God's War: A New History of the Crusades (81 page)

The reason for the notoriety of the Fourth Crusade lay and lies in its outcome, the conquest of large tracts of the Christian Byzantine empire after its capital Constantinople had been sacked by the crusaders in April 1204. Yet Innocent’s intention had been to reverse the hung verdict of the Third Crusade and the disappointment of the German expedition in Palestine, not revive Henry VI’s threats to the Greeks of 1195–6. Byzantium inevitably figured in Innocent’s calculations, as it had to in those of all planners of major eastern crusades since 1095. However a
hostile assault on Constantinople formed no part of the original papal scheme. Innocent’s motives, as revealed in his bull of August 1198, in so far that they embraced considerations beyond the need to recover all of the Holy Land, concerned his promotion of papal authority, in the operation of the crusade itself and in his interference in secular politics to achieve it. There was no mention of Byzantium in the 1198 or subsequent bulls for the enterprise. The controversy surrounding the Fourth Crusade revolves centrally around the issue of intent. If the violent capture and barbaric pillage of Constantinople and the subsequent dispossession of the Greeks were crimes, were they the result of deliberate malice, conspiracy or a series of accidental decisions that led to unforeseen although consciously embraced consequences? Was the destruction of Byzantium murder, manslaughter or even self-defence?

Immediately, crusade recruitment proved another damp squib. It is sometimes argued that Innocent III wished to exclude reigning monarchs from commanding his crusade. The bickering during the Third Crusade presented a clear warning of potential difficulties, while Henry VI’s crusade appeared to contest papal authority itself. Yet Innocent’s eagerness to resolve the political conflict between Philip II and Richard I, prominent in the bull of August 1198, indicated an understanding that the financial and political resources of rulers offered the best chance for a successful crusade. It was less the success of papal planning than the failure of papal diplomacy and continuing international instability that threw the burden of military leadership on counts, not kings. Peter Capuano’s mission to France served to irritate rather than pacify. By turns tactless, ingratiating and sanctimonious, Cardinal Peter, a notably effective preacher, seems to have combined the Gladstonian manner of addressing individuals as if they were public meetings and the Disraelian habit of laying on emotion with a trowel. In December 1198, when Peter suggested to Richard I that the king might agree to a truce with Philip II, Richard was so infuriated at being lectured at that he threatened the legate with castration.
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Richard’s unexpected death in April 1199, from a crossbow bolt wound suffered while besieging a rebel castle at Chalus in the Limousin, and the subsequent succession crisis in the Angevin lands that lasted until Philip II’s treaty with King John at Le Goulet in May 1200, further precluded royal involvement. The only benefit the crusade derived from this long crisis lay with those lords who found
themselves on the wrong side of events and were thus open to recruitment for a conveniently good cause 2,500 miles away.

The preaching campaign promised to be more efficient. A chain of authority reached from the pope to legates, local ecclesiastical hierarchies and specially appointed preachers with the powers to conscript deputies, including monks and canons. The problem lay not in the message but the promotion and reception. In November 1198, Innocent pulled off a public relations coup by enlisting the charismatic French evangelist Fulk of Neuilly, who already enjoyed a large popular following for his brand of austere moral rearmament.
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A parish priest of imposing bearing, a notorious gourmand, Fulk had honed his rhetorical skills during a stay at the sophisticated theological schools in Paris, where the pope as young man may have encountered him. Despite this elite training, Fulk affected the common touch in his career as an itinerant holy man. He made his reputation in the late 1190s preaching a return to apostolic virtue, the practice of simplicity and poverty and a rejection of outward signs of corruption such as usury, luxury and sexual licence. He attracted stories of miracles based on those found in the Gospels and Acts of the Apostles: healing the sick; curing the blind, dumb and lame; exorcism; reforming prostitutes; and escaping from chains and prison. Although covertly something of an establishment figure himself, Fulk – and his admirers – cultivated the figure of the prophet apart, John the Baptist or even Peter the Hermit. This carefully fashioned image of plain-talking fearless pursuit of the truth and redemption, so useful for a professional evangelist, was greatly enhanced by his well-publicized encounter with Richard I. He accused the king to his face of pride, avarice and sensuality, drawing Richard’s neat riposte: ‘I give my pride to the Templars; my avarice to the Cistercians; and my sensuality to the Benedictines.’
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Fulk lacked shyness; in mock humility and floods of tears he told an audience of Cistercians in 1201 that he had personally signed up 200,000 crusaders, a preposterous claim, but one that reflected a possibly necessary self-belief. In the words of his contemporary eulogist and fellow preacher, James of Vitry, Fulk was a star (‘stellam in medio nebule’).
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As such, Innocent was evidently keen to harness his fame, popularity and promotional ability to the crusade. Fulk embodied Innocent’s attempt to integrate the war of the cross into the wider reform movement, loosely described as Apostolic Poverty. Fulk’s appointment as a
preacher of the cross in November 1198 allowed him free rein, not least in choosing his own evangelizing lieutenants. His crusade preaching took him to Flanders, Normandy and Brittany as well as his home region of the Ile de France.
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A measure of his impact is the indelible impression his preaching left in the memories of contemporaries. Two
crucesignati
who wrote accounts of their experiences, the grand Geoffrey of Villehardouin, and a Picard knight of modest means, Robert of Clari, both opened their histories of the Fourth Crusade with Fulk’s preaching. To emphasize the importance of Abbot Martin of Pairis near Basel in preaching the cross, his panegyrist Gunther took pains to associate him with Fulk’s mission. Yet the tangible results of Fulk’s preaching were elusive, at least in regard to enrolling lords and property owners on whom the success of any expedition depended. No important recruits came forward for another year, by which time Fulk’s appeal may have faded.

