Between the mid-11th and late-15th centuries, a historically specific configuration of material and ideational factors gave rise to a constellation of religious wars now known as “the Crusades.”
This constellation included Church-organized wars in the Holy Land, Iberia, and along the Baltic frontier, as well as within Latin Christendom itself.[1] The Crusades to the Holy Land were “wars of liberation” initially launched by the Church to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule. Following the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader principalities—collectively known as Outremer—the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem became key strongholds. These expeditions were conducted primarily to defend the Holy Places against Muslim attempts at reconquest or, following its loss in 1187 and again in 1244, to recover Jerusalem for Latin Christendom.
While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were prosecuted by princes, nobles, and knights from every corner of Latin Christendom, as well as by so-called “para-crusaders” (milites ad terminum) and members of military orders such as the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights.[2] They were fought primarily against a range of Muslim powers, although the Fourth Crusade ended up being waged largely against adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite. Although the idea of launching additional expeditions to liberate Jerusalem persisted for a considerable time, the Crusades to the Holy Land effectively came to an end with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in Palestine—Acre—in 1291.[3]
The Iberian Crusades were a series of military campaigns launched by the Church to liberate Christians from Muslim rule in what are now Spain and Portugal.[4] While undertaken against the backdrop of the Reconquista, they are neither reducible to nor synonymous with this much broader and more complex geopolitical phenomenon. Although it came to be seen as a sanctified enterprise, the Reconquista was in large measure a “political” process of conquest, conversion, and colonization that unfolded over several centuries. The Iberian Crusades, on the other hand, were a series of discrete, papally authorized, religiously motivated military campaigns that punctuated that centuries-long process.[5] The Reconquista was not, in other words, an “eternal” or “perpetual” crusade, such as would emerge in the Baltic region.[6] Just as clearly, however, these two phenomena remained distinct expressions of the historical structure of medieval war.
Unlike the Crusades in the Holy Land and Iberia, which were understood to be elements of the Church’s eschatological struggle against Islam, the Northern Crusades were “indirect missionary wars” launched by the Church to create the conditions necessary for the subsequent evangelization of the pagan Baltic region.[7] As with their Iberian counterparts, these crusades were part of a broader phenomenon of territorial conquest and colonization—in this case, the medieval German Ostsiedlung, or “settlement of the East”—but were not reducible to it. Although in this case there was a dimension of “perpetual crusade” that was not found in Spain, the Northern Crusades were nevertheless discrete campaigns punctuating the three-century-long process of conquest and colonization that Germanized and Christianized the Baltic region. As Peter Lock has argued, this process unfolded in five partly overlapping phases: the Wendish Crusades (1147–85), the Livonian and Estonian Crusades (1198–1290), the Prussian Crusades (1230–83), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–15th century).[8]
While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were prosecuted by Danish, Saxon, and Swedish princes, as well as by military orders such as the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights. They were fought primarily against a range of pagan adversaries—Wends, Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Suomi, and Prussians—although some were also waged against Russian Christian schismatics (i.e., adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite). By the early 16th century, these ecclesiastical wars—always only one element of the broader process of medieval Europe’s expansion—had contributed significantly to the extension of the northeastern frontier of Latin Christendom and the transformation of the Baltic from a pagan mare incognita into a stronghold of Latin Christendom.
The final expression or form of religious war, however, was not directed outward against Muslims or pagans, but inward against Christians within Latin Christendom.[9] These “internal crusades” were of two types. The first involved Church-organized wars against schismatics and heretics such as the Cathars, Hussites, and Waldensians. These heterodox religious movements were seen as “a threat to Christendom, a threat, as Hostiensis put it, to Catholic unity, which was in fact more dangerous than the threat to the Holy Land.”[10] This type of crusade was thus seen as a defensive war fought against those who threatened the Church’s spiritual authority.
The second type of internal crusade involved wars launched by the papacy against temporal powers it viewed as threats to the Church’s political authority. Examples include Pope Innocent II’s 1135 crusade against the South Italian Normans “for the liberation of the Church” and Pope Innocent III’s 1199 crusade against Markward of Anweiler, who, the pope charged, was impeding the Fourth Crusade. As Riley-Smith notes, these internal crusades were always framed as being necessary for the defense of the Catholic faith and/or the liberty of the Church.[11]
Reflecting the very different “political” conditions encountered in these distinct contexts, each of these types of religious war developed its own distinctive character. But each was also powerfully conditioned—indeed, made possible—by a common institutional and legal framework—the idea of the “crusade” as codified in canon law and theology—a common politico-military infrastructure—the crusader army and the military religious orders—and a common moral purpose—the defense of the Church and Christendom, and the redress of injustice. Put slightly differently, each was a manifestation of a common historical structure of war.
