God's War: A New History of the Crusades (82 page)

RECRUITMENT AND FINANCE

Early recruitment for Innocent III’s crusade owed much to a ghost. Looking back half a century later, a knowledgeable Cistercian, Alberic of Trois-Fontaines, characterized the enterprise as ‘an overseas expedition of nobles signed with the Cross who had formerly abandoned King Philip when King Richard attacked, as well as other barons’.
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Half a decade of intense conflict had forced most of the higher nobility of France to choose between allegiance to the Capetians or alliance with the Angevins. In the late 1190s, Richard’s partisans included the counts of Flanders, Blois and St Pol, all prominent future leaders of the crusade. The death of Richard in April 1199 transformed prospects. While he lived, few nobles in any region of France would have been happy or sensible to leave for the east with the contest between the kings of France and England active and unresolved. No amount of fine words from Fulk of Neuilly could shift political necessities. The value of church protection for absent crusaders had been starkly exposed by the fate of Richard’s own French lands in 1193–4. However, on Richard’s death, new accommodations were reached, not least because of the rebarbative personality of Richard’s successor John, one of the most unsuccessful medieval monarchs who lost an empire and united his own baronage in dislike, resentment, fear and, ultimately, rebellion. The awkwardness facing Richard’s former allies could honourably be resolved by a decision to take the cross, a move that would serve the interests and win the approval of the king of France. Many of the great lords of northern France were young men. In 1199, the counts of Flanders, Blois and Champagne were all in their twenties, childless or with infants as heirs. For King Philip, their absence on crusade would remove proven or potential troublemakers and offer chances for lucrative royal intervention in their territories through regency or wardship arrangements.

In the winter of 1199–1200 a closely related group of great nobles from northern France accepted the cross, the counts of Champagne and Blois during a tournament at Ecry-sur-Aisne on Advent Sunday,
28 November, and the count of Flanders in Bruges on Ash Wednesday, 23 February.
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Theobald of Champagne and Louis of Blois were cousins. Baldwin of Flanders was married to Theobald’s sister, Marie, who took the cross with him, although heavily pregnant. The dates were not coincidental, each falling on the first days of the two great penitential seasons of the Christian year, Advent and Lent, familiar times to take the penitential vow of the cross. These were far from spontaneous acts, each count having assembled large numbers of important vassals to take the cross. The timing may also indicate wider preparations involving the pope, although there is no direct evidence for this. A month after the ceremony at Ecry, Innocent issued his bull announcing his own financial provision for the expedition.
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The pope may have been waiting for news of the public commitment by the French nobles. Certainly the preamble to the bull of 31 December implied that action had already begun to which the pope wished to be seen to contribute. He also assigned two papal legates to travel to the Holy Land. At the same time, the preaching campaign was revived or extended, for example to Germany and the British Isles.
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The preaching campaign for the Fourth Crusade was organized through three agencies: papal legates; local bishops; and the Cistercians. Even Fulk of Neuilly fitted this scheme. Innocent declared that his appointment to preach the cross had been made with the ‘advice and assent’ of the legate to France, Peter Capuano.
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A well-informed Cistercian source insisted that Fulk had previously adopted the cross at the order’s general chapter at Cîteaux on 4 September 1198 and subsequently had failed to persuade many Cistercians to help in the preaching campaign. It was later alleged in Outremer that some of Fulk’s ‘innumerable wealth’ was deposited with the Cistercians, who sent it to the Holy Land to pay for repairs to the walls of Tyre, Beirut and Acre.
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Whatever the truth or pious fictions associating Fulk with the Cistercians, other members of the order played significant roles both in preaching and accompanying the crusade. Abbot Martin of Pairis roused considerable enthusiasm at Basel, probably in May 1201, after a modest response to the earlier preaching of the local bishop. He subsequently joined the Basel crusaders on their journey to the muster at Venice in the summer of 1202. The abbots of Loos and Les Vaux de Cernay were leading figures on the expedition itself, although finding themselves on opposite sides of the argument over the diversion to
Byzantium. Cistercians, including the abbot of Luciedo, were among the entourage of Boniface marquis of Montferrat when he arrived in France to accept the leadership of the crusade in the late summer of 1201; they may have been instrumental in persuading him to accept the task. In September 1201, the Cistercian General Chapter at Cîteaux played host to Boniface and other crusade leaders at an assembly that included Fulk of Neuilly and, possibly, Martin of Pairis.
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The evangelical tradition of St Bernard and the Second Crusade, which had sustained Cistercian enthusiasm for the crusade after 1187, provided the expedition’s organizers with a useful web of proselytizing, information and influence. The order was exempted from the clerical tax of 1199. Its role perhaps added spice to Richard I’s gift to them of his greed.