Despite Innocent III’s theology of redemption and the Lord’s War, aspects of the alliance of Apostolic Poverty with crusading jarred. Robert of Clari noted that, as well as preaching the cross, Fulk had collected ‘much wealth to be carried to the Holy Land overseas’, presumably in the form of alms and donations, as encouraged by the papacy. James of Vitry’s account is less innocuous and more revealing.

[Fulk] began amassing a great sum of money from the alms of the faithful which he had undertaken to pay out to poor men who took the cross, both soldiers and others. But through avarice or other base motive, he did not make these payments, and from that time, by God’s hidden judgement, the power and influence of his preaching swiftly declined. His wealth grew, but the fear and respect he had commanded fell away.
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According to James, following these charges of embezzlement, his reputation shot to pieces, Fulk slunk away into retirement and death. In fact he continued to play an important, if only iconic, role, at least in observers’ memories.

He was not the last evangelist to find preaching and the crusade a corrosive mix. In the sermons of many of the Paris-trained moralists who promoted Innocent III’s crusades, the concentration lay as much, occasionally more, with the redemptive and reforming dimensions of the message than with the military or material. One of those Fulk recruited to preach the cross, Eustace abbot of St Gemer de Flay, after
preaching tours of England in 1200 and 1201 was remembered for his vitriolic attacks on illicit trading and breaches of the Sabbath rather than for his urging of holy war.
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Fulk’s difficulty lay in a series of potential conflicts and contradictions between his usual stance against usury and the requirements of the crusade. Insistence on the rejection of usury (i.e. credit) and the abandonment of wealth in favour of the rigorous
vita apostolica
presented aspirant crusade contributors and participants with material and moral quandaries. Fulk found himself preaching poverty and the evils of money, which he was simultaneously salting away. Whether he was actually corrupt hardly mattered: as always, there were fellow clerics eager to cast the first stone. Fulk had built his name on perceptions; he lost it the same way. Yet, despite the whiff of scandal, his efforts were remembered as seminal. It may have been no coincidence that some of the areas he toured in northern France, including Flanders, produced large contingents of crusaders. Both the Champenois Villehardouin and Picard Robert of Clari stressed Fulk’s probity; perhaps they had heard the stories of embezzlement. Despite the rumours, Fulk remained attached to the crusade venture until his death in May 1202, attending on the crusade leaders at Soissons in May 1201 and addressing the General Chapter of the Cistercians, an order heavily involved in the preaching campaign, in September the same year.