Map by Simeon Netchev, World History Encyclopedia
The Crusades, on this account, were artifacts of neither the timeless logic of anarchy nor the feudal mode of production and exploitation. Nor were they simply the geopolitical derivatives of socially constructed religious mentalités collectives. Nor, significantly, were they a function of the logic of the late medieval state system. Rather, they were organic expressions of the historical structure of medieval religious war. This structure comprised three elements. The first of these was the development of a distinctive war-making capability on the part of the post-Gregorian Church. The second was the crystallization of a socially constructed identity-interest complex that placed this Church in a structurally antagonistic relationship with a range of other social forces both within and beyond Latin Christendom. And the third was the evolution of the social institution of “crusade”—an institution that both legitimized war as an instrument of ecclesiastical statecraft and re-constructed the armed nobility that provided the core of Latin Christendom’s war-fighting capacity as “soldiers of Christ” willing and able to fight on behalf of the Church and its interests.
This historical structure did not “cause” the Crusades—at least not directly. Rather, it established the essential conditions of possibility for each of the specific Crusades that took place during the later medieval era. Once it had crystallized, ecclesiastical war became an ever-present feature of the geopolitical relations of Latin Christendom. Once it faded from the historical scene, crusading—while formally persisting for centuries—became little more than a vestigial remnant of a bygone era, increasingly out of place in the post-medieval world order of Early Modern Europe.[12]
The Crusades to the Holy Land
As Riley-Smith has argued, following the “birth” of the crusading movement and the First Crusade, the history of the Crusades to the Holy Land can be organized into several discrete phases. The first of these, c. 1102–87, he describes as that of “crusading in adolescence.”[13] During this phase, the Church and Crusader principalities were forced decisively onto the defensive by an increasingly unified Islamic polity committed to the reconquest of Jerusalem and the extirpation of the Christian presence in Syria and Palestine. The success of the First Crusade was largely a function of disunity and internecine conflict in the Islamic world. This was also true of the period in which the Crusader States were established—disunity among the contiguous Muslim polities (Rum, Aleppo, Mosul, Damascus, Egypt, Sinjar, Hama, Homs) meant that the Christian princes could strategically play them against one another to great effect.
Almost immediately after capturing Jerusalem in 1099, the crusader leadership recognized the need for a defensive buffer around the city to secure the Holy Land. Egyptian forces, for example, attempted to retake Jerusalem as early as 1099, as did those of the Sultanate of Iraq beginning in 1110.[14] Ominously, from the Church’s perspective, an increasingly unified Muslim state centered around Mosul and Aleppo began to coalesce in the 1120s. When a new governor, ‘Imad as-Din Zengi, was appointed in 1128, he led this newly unified emirate on a series of campaigns intended to further extend what had become his personal domain at the expense of both his Christian and Muslim neighbors. When, in 1144, the Count of Edessa entered into a defensive alliance with one of Zengi’s Muslim adversaries, Zengi sensed an opportunity and attacked the county. Edessa, the capital of the first Crusader principality and a cornerstone of the strategic defenses of Jerusalem, fell to Zengi’s forces on Christmas 1144.
Almost as soon as they had taken Jerusalem, the crusader leadership realized that securing the Holy Land required more than just an “inner ring” formed by the principalities founded during the First Crusade. It also necessitated an “outer ring” comprising key strategic towns—Ascalon, Aleppo, Damascus—and Mediterranean ports, which could serve as staging areas for any future Muslim counteroffensive against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. With the fall of Edessa, this strategy was seriously compromised.