However, as before, preaching operated as part of a process of public commitment. When Martin of Pairis preached at Basel, his audience were bursting with expectation, filled by rumours of preaching elsewhere, ‘prepared in their hearts to enlist in Christ’s camp… hungrily anticipating an exhortation of this sort’.
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Whatever frisson of excitement or moment of epiphany struck congregations, the decision to take the cross depended on a long chain of conscious individual and collective calculations and decisions. This deliberate and complex activity took time to gain the acceptance, permission and support of family, lords, tenants or vassals, and to begin the necessary material as well as spiritual preparations. The sermons stood as ritualized representations of this, taking the cross confirming as much as inspiring enlistment. But months and years were required to convert the commitment into action, because, unlike the First Crusaders in 1095–6, their successors increasingly knew what to expect and took pains to anticipate the difficulties.

Between 1199 and 1202, crusade recruitment extended from the Irish Sea to the Adriatic, from Saxony to Lombardy and Provence. Yet the core regions stretched from Flanders southwards through Champagne and the Ile de France to the Loire. It gave the appearance of a very French affair. The carefully crafted ceremony at Ecry lent important momentum. One of those who took the cross there with Count Theobald, Geoffrey of Villehardouin, marshal of Champagne, noted that ‘people throughout the country were greatly impressed when men of such high standing took the cross’.
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Whatever private conviction or enthusiasm prompted responses to the call of the cross, networks of family, lordship, region, community and tradition exerted a powerful
influence. As with a number of the German crusade leaders four years earlier, the youth of some of the French counts may have encouraged adventure. Preaching alone was insufficient. Many noble
crucesignati
boasted distinguished crusading pedigrees. Theobald of Champagne’s father, Count Henry I, had twice visited the Holy Land, the first time with the Second Crusade; his elder brother, Count Henry II, from whom he had had inherited the county, had been one of the commanders of the Third Crusade and ruler of Jerusalem 1192–7. Louis of Blois, as a teenager, had campaigned with his father in Palestine on the Third Crusade. Baldwin of Flanders was heir to one of the most distinguished of all crusade traditions, stretching back to Count Robert II on the First Crusade and including three other twelfth-century counts. Other veterans included Geoffrey of Villehardouin, who had spent four years in a Muslim prison after being captured outside the camp at Acre in 1190, and Simon de Montfort, who had only just returned from the Holy Land.
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In retelling the story of the Fourth Crusade, eyewitnesses grouped noble recruits in regional or lordship associations. The Picard knight Robert of Clari described bodies of crusaders from Picardy, Flanders, Burgundy, Champagne, the Ile de France, the Beauvaisis and the Chartrain, dividing them between the very rich and those he called ‘poor’, men of his own modest but knightly standing who demonstrated and shared in the ‘prouesse’ of the chivalric elite, if not always their pick of the booty.
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Villehardouin similarly listed recruits according to family and regional affinities, although he arranged them more hierarchically under the precedence of their local counts. When Baldwin of Flanders took the cross, his wife and brother, Henry, and a significant entourage of local nobles accompanied him. His example was soon followed by neighbouring lords in Artois and Picardy, such as Hugh IV count of St Pol and his nephew Count Peter of Amiens, one of whose vassals was Robert of Clari. In Flanders, as in Champagne and Blois-Chartres, the public commitment of the great regional overlord drew in wider aristocratic circles. In Burgundy, by contrast, with Duke Eudes III declining to participate, numbers of prominent lords recruited were fewer, and included Odo of Champlitte and his brother William, who were closely related to the Champagne comital family. However, recruitment was not confined to the networks of locality, kin and clientage in northern France. Although there was minimal enrolment in England, by 1202,
crusaders from southern Burgundy and Forez were making their way east via Marseilles. Southern Germany and the Rhineland had been evangelized from early 1200 to some effect. The force from Basel that set out in 1202 included Abbot Martin of Pairis, who had led some of the local preaching. This alternative focus of support around local bishops or a monastic order, such as the Cistercians, was shown by the bishops of Autun in Burgundy, Soissons and Troyes in Champagne, the abbot of Loos in Flanders and, more eccentrically, the bishop of Halberstadt in Saxony, an unorthodox crusader.

