montfort at Evesham in August 1265 before any continental crusade force had been gathered. Nonetheless, the willingness of Urban IV and Clement IV to throw the full panoply of Holy Land crusading behind the political interests of their temporal allies reveals how far the war of the cross had become integrated into all aspects of papal secular policy, in the eyes of its promoters, synonymous, if only rhetorically, with the defence of the faith, i.e. the Roman church. This assumption, falling as a material burden on the whole church through taxation, grated on many, especially when it seemed to promise no end to conflict and bore few tangible benefits.

The war against the Hohenstaufen (1239–68) witnessed the most
sustained pursuit of this policy.
⁴⁵
It marked a final collapse of hopes for a papal–imperial alliance that had seemed attainable on a number of occasions between 1180 and 1230, not least during the youth of Frederick II, when he was a papal protégé and designated commander of the pope’s crusade. The dispute derived from an intractable range of problems. The dynastic claims of Frederick to rule Sicily and the German empire, including rights over northern Italy, posed a potential challenge to papal independence. The creation of the Papal States inevitably led to tensions over frontier regions, especially the March of Ancona and the duchy of Spoleto. Local territorial rivalries were complicated by the special relationship of pope and emperor, symbolized by papal recognition and coronation of imperial candidates. Control of Sicily, as a papal fief, provided another focus of conflict, especially as Frederick and his successors governed the church in their lands with scant regard for papal supremacy and disdain for papal interference. The bitterness of papal hostility towards Frederick II in particular was a product of previously close attachment turning sour. A fundamental lack of trust in what Urban IV called a ‘viper race’ fuelled the tenacity with which the successive popes pursued Frederick and his heirs.

Earlier papally sponsored campaigns against Frederick II, such as that under John of Brienne in 1228–30, had been funded by clerical taxation. Frederick had twice been excommunicated, in 1227 and March 1239. However, only in the winter of 1239–40 did Gregory IX call for a formal crusade against the emperor. The pope’s allies, the Lombard League of northern Italian cities, had been heavily defeated by Frederick in 1237. Imperial forces threatened Rome, where, as so often in the period, support for the pope remained fickle. By summoning a crusade, Gregory could expect to stiffen local resistance but also mobilize a larger coalition in northern Italy and Germany by making church funds available to those prepared to take the field against the emperor. The crusade, renewed in 1240 and 1243, was primarily preached in imperial lands north and south of the Alps. Anti-kings were established in Germany: Henry Raspe of Thuringia (1246–7), then William of Holland (1247–56). Ringingly endorsed by the First Council of Lyons (1245), these anti-Hohenstaufen crusades attracted many recruits, some defecting from Louis IX’s crusade. The association of crusading to the political conflicts of Italy and Germany lent the anti-imperialist cause an element of institutional commitment and international appeal (or
outrage, depending on the observer) they would otherwise not have enjoyed. However, the crusade’s main contribution was financial: the church subsidized the war to destroy the Hohenstaufen, which would otherwise have been beyond the resources, let alone will, of the motley collection of secular lords ranged with the papacy.

On Frederick’s death, attempts to reach an accommodation with his successors failed, and crusades were renewed against his heir, Conrad IV, and Frederick’s illegitimate son, Manfred, regent (1250–58), then king, of Sicily. Increasingly, the focus of crusading fell on Italy and Sicily. In 1255 Alexander IV persuaded Henry III of England to accept the crown of Sicily on behalf of his second son, Edmund, hoping to add the resources of a secular kingdom to those of the church. English involvement proved abortive, as the financial obligations of the project and the extravagance of its ambition helped provoke opposition and civil war in England (1258–65). However, the scheme of hiring a secular prince to attack Manfred was revived by Urban IV and Clement IV, who secured the services of Louis IX’s youngest brother, Charles of Anjou. After a lightning campaign in the winter of 1265–6, Charles defeated and killed Manfred at the battle of Benevento in February 1266. Two years later, Charles secured his position by victory at Tagliacozzo (August 1268) over Conrad IV’s now teenage son and titular king of Jerusalem, Conradin. In October 1268, Charles had Conradin executed at Naples, the last of the male Hohenstaufen line.
⁴⁶

