Many crimes in the crusader states were very visible—and often shockingly so. But there were other crimes that were far more discreet—and insidious. Then as now, these were the kinds of crimes that thrived on things unsaid, and on the exploitation of unspoken social norms.
Bribery, tax evasion, and fraud were the pervasive forms of ‘white-collar crime’—they were easy to commit, hard to prevent, and very profitable if you got away with it. Relatively small-scale fraud and profiteering such as this was impossible to ever eradicate fully.
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A lack of centralised resources made medieval bureaucracies particularly vulnerable to abuse by those who sought advantage through corruption. Capital and corporal punishments served as high-profile deterrents, but the rewards for such crimes were high—there is little evidence that the punishments were ever fully successful.
A Venetian report of 1243, for example, talks of bribery being used as a means of facilitating tax evasion. Government officials who took bribes laid themselves open to the possibility of extreme punishments, including execution by hanging—but the practice was so lucrative that it proved impossible to stamp out.
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In such desperate times, even the military orders could not always be trusted. The Hospitallers certainly had their share of fraudsters. A Brother John of Isca, for instance, was based at the order’s house in Paris in the 1280s. John absconded with 11,000 livres tournois, a huge sum of money that had been gathered from the tithes of the region to help defend the Holy Land. This scandal was a major embarrassment for the order, diverting resources from the front line at a time when the Latin East needed all the help it could get.
The Templars, despite (or perhaps because of) their role as the inventors of investment banking, could also be untrustworthy. In 1250, John of Joinville was given some money by King Louis on his release from captivity in Egypt. He had been reduced to abject poverty by his imprisonment and was forced to dine with the king, ‘wearing the garment that had been made for me out of scraps of my blanket when I was a prisoner’. This was also an obvious and ostentatious way of signaling his poverty to the king, of course—which was very important for a man looking for handouts.
An image of Crusader warfare from Jean de Joinville’s Life of St Louis – Bibliothèque nationale de France MS Français 13568 fol. 83
King Louis, kindly and decent as ever, responded accordingly. He gave John 400 livres as wages for his service. Very sensibly, John put ten percent of the money aside for immediate expenses and gave the rest to the Templars for safekeeping. Trouble began when he wanted to start drawing down on his reserves, however. The fraud was not even subtle. The local Templar commander denied that Joinville was a customer and told him ‘that he did not have any of my money and that he did not know me’.
Entirely understandably, Joinville kicked up a fuss. He complained to the Master of the Templars. The Master was a friend of John’s (or so he thought) but even he told him that if he did not withdraw his complaint, there would be consequences—his actions were causing reputational damage to the Templar ‘brand’.
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John held firm to his complaint, however—he was so impoverished that he had little choice. He had the king’s ear, and he refused to let things drop. The Templars were forced to reconsider—suspiciously quickly, ‘the Master came to me,’ wrote John, ‘all smiles, and told me he had found my money. They were able to trace these funds because it transpired that the former [Templar] commander of the palace had been replaced. He had been sent to a village called Le Saffran, from where he returned the money.’
As with monks nowadays, culprits were clearly just transferred from one location to another rather than being brought to justice, largely for reasons associated with reputation. Defrauding newly released prisoners of war was clearly unimpressive, and threatened to harm the Templars’ image. Ironically, and unbeknownst to all concerned, within a few decades they would need all the help they could get—the order was suppressed for arrogance, and, just as importantly, for having run out of corporate objectives and friends.
Fraud upon fraud was the norm, however. Having regained access to his money, John also discovered that his servant was stealing from him. He later wrote, ‘I asked my new servant, Guillemin, to show me his accounts, which he did. I found that he had cheated me out of a good ten livres or more… When I asked him for the money, he said he would repay me when he could. I dismissed him and told him I would give him what he owed me, since he had certainly earned it.’