In 1202, Conrad of Krosigk, the new bishop of Halberstadt, was excommunicated by the papal legate, Cardinal Guy of Palestrina, for his fierce partisanship on behalf of Philip of Swabia, whose claims to the German throne were then being strongly opposed by Innocent III. Undaunted, Bishop Conrad took the cross on 7 April 1202, ‘judging it wiser to fall into the hands of God than into the hands of men’.
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After accompanying the main crusade force from Venice to Zara and Constantinople, he fulfilled his vows in the Holy Land late in 1204. Only then did he receive absolution for his excommunication, reluctantly confirmed by the pope in June 1205. For the whole of his crusade, Bishop Conrad was an excommunicate. His equivocal status did not seem to interfere with his contacts with ecclesiastical authorities nor inhibit his acquisition in the Greek capital of choice relics, silks, precious stones and other lustrous fabrics and tapestries. Conrad’s status and enthusiasm cut across legal niceties. He seems to have arranged for his memoirs to be recorded during his retirement in 1209. In them, acceptance by the mass of sceptical crusaders of the decision to divert the crusade to Constantinople in 1203 was ascribed to the crusaders being ‘swayed partly by prayers, partly by price’.
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Prayers and price: rather a neat description of the whole crusade.

The piety of crusaders in the cause of the Holy Land should not be discounted. Documentary as well as chronicle evidence for the now traditional pious bequests and arrangement of affairs survives in some abundance. The testimony of events proves personal and collective commitment even to death. As
crucesignati
poets put it, the choice between the lady love and the cross is an unfair contest, ‘whether to go to God or to remain here’.
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Theobald’s enthusiasm seems to have played a significant part in setting the crusade in motion, even if his early death allowed him to be given the role of the lost leader unsullied by the
compromises of subsequent events. However, the importance at least of the comital commanders, Theobald especially, was due as much to their wealth as to their status or conviction. When Hugh count of St Pol complained that, by July 1203, when the crusade army arrived outside Constantinople, he was heavily in debt, this reflected the expense of the campaign rather than his original financial position.
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Baldwin of Flanders and Theobald of Champagne were probably the richest nobles in France, their combined resources rivalling those of the king. Louis of Blois, also by the right of his wife count of Clermont, controlled another extensive and rich block of territory. The ability of these lords to subsidize their followers provided the necessary mixture of incentive and control.

Crusading had developed into a joint enterprise operation. Great lords paid the expenses of their immediate entourage as well as any mercenaries. Beyond that, almost as an attribute of lordship, many leaders saw it necessary to subsidize their aristocratic vassals as well. Fleets, such as Richard I’s, could also be partly funded by a commander. The experience of twelfth-century crusading had suggested that central funding contributed to efficiency and order in planning and execution. Against this, the canonical assumption of payment by the individual
crucesignatus
remained strong, although, with Innocent III’s financial expedients, beginning to weaken. The Fourth Crusade occurred during a period of change from mainly self-financed expeditions to those predominantly underwritten by the leaders and the church that became a feature of the mid-thirteenth century and later. In this, crusading armies reflected patterns of military organization emerging across Europe. In 1199–1202, at the very least, to attract support, the crusade leadership, as the pope recognized, needed to be prepared openly to offer financial support to their followers. However, as they were to be forcibly reminded, the paymaster retained authority only for as long as he remained solvent. No cash, no control and, ultimately, no crusade. The experience of the Fourth Crusade stripped aside sentimental views of the material basis of crusading, its course almost wholly determined by finance and the constant quest for resources. From the outset, the crusade leaders understood this. Theobald of Champagne had calculated he needed 25,000 livres to pay his own retinue and proposed another 25,000 livres to retain other troops. Innocent III assumed the conscription of warriors for pay. On campaign at Constantinople, Hugh of St Pol reckoned
knights as well as mounted sergeants and infantry required wages, if only to cover expenses.
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Baldwin of Flanders provided Gilles de Trasignies, later a hero of a vernacular verse romance and one of his sworn vassals (
home lige
), 500 livres to go with him on crusade. The count also hired experienced troops. Along with clothing, food and other provisions, Baldwin sent some of these in his own ships with a fleet that sailed from Flanders in the summer of 1202 under the command of the governor of Bruges and others. This was evidently a comital project. When they arrived at Marseilles at the end of the year they sought Baldwin’s orders as to where to go next.
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Without such investment by the leaders there would have been no crusade.