On 1 December 1145, Pope Eugenius III reacted to this unwelcome development by issuing a general letter entitled Quantum praedecessores, calling for a Second Crusade to defend the Holy Land. Following a poor initial response, the encyclical was reissued on 1 March 1146, and Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux was charged with preaching the Crusade in France and Germany. Quantum praedecessores was augmented by a second encyclical, Divini dispensatione, issued in October of that year and addressed specifically to the Italian clergy. In addition to calling on the armed laity to take the cross and aid their besieged brethren in Outremer, both of these letters offered those who took the cross remission of sins, protection of property, and other privileges. The former also outlined the motives behind this call to Crusade: first, the need to right the injustices perpetrated by the Muslims—including the unlawful seizure of one of the oldest Christian cities, the spoliation of the local Church and its relics, and the murder of the local archbishop and clergy. Second, the need to address the broader threat posed to the Church and Christendom by the loss of the city. The latter extended the Crusade to Iberia and the Baltic frontier, in effect authorizing a three-front campaign to defend and expand Latin Christendom.[15]
The response to the call was an extraordinary mobilization of the armed laity of the Latin world. In 1147, two massive armies—one led by King Louis VII of France, the other by Conrad III of Germany—embarked in quick succession on the overland route through Byzantine Greece and Anatolia to Syria. Despite the tremendous enthusiasm generated by the venture, however, the harsh reality from the Church’s perspective was that these Crusader armies were simply not up to the task of confronting the Muslims threatening Outremer. Amid political maneuvering among the French, German, and Byzantine leaders, the Seljuk Turks inflicted crushing defeats on Conrad’s army at Dorylaeum and Louis’ army at Laodicea, both in Asia Minor. Despite the clear danger posed by the unification of Egypt and Syria under Saladin in 1174, the resulting demoralization and disillusionment delayed the possibility of a major Crusade to the East for the better part of a generation.[16]
The second phase in the history of the Crusades to the Holy Land—often described as their “coming of age”—began with the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 and ended with its restoration to Latin Christendom in 1229.[17] Above all else, this phase was characterized by a profound change in geopolitical purpose: during this period, the Crusades were no longer prosecuted in defense of Jerusalem but for its recovery. After the failure of the Second Crusade, the jihad against the Christian principalities provided both a common goal and a unifying religious focal point for the Muslim polities in the region. Building on this, Zengi’s son and successor, Nur al-Din, first created a unified Syrian emirate and then entered into an alliance with Egypt to put pressure on the Christians. Upon his death, the vizier of Egypt, Saladin, invaded Syria, creating for the first time a truly unified Muslim polity surrounding Outremer. Once he had consolidated his hold over this “empire,” Saladin resumed the jihad against the Crusader principalities.
After a turbulent period marked by a few notable victories and several serious defeats, and at a time when “the Christians were exceptionally weak and divided,” Saladin’s army attacked Tiberias.[18] When the Christian army marched to relieve the besieged citadel, Saladin caught them in a highly unfavorable position and inflicted a devastating defeat upon them at the Battle of Hattin. The majority of the massive Christian host was killed or captured, including the King of Jerusalem, the Master of the Temple, and many other important leaders. The True Cross, recovered during the First Crusade and traditionally carried into battle by the King of Jerusalem, was captured and paraded upside down through the streets of Damascus by the victorious Muslims.
With the principalities deprived of their best fighting men, Jerusalem fell to Saladin’s forces on 2 October 1187. By the time Saladin had completed his campaign, Outremer had been reduced to little more than the coastal enclaves of Tripoli, Antioch, and Tyre.
On October 29, 1187, Pope Gregory VIII responded to these catastrophic developments by issuing an encyclical, Audita tremendi, that called upon the princes, nobles, and knights of Latin Christendom to launch an expedition to liberate Jerusalem once again from the Muslims.[19] The encyclical began by characterizing the disastrous fall of Jerusalem as punishment for the collective sinfulness of all Christendom; the city had been lost, the pope argued, because of the sins of Christians everywhere. This being the case, the encyclical continued, the redemption and liberation of the Holy Sites necessarily required acts of penitential sacrifice by Christians everywhere.[20]
In effect, the pope called on Latin Christendom to redeem itself through acts of contrition, piety, and purification, including participation in an expedition to reclaim Jerusalem. In practical terms, the encyclical also sought to facilitate such an expedition by imposing a seven-year truce throughout Latin Christendom and mobilizing its princes and nobles by offering them the now-customary indulgences, privileges, and protections in exchange for their penitential participation in an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[21]
The response to Gregory’s call was “the largest military enterprise in the Middle Ages.”[22] Richard I (Lionheart) of England, Philip II (Augustus) of France, and Frederick I (Barbarossa) of the Holy Roman Empire all led vast armies to the Holy Land. Once again, however, the campaign was to prove ill-fated. Frederick drowned en route, leaving only a rump force under the command of Duke Leopold IV of Austria to press on to Palestine. Divisions among the three temporal Crusade leaders subsequently led to the departure of Leopold and Philip from the Holy Land in 1191. This left only Richard to continue the campaign, which he did ably, achieving notable military successes against Saladin.