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It later transpired that dear Guillemin had extensive ‘previous’. He was a well-known crook. ‘Once the Burgundian knights,’ his previous employers, had returned from their captivity as prisoners of war in Egypt, John had an opportunity to question them about Guillemin. He ‘learned from them that they had brought Guillemin overseas in their company, and that he was the most obliging thief that there ever was’. Interestingly, even the knights were complicit in his thefts, and he often stole things to order for them—‘whenever a knight was in need of gloves or spurs or anything else, Guillemin would go and steal it and then give it to him’.
Everyone associated with the Burgundian servant seemed to have been party to fraud and theft. This suggests an answer to the strange and unresolved question as to why Joinville did not ask Guillemin to return the money he had stolen. Perhaps John too had been party to some of his activities, or perhaps Guillemin knew things about John that were best left untold—we know, for instance, that it was Guillemin who had ensured, perhaps at his master’s request, that they had taken lodgings conveniently (and suspiciously) close to the prostitutes and bath-houses of Acre.
Much the same happened in the early years of King Edward II’s reign, at some point before 1315. One of the royal household, a certain John of Bosham, was sent out to Palestine to act for the king in an undisclosed mission. This was a task both secretive and sensitive—perhaps John was a spy, or possibly he was sent on a humanitarian mission to free some of the many English prisoners of war languishing in Cairo. Whatever the objective, Edward’s agent was given the large sum of 150 gold florins to use on his mission—money to be used in either capacity, possibly for bribes or for ransoms.
To ensure that he had the benefit of local knowledge on his mission, John was accompanied by a Hospitaller brother, a man stationed in Rhodes. Following in the corrupt traditions of the Rhodes’ garrison of the early 14th century, however, the Hospitaller knight, far from helping John, stole his money and absconded. Much embarrassed, the Hospitallers in England were forced to pay their erstwhile comrade’s debts to the king in full.
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Want to learn more about crime during the Crusades? Check out Steve Tibble’s new book Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land.
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
By Steve Tibble
Many crimes in the crusader states were very visible—and often shockingly so. But there were other crimes that were far more discreet—and insidious. Then as now, these were the kinds of crimes that thrived on things unsaid, and on the exploitation of unspoken social norms.
Bribery, tax evasion, and fraud were the pervasive forms of ‘white-collar crime’—they were easy to commit, hard to prevent, and very profitable if you got away with it. Relatively small-scale fraud and profiteering such as this was impossible to ever eradicate fully.
A lack of centralised resources made medieval bureaucracies particularly vulnerable to abuse by those who sought advantage through corruption. Capital and corporal punishments served as high-profile deterrents, but the rewards for such crimes were high—there is little evidence that the punishments were ever fully successful.
A Venetian report of 1243, for example, talks of bribery being used as a means of facilitating tax evasion. Government officials who took bribes laid themselves open to the possibility of extreme punishments, including execution by hanging—but the practice was so lucrative that it proved impossible to stamp out.
In such desperate times, even the military orders could not always be trusted. The Hospitallers certainly had their share of fraudsters. A Brother John of Isca, for instance, was based at the order’s house in Paris in the 1280s. John absconded with 11,000 livres tournois, a huge sum of money that had been gathered from the tithes of the region to help defend the Holy Land. This scandal was a major embarrassment for the order, diverting resources from the front line at a time when the Latin East needed all the help it could get.
The Templars, despite (or perhaps because of) their role as the inventors of investment banking, could also be untrustworthy. In 1250, John of Joinville was given some money by King Louis on his release from captivity in Egypt. He had been reduced to abject poverty by his imprisonment and was forced to dine with the king, ‘wearing the garment that had been made for me out of scraps of my blanket when I was a prisoner’. This was also an obvious and ostentatious way of signaling his poverty to the king, of course—which was very important for a man looking for handouts.
King Louis, kindly and decent as ever, responded accordingly. He gave John 400 livres as wages for his service. Very sensibly, John put ten percent of the money aside for immediate expenses and gave the rest to the Templars for safekeeping. Trouble began when he wanted to start drawing down on his reserves, however. The fraud was not even subtle. The local Templar commander denied that Joinville was a customer and told him ‘that he did not have any of my money and that he did not know me’.