Despite the claims made by and for Fulk, most recognized the guiding hand of Pope Innocent behind the charismatic French preacher. Whatever success the preachers enjoyed, in 1198–9 the crusade hardly progressed publicly, not least because of Innocent’s difficulties. Fulk’s own travails indicated one of Innocent’s problems: money. In December 1199, with his proposed deadline long past and no prospect of royal involvement, the pope proclaimed a tax on clerical profits of a fortieth (2.5 per cent) in order to pay ‘for the upkeep of fighting men’.
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To try to forestall resistance to this novel demonstration of papal authority, he promised the levy would create no precedent, an indication that Innocent’s conception of papal power still lacked general consensus. Hiring paid troops on crusade was not a new idea. Conrad III had done it in the Holy Land in 1148, as had both Philip II and Richard I on their arrival in 1191. Richard had paid for his fleet and its sailors. Henry VI had provided wages for a mounted regiment at least 3,000 strong in 1195. If, as James of Vitry reported, Fulk of Neuilly was raising funds to pay soldiers, then Innocent had recognized the need for such a pool
of men and money from the start. Finance and mercenaries were to lie at the centre of how the Fourth Crusade operated and developed.

In 1198–9, Innocent’s eastern schemes were taking time to coalesce. Elsewhere, grants of crusade privileges, as against the Livs renewed in 1198, cost little, the burden of action being taken by locals. The wars in France and Germany were partly responsible for the delay in the Holy Land enterprise. More pressing were political difficulties in Italy, where a German adventurer and former imperial steward, Markward of Anweiler (d. 1202), was attempting to carve out a territory for himself from the lands of his former master Henry VI in southern Italy and Sicily. Innocent as guardian of the rights of Henry’s infant son Frederick II, sought to organize resistance. In January 1199, he toyed with the idea of granting Holy Land plenary indulgences to those resisting Markward on the mainland. By November, perhaps as a last resort when it appeared that Markward and his Muslim allies had Sicily at their mercy, Innocent offered Holy Land indulgences to those prepared to fight the invaders, in part because he professed to regard Markward’s ambitions as a hindrance to the Palestine project. War in Italy and Sicily clearly influenced arrangements for any crusade to the east, if only by denying crusaders safe passage to ports and access to transport. The effect of Innocent’s grant is hard to judge. It does not appear that the other central crusading features of preaching and giving the cross were employed, even though the conflict has been called the first ‘political crusade’.
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Besides distracting the pope from the eastern question, the wars in Italy and Livonia confirmed Innocent’s inclusive interpretation and use of the holy war of the cross. His theology was in place. Preaching had begun to raise the consciousness of the faithful. The bull of August 1198, coming so soon on the heels of Innocent’s accession and the end of the German crusade, had confirmed a near-permanent position for Holy Land crusading in the ecclesiastical and religious polity of the western church. However, to convert ambition into action required the initiative not of the pope, legates and clergy alone or even the masses enthused by crusade evangelists. To get anywhere, Innocent’s new crusade, as he had admitted in his bull, relied on the commitment and leadership of the secular rich and powerful.

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The Fourth Crusade: Preparations

The central irony of the Fourth Crusade sprang from its achievements. The capture of Constantinople in April 1204 and the subsequent annexation by western lords of large tracts of the Greek empire constituted for many participants and witnesses a memorable and admirable triumph of western chivalry. Against great odds, as one of their leaders Geoffrey of Villehardouin was later at pains to emphasize, the crusaders had overcome ‘the greatest, most powerful, and most strongly fortified city in the world’.
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Yet every step of the way – from the treaty with Venice that insisted on a general muster there in 1202; to the attack on the Dalmatian port of Zara; to the diversion to Byzantium in 1203 – was accompanied by divisions, doubts, arguments and defections. The triumph itself seemingly required constant justification, at the time and subsequently. The Greek conquests failed to ignite much western interest or support, at least once the great holy booty of relics had been secured. This ‘new France’, as Innocent’s successor Honorius III called it, failed to capture the imagination to compete with the Holy Land. While Byzantium never fully recovered from the trauma of defeat and partition, the effect of the Fourth Crusade on most of western Europe remained peripheral. The exception was Venice, a city that had gambled and gained hugely on this unexpected inauguration of its international empire. Yet the image of a Christian army of crusaders laying waste the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople appeared, at the very least, striking, if not actively disturbing. The pope was appalled.
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A victory of pragmatism, perhaps even desperation, over idealism, conscience, even, some argued, law, the Fourth Crusade left its main purpose unrealized, the recovery of Jerusalem. Whatever the religious dimension of attacking the schismatic Greeks, the essential excuse for the events of 1203–4 depended on a variety of just war explanations allied to the rationale of expediency. By
the time the enterprise to fight for the Holy Land was effectively called off in the summer of 1205, there had been no holy war. The crusade had been cancelled before it had begun.