When he began his campaign, the Latin kingdom comprised little more than a handful of coastal cities and a few isolated inland fortresses; when he was finished, it consisted of the entire coastline from Tyre to Jaffa. However, while Richard had effectively reversed most of Saladin’s gains since the Battle of Hattin, he was unable to break the sultan’s army or force him to abandon Jerusalem. The best he could manage was a negotiated settlement that guaranteed unarmed Christian pilgrims access to the holy sites but left the Holy City in Muslim hands. Having achieved this—and having created the geopolitical conditions necessary for the Kingdom of Jerusalem to survive for another century—Richard left the Holy Land for good in 1192.
While Richard’s campaign against Saladin was in some ways remarkably successful, from the Church’s perspective, it failed to achieve the goals articulated in Audita tremendi. Certainly, the Crusader principalities had been restored, and their strategic position greatly enhanced. But, as Madden puts it, “the purpose of these states was the protection of the holy sites; they were not an end in themselves.” To the papacy and many of Latin Christendom’s temporal leaders, Richard’s inability to liberate Jerusalem was a crushing setback—one that needed to be reversed at the earliest opportunity.
The failure to realize this crucial objective thus set the stage for three more major Crusades, all intended to restore the holy sites to Latin Christendom. In 1198, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) issued the encyclical Post miserabile, launching the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204). The avowed objective of this campaign was “the liberation of Jerusalem by an attack on Egypt.”[23] It was, however, soon diverted into an attack on the Byzantine capital, largely as a result of the strategic calculation that “a Constantinople in reliable western hands might be deemed as much of an asset for the liberation of Jerusalem as the conquest of Alexandria.”[24] While it succeeded in establishing the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, this Crusade also failed to achieve its declared goal of liberating Jerusalem.
The Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), also launched by Innocent, was similarly intended to harness the “full economic, military, and spiritual might” of Latin Christendom to the task of liberating Jerusalem, this time under even tighter Church leadership. The proximate objective of the Crusade was again Egypt—the Nile port of Damietta was to be captured and used as a base for an attack on Cairo, which was in turn to be used as a staging ground for the liberation of Jerusalem. Following extensive preparations, Damietta was attacked and captured in 1219. In August 1221, however, the Crusader army found itself surrounded by Muslim forces near El Mansura and was forced to withdraw from Egypt. For all its efforts, this Crusade achieved little more than an eight-year truce and an unfulfilled promise that the relic of the True Cross—lost to Christendom at the Battle of Hattin in 1187—would be returned.
The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) was to prove considerably more successful, though more due to skillful diplomacy than martial prowess.[25] Under pressure from Pope Honorius III and later from Gregory IX, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Jerusalem, Frederick II, finally embarked on his long-promised Crusade in 1228. He launched his expedition, however, without papal approval, as he had long failed to fulfill his Crusader vow and was under the sanction of excommunication. While his status as an excommunicate caused him considerable political difficulty—he was not afforded Crusader protections and privileges; he was opposed by the military orders—Frederick was nevertheless able to force the sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil, to the bargaining table. Against the backdrop of al-Kamil’s efforts to consolidate control over his own newly acquired Syrian territories, Frederick was then able to pressure him into signing a treaty that effectively surrendered Jerusalem to the Christians.
While the treaty itself no longer survives, its terms were widely reported in contemporary accounts. On the one hand, in return for a much-needed ten-year truce, al-Kamil agreed that the Kingdom of Jerusalem would extend from Beirut to Jaffa and would include Bethlehem, Nazareth, Belfort, Montfort, and the city of Jerusalem (which would be demilitarized). On the other, Frederick agreed that the Muslim inhabitants would retain control over their holy sites (the Dome of the Rock and the Temple of Solomon), remain in possession of their property, and administer their own system of justice. He also agreed that the Kingdom of Jerusalem would stay neutral in any future conflict between the sultanate and the Christian principalities of Tripoli and Antioch.
While many at the time condemned its outcome as “humiliating,” in geopolitical terms, the Crusade was clearly a success: the city of Jerusalem was restored to Latin Christendom, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem was rebuilt as its defensive glacis.