Entirely understandably, Joinville kicked up a fuss. He complained to the Master of the Templars. The Master was a friend of John’s (or so he thought) but even he told him that if he did not withdraw his complaint, there would be consequences—his actions were causing reputational damage to the Templar ‘brand’.
John held firm to his complaint, however—he was so impoverished that he had little choice. He had the king’s ear, and he refused to let things drop. The Templars were forced to reconsider—suspiciously quickly, ‘the Master came to me,’ wrote John, ‘all smiles, and told me he had found my money. They were able to trace these funds because it transpired that the former [Templar] commander of the palace had been replaced. He had been sent to a village called Le Saffran, from where he returned the money.’
As with monks nowadays, culprits were clearly just transferred from one location to another rather than being brought to justice, largely for reasons associated with reputation. Defrauding newly released prisoners of war was clearly unimpressive, and threatened to harm the Templars’ image. Ironically, and unbeknownst to all concerned, within a few decades they would need all the help they could get—the order was suppressed for arrogance, and, just as importantly, for having run out of corporate objectives and friends.
Fraud upon fraud was the norm, however. Having regained access to his money, John also discovered that his servant was stealing from him. He later wrote, ‘I asked my new servant, Guillemin, to show me his accounts, which he did. I found that he had cheated me out of a good ten livres or more… When I asked him for the money, he said he would repay me when he could. I dismissed him and told him I would give him what he owed me, since he had certainly earned it.’
It later transpired that dear Guillemin had extensive ‘previous’. He was a well-known crook. ‘Once the Burgundian knights,’ his previous employers, had returned from their captivity as prisoners of war in Egypt, John had an opportunity to question them about Guillemin. He ‘learned from them that they had brought Guillemin overseas in their company, and that he was the most obliging thief that there ever was’. Interestingly, even the knights were complicit in his thefts, and he often stole things to order for them—‘whenever a knight was in need of gloves or spurs or anything else, Guillemin would go and steal it and then give it to him’.
Everyone associated with the Burgundian servant seemed to have been party to fraud and theft. This suggests an answer to the strange and unresolved question as to why Joinville did not ask Guillemin to return the money he had stolen. Perhaps John too had been party to some of his activities, or perhaps Guillemin knew things about John that were best left untold—we know, for instance, that it was Guillemin who had ensured, perhaps at his master’s request, that they had taken lodgings conveniently (and suspiciously) close to the prostitutes and bath-houses of Acre.
Much the same happened in the early years of King Edward II’s reign, at some point before 1315. One of the royal household, a certain John of Bosham, was sent out to Palestine to act for the king in an undisclosed mission. This was a task both secretive and sensitive—perhaps John was a spy, or possibly he was sent on a humanitarian mission to free some of the many English prisoners of war languishing in Cairo. Whatever the objective, Edward’s agent was given the large sum of 150 gold florins to use on his mission—money to be used in either capacity, possibly for bribes or for ransoms.
To ensure that he had the benefit of local knowledge on his mission, John was accompanied by a Hospitaller brother, a man stationed in Rhodes. Following in the corrupt traditions of the Rhodes’ garrison of the early 14th century, however, the Hospitaller knight, far from helping John, stole his money and absconded. Much embarrassed, the Hospitallers in England were forced to pay their erstwhile comrade’s debts to the king in full.
Want to learn more about crime during the Crusades? Check out Steve Tibble’s new book Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land.
Please visit the publisher’s website or buy this book
on Amazon.com | Amazon.ca | Amazon.co.uk
Dr Steve Tibble is a graduate of Jesus College, Cambridge and London University. He is an Honorary Research Associate at Royal Holloway College, University of London. Steve is a leading authority on warfare and violence in the crusading era.
You can check out Steve’s other books: Templars: The Knights Who Made Britain, The Crusader Armies and The Crusader Strategy
Further Readings:
Forey, A.J., “Desertions and Transfers From Military Orders (Twelfth to Early Fourteenth Centuries),” Traditio, 60 (2005).
Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades, tr. C. Smith, London, 2008.
Tyerman, C.J., England and the Crusades, 1095–1588, Chicago, 1988.
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