The baleful legacy of the crusades of conquest in southern Italy and Sicily infected the politics of the peninsula for generations. Opponents of papal interests became known as Ghibellines (
Ghibellini
), a nickname apparently derived from a twelfth-century Hohenstaufen war cry, ‘Waiblingen’, the name of a family estate in Swabia. Papal supporters and anti-imperialists, by deliberate contrast, were described as Guelphs, recognizing the long German opposition of the Welf family to the Hohenstaufen. Crusading became almost endemic in Italian politics, crusades being launched against Ezzelino and Alberic of Romano in 1255 and Sardinia in 1263. A new lease of papal energy followed the Sicilian uprising against Charles of Anjou in March 1282, known as the Sicilian Vespers, and the annexation of the island a few months later by Peter III of Aragon, whose wife was Frederick II’s daughter.
⁴⁷
In January 1283, a new crusade against Aragon was promulgated by Martin IV, to which Philip III of France was recruited. Philip’s invasion of Aragon in
1285 ended in dismal failure. Having wasted the summer months in a fruitless siege of Gerona in north-east Catalonia and losing his fleet to the Aragonese navy, Philip was forced to retreat, during which he died. This debacle probably persuaded Philip III’s son and heir, the inscrutable but single-minded Philip IV, to avoid such direct entanglements in the future. Further crusade bulls were issued when Frederick of Sicily, Peter III of Aragon’s younger son, defied his elder brother James II of Aragon by retaining control of Sicily despite a papal-Aragonese agreement in 1295 restoring the island to the Angevins. This fresh round of crusades only ended with the Treaty of Caltabellota in 1302 between Frederick of Sicily and the new papal claimant to the island, Charles of Valois, younger brother of Philip IV of France. Thereafter, there were no more crusades against Sicily. Although the crusade weapon may have helped destroy the Hohenstaufen, the final territorial settlement hardly matched papal aspirations; Sicily remained divided from the kingdom of Naples for another two centuries.

In the fourteenth century, Italian battlelines fragmented, especially with the papacy largely absent from the peninsula (from 1305, at Avignon from 1309 until 1377). Popes persisted in using the crusade to further their policies.
⁴⁸
Twice aggressive attempts were launched to reassert imperial claims in Italy, by Henry VII (in 1310–13) and Louis IV (1328–30), German kings eager to acquire the traditional imperial title, the latter’s move on Rome eliciting a crusade against him. Most Italian crusades in the period were applied to more local targets; Boniface VIII in dealing with his rivals the Colonna in 1297–8; the suppression of the Piedmontese heretical leader Dolcino in 1306–7; or preventing Venetian annexation of Ferrara (1309–10). John XXII showed himself particularly bellicose. The
signori
(military rulers of cities) of Lombardy, Tuscany and central Italy tended to be anti-papal Ghibellines, prominently the Visconti of Milan. Florence and the rump Angevin kingdom of Naples favoured the papal, Guelph, side. Regardless of the traditional crusade rhetoric, privileges, funding and accoutrements, such as red and white crosses adorning the banners of John XXII’s Italian crusaders, self-interest, not principle or faith, determined action.
⁴⁹
Thus in 1334 Guelph Florence combined with its rival, Ghibelline Milan, to thwart papal plans for a new Lombard puppet state. Only a very narrow, technical, partisan and increasingly unconvincing equation of the political interests of popes with the spiritual health of Christendom could
endow these wars with religious significance. This did not prevent participants enjoying the crusader status and privileges on offer. The wars would have been fought in any case and men would have fought in them. The crusade merely added lustre; it hardly determined their practical nature. As in Spain, the crusade in Italy became increasingly a fiscal device, a means of raising money for war.

Major campaigns over the Papal States were organized by cardinallegates Bertrand du Poujet after 1319 and Gil Albornoz after 1353. Crusades were instigated against Milan and Ferrara in 1321; Milan, Mantua and rebels in Ancona in 1324; Cesena and Faenza in 1354; and Milan again in 1360, 1363 and 1368. After 1357, a new element was introduced, with crusades directed to eradicating those mercenary companies not in papal pay, in 1357, 1361 and 1369/70. Huge sums were spent, especially by the spendthrift amateur war-monger John XXII. Yet outside Italy, the same popes were reluctant to apply crusading to other people’s wars, such as those between France and England. Even in Italy, it is hard to see how the use of the crusade as a local coercive weapon, with strictly limited regional objectives, preaching, recruitment and impact, made much of a difference. They may not have been theoretical perversions of the institution of crusading. They were certainly enthusiastically embraced by those who were on the pope’s side in the first place. They may have persuaded more to join the spiritual gravy train. They ensured the crusade remained embedded in western European experience, yet only on a limited scale. The Italian wars were not universal, even in propaganda. Although canonically legitimate – how could they not be, as popes determined what was canonical? – the papal crusades in Italy, and crusades against Christians generally, lacked the distinctive numinous historical resonance that gave holy wars elsewhere their particular spiritual charge.