The third phase of crusading in the Holy Land—its “maturity”—began with the expiration of Frederick’s truce in 1239 and ended with the fall of the last remnant of Outremer, the city of Acre, in 1291.[26] Its opening act involved the occupation of the defenseless city of Jerusalem by the forces of the Muslim emir of Kerak in 1239. Against the backdrop of internecine conflict in the Muslim world, over the next two years, minor Crusader armies were able to play Muslim factions off against each other, thereby securing the return of the city of Jerusalem and greatly extending the frontiers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. However, the regional balance of forces soon shifted again, and the Muslims retook the defenseless city in 1244, subsequently massacring its Christian inhabitants and torching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This set the stage for the final three acts of this phase of the Crusades to the East. The Seventh Crusade (1248–1254), led by King Louis IX of France, was a direct response to the loss of the Holy City. Louis led a massive army to Egypt, occupying Damietta almost without resistance and then advancing on Cairo. However, increasing Muslim resistance and an outbreak of dysentery within the Crusader army turned the tide, forcing Louis to withdraw toward his operational base at Damietta. Additional Muslim successes soon rendered the Crusader army’s position untenable, and Louis’s first bid to liberate Jerusalem ended with his surrender to the sultan of Egypt on April 6, 1250.
The Eighth Crusade (1270) was King Louis’s second attempt to liberate the holy sites. This time, he adopted a three-step strategy: first, attack Tunis; second, advance along the North African coast and capture Egypt; and third, liberate Jerusalem. At first, the expedition went well: Carthage fell to Louis in July 1270, and a Sicilian fleet led by Charles of Anjou neared the port with reinforcements that would allow the king to capitalize on this initial victory. However, on August 25, Louis died of dysentery, and the Crusade was abandoned shortly thereafter.
Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the failed Eighth Crusade, Prince Edward of England led an expedition to the Holy Land to aid in the defense of Tripoli and the weakened Kingdom of Jerusalem. This was the Ninth Crusade (1271–1272), conventionally considered the last major Crusade to the Holy Land. It ended when a treaty was signed between Egypt and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Upon his father King Henry III’s death, Edward returned home to assume the English throne.
As this necessarily schematic sketch clearly indicates, the Crusades to the Holy Land were a powerful expression of the historical structure of war in later medieval Latin Christendom: they reflected the distinctive war-making capacity of the Church (the Crusader army and the military religious orders); they expressed the socially constructed interests of the reform papacy (the liberation and defense of Jerusalem); and they were made possible by the institution of the Crusade (establishing the Church as a legitimate war-making entity and the ‘Crusader’ as a recognizable actor with a defined portfolio of religious interests).
Of course, crusading was not the only form of war conducted by Christian powers in the Holy Land. The dynamics of public war were clearly at work throughout the two-century-long Latin political presence in Syria and Palestine. Nevertheless, any serious account of medieval geopolitics must recognize and take into account the distinctiveness of these ecclesiastical wars. While often intertwined with other forms of violent conflict, the Crusades were distinct and not reducible to them. Nor were they driven by the same constellation of war-making units, structural antagonisms, and institutions that shaped other conflicts. Rather, they were a distinctive form of organized violence—one that would soon manifest in other parts of Latin Christendom.
The Iberian Crusades
The pre-history of the Iberian Crusades can be traced to the disintegration of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031 and the subsequent emergence of a constellation of weak successor kingdoms—Badajoz, Seville, Granada, Málaga, Toledo, Valencia, Denia, the Balearic Islands, Zaragoza, and Lérida—known as taifas. Locked in intense internecine competition, these emirates soon began to seek the “protection” of the militarily stronger Christian kingdoms of León, Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and Catalonia. In turn, these Christian kingdoms began to vie with one another for the tributary payments (parias) paid by the taifas for protection.
In this complex regional system, the geopolitical fault lines were not always defined by religious or civilizational divisions. As O’Callaghan puts it, “[j]ust as Muslim kings concluded that it was prudent to become vassals of their Christian neighbors, paying tribute and joining in attacks on their fellow Muslims, so too, when it suited their purpose, Christian princes did not hesitate to make alliances with Muslims.”[27] Nor were these alliances stable; arrangements shifted as perceptions of advantage or insecurity changed.[28] While territorial expansion at the expense of the taifas was certainly a factor in this system—such as Fernando I’s conquest of Coimbra from the taifa of Badajoz in 1064—it was not its defining characteristic. Rather, the dominant logic of Iberian geopolitics during this period was maneuvering for advantage among the taifa statelets, coupled with competition over the parias (which had both proprietorial and state-building dimensions) among the now-dominant Christian principalities.[29]
Map by Simeon Netchev / World History Encyclopedia
Against this backdrop, in 1063, Pope Alexander II encouraged Christian knights from within and beyond Iberia to wage war on the taifas. Reflecting his worldview as one of the early reform popes, Alexander was greatly concerned by the general military threat posed to Christendom by Islam. Indeed, like Gregory VII and Urban II, Alexander “considered the military threat posed to Christianity by Islam, and its eschatological context, at least as much in terms of the struggle in Iberia as in the wars occurring in the Middle East.”[30] Sensing an opportunity to liberate at least some of the once-Christian lands of the peninsula from Muslim rule, Alexander responded to an appeal for assistance from the Christian king of Aragón by issuing a bull, Clero Vultutnensi, that offered relief from penance and remission of sins to any and all Christian warriors participating in his planned expedition against the taifa of Zaragoza.[31]
In response, a large number of knights from Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine, Italy, and across Christian Iberia journeyed to Aragón to take part in the campaign. The fort at Barbastro—a strategically important site about sixty miles north of Zaragoza—was taken by this army and held until it was recaptured by Muslim forces in late 1065.
Following several lesser actions in which Pope Gregory VII may have offered similar religious inducements to fight,[32] in 1089, another major proto-Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II. The geopolitical context of this campaign was quite different from that of the 1060s. In 1085, King Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo, convincing the emirs of the taifa statelets that they faced an increasingly lethal threat to their existence. They subsequently appealed to the Almoravids—a puritanical Sunni sect that had recently subjugated Morocco—for help in resisting the Christian campaign of reconquest. Responding to this appeal, but also acting on their belief that the taifas were decadent and in need of religious reinvigoration, the Almoravids crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and entered Iberia in force.
In 1087, they routed King Alfonso’s army at the Battle of Sagrajas near Badajoz, stemming the Christian advance, ending the parias system, and dealing a severe geopolitical and economic blow to the Christian principalities. Over the next two decades, the Almoravids proceeded to incorporate the remaining taifas into their empire. These developments deeply concerned Church officials, who saw them not only as a reversal of the Reconquista but as a growing threat to Christian Spain, southern France, and ultimately, all of Christendom.[33]
In a bid to “create a wall and bastion against the Saracens,”[34] the pope offered remission of sins to those Catalan nobles who undertook to liberate and restore a number of important metropolitan sees under Muslim control (Braga, Mérida, Seville, and Tarragona). While not yielding immediate successes, the call nevertheless mobilized a significant number of knights committed to liberating Tarragona. In some ways anticipating the future evolution of the Military Orders (Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, etc.), it even led to the creation of a novel form of “military confraternity,” comprising knights living communally in frontier fortresses, dedicated to liberating and restoring the See in return for remission of sins.[35]
These early campaigns, clear expressions of the evolving historical structure of medieval war in the 11th century, are significant for two reasons. First, they contributed to the evolution of the Crusade proper as a defining element of the geopolitical system of medieval Latin Christendom. Many of the elements that later coalesced into the institution of the Crusade were first developed in these campaigns: the use of papal bulls to mobilize the armed laity, the remission of sins in return for service, the invocation of the Peace of God to ensure internal stability for campaigns against the Muslims,[36] and the trans-local nature of the forces responding to the call.
While some of the institution’s defining elements—such as the vow and the sense of pilgrimage—were absent in these pre-1095 campaigns, these experiments nonetheless laid the institutional groundwork for the First Crusade to the Holy Land. Second, these campaigns initiated a transformation that radically altered the overall character of the Reconquista. Whereas before the 1060s the Reconquista was driven by the intertwined logics of lordly political accumulation and princely state-building, after the Barbastro campaign, it increasingly followed the logic of religious defense and expansion (defensio and dilatio).
While it may not have fully transformed the Reconquista into a perpetual Crusade—as O’Callaghan suggests—this development undeniably reshaped the patterns of violent political conflict in the peninsula for centuries to come.
The next phase of Iberian crusading—running from 1095 to 1123—was a period of bricolage and experimentation during which the constitutive ideal of the Crusade, decisively forged during the successful expedition to Jerusalem in 1099, was purposefully introduced to Iberia. As with the experiments before 1095, the impulse to introduce Crusading proper to the peninsula was driven primarily by developments in the Islamic world—specifically, by the continuing successes of the Almoravids in both weakening the Christian kingdoms and consolidating their own. By 1110, this process was completed with the incorporation of the last remaining taifa—Zaragoza—into their empire. With internal consolidation complete, the Almoravids were free to intensify their pressure on the Christian kingdoms of León-Castile and Aragón, prompting the rulers of these kingdoms to appeal to the papacy for assistance.
The reform popes of the period—Urban II, Paschal II, Gelasius II, and Calixtus II—viewing the threat in Iberia in its broader eschatological context, responded to this appeal by mobilizing the only military instrument then available to them: the Crusader army. Drawing on the constitutive ideal of the successful 1095 expedition to Jerusalem, the papacy almost immediately began introducing the formal apparatus of Crusading—papal bull, preaching, vow, indulgence, privilege, and signing with the cross—to the Iberian region in order to mobilize the martial resources of Christendom against the Almoravids.
This resulted in two Crusades between 1113 and 1118. The first, authorized by Pope Paschal in 1113, was a joint Pisan-French-Catalan expedition to liberate Christian captives being held in the Balearic Islands;[37] the second, proclaimed in 1118 and led by King Alfonso I of Aragón and Navarre, was a campaign to capture Zaragoza.[38] While there is some debate over whether they were full-fledged Crusades or merely a form of Iberian proto-Crusade,[39] these two campaigns clearly reflected the Church’s newfound desire not merely to sanctify and encourage the Reconquista, but to use its recently acquired and distinctive war-making capacity to advance its own socially constructed interests in the region.
The final stage, beginning in 1123, marked the maturity of Iberian crusading. As argued above, crusading in Iberia prior to 1123 involved either innovations that anticipated the First Crusade of 1095 or, after 1099, piecemeal applications of Crusading practices that had crystallized as a result of that campaign. In 1123, however, the First Lateran Council decisively ruled that the Iberian Crusades were of a piece with those to the Holy Land.[40] From this point on, the Crusades in Iberia were seen as part of a wider conflict against Islam—usually as a kind of “second front,” though sometimes as an alternate route to the East—and efforts were often made to coordinate—or at least deconflict—Crusades in the two theaters.
As importantly, with the full application of the increasingly well-defined Crusade institution in Iberia, Crusader armies could be more readily mobilized by the Church to advance its interests in the peninsula. Taking advantage of this new capacity, the papacy authorized several Iberian campaigns—one conducted by Alfonso VII of Castile against Almería on the southern coast of Granada in 1147;[41] another, conducted by a joint Catalan-Genoese force, against Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro in 1148 in support of the Second Crusade (1145–1149).[42] Popes Eugenius III and Anastasius IV also authorized a Crusade by Count Ramon Berenguer IV to secure control of the Ebro Valley between 1152 and 1154, and one by King Alfonso VII to capture Andújar in 1155.[43]
From the mid-1100s onward, however, the Church grew increasingly concerned about the threat to Christendom posed by the Almohads, a fundamentalist Islamic sect originating in Morocco that had begun displacing the Almoravids as rulers of Muslim Iberia. Against the backdrop of continuing rivalry among the Christian principalities, this new empire reversed the geopolitical dynamic in the peninsula for several decades, winning several important battles and retaking territory lost in the later years of the Almoravid regime. In 1172, the Almohads seized the last Almoravid emirate in Iberia.
However, the period of Almohad expansion was short-lived. In response to the grave threat posed by resurgent Muslim forces, the Christian princes, with papal encouragement, began employing religious military orders as a bulwark against further Almohad advances. As Houlsey observes, this phenomenon had both local and translocal dimensions.[44]
Each of the Christian kingdoms (except Navarre) established its own orders. These included the larger and more enduring orders such as Alcántara, Calatrava, and Santiago, as well as more ephemeral ones such as La Merced, Monte Gaudio, San Jorge de Alfama, and Trujillo. Meanwhile, the Templars and Hospitallers, two iconic translocal orders, maintained a significant presence in the peninsula, particularly in Aragón and Catalonia.[45]
Together, these orders formed a permanent defensive stronghold along the frontier, significantly hindering the Almohad advance in the latter part of the 12th century.
Not content with merely stabilizing the frontier in Iberia, during this period, successive popes offered remission of sins and other spiritual inducements to those fighting to drive the Muslims out of Iberia. In 1175, Pope Alexander III used the promise of the same indulgence granted to Crusaders in the Holy Land to encourage the Christian rulers of León, Castile, and Aragón to go on the offensive against the Almohads. In an effort to prevent a large-scale departure of penitential warriors from Spain to the Holy Land following the proclamation of the Third Crusade (to liberate Jerusalem, which had fallen in 1187), Pope Clement III extended the scope of that Crusade to include Iberia.
In response, Alfonso VIII went on the offensive south of the Guadiana River, and more importantly, non-Iberian Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land engaged in a joint venture with Sancho I of Portugal to capture the town of Silves (the Crusade of Silves, 1189). Also encouraged by the extension of the Crusade bull to Iberia, Alfonso VIII embarked on the ill-fated Crusade of Alarcos (1193).
Amid successful papal efforts to end internecine struggles among the peninsula’s Christian princes, the Crusade of Las Navas de Tolosa was launched in 1212. This decisive Christian victory shattered the Almohad empire and marked a turning point in the long conflict in Iberia. The preceding century had been one of geopolitical stalemate, with the frontier shifting back and forth according to the ever-changing balance of power between Muslim and Christian forces. After Las Navas, however, the Almohads never regained their footing, and their empire entered a period of terminal decline. Four decades and several Crusades later, al-Andalus had been nearly extinguished, and almost all of Iberia had been permanently reincorporated into the Latin Christian world order.
Perhaps not surprisingly, over the course of several centuries, the Iberian Crusades developed their own distinctive character: “pilgrimage” was far less important than in the Crusades to the Holy Land; they were closely controlled by Iberian monarchies (especially León-Castile); they proved more successful than those in the East, particularly after the Battle of Las Navas in 1212; they relied more on both regional and transregional military orders; and the Iberian “Crusader states,” unlike those in the Holy Land, developed strong fiscal and administrative foundations from which to launch both political wars and Crusades.[46]
Nevertheless, they were also clear expressions of a historical structure of war that transcended the Iberian sub-system. They reflected the distinctive war-making capacity of the Church (the Crusader army and the military religious orders); they expressed the socially constructed interests of the reform papacy (the restoration of once-Christian lands in Spain to the Latin Christian fold); and they were made possible by the institution of the Crusade, establishing the Church as a legitimate war-making entity and the “Crusader” as a recognized agent with a defined portfolio of religious interests.
Of course, this does not explain the totality of the historical process known as the Reconquista. It does, however, highlight the distinctively ecclesiastical or religious dimension of the process—a dimension that was organic to the historical structure of war in later medieval Latin Christendom.
The Northern Crusades
As Peter Lock has characterized them, the Northern Crusades took place in five partly overlapping phases: the Wendish Crusades (1147–1185), the Livonian and Estonian Crusades (1198–1290), the Prussian Crusades (1230–1283), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–15th century).[47] While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were waged by Danish, Saxon, and Swedish princes as well as by military orders such as the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights. They were fought primarily against pagan adversaries—including Wends, Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Suomi, and Prussians—though some also targeted Russian Christian schismatics (i.e., adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite).
By the early 16th century, these ecclesiastical wars—always only one element of the broader process of medieval European expansion—had significantly contributed to the expansion of Latin Christendom’s northeastern frontier and the transformation of the Baltic from a pagan mare incognita into a Latin Christian lake.
Map by S.Bollmann / World History Encyclopedia
The prehistory of the Northern Crusades can be traced to the so-called Magdeburg Charter of 1107/8—a document that explicitly called for an expedition against the Baltic pagans. Although debates persist regarding its provenance and purpose,[48] it is significant in that it constitutes the earliest known text in which the Crusading ideal was grafted onto preexisting ideas about the dangers and opportunities confronting the Church on the northeastern frontier of Latin Christendom (i.e., the earliest translation of the Crusading ideal to the Baltic region).
Several themes in the document are particularly noteworthy. First, it depicts the pagan Slavs in terms reminiscent of descriptions of Muslims in accounts of the First Crusade—portraying them as “oppressors” guilty of committing grievous “injuries” against the Church and its members. Second, it presents the pagan lands as “our Jerusalem,” a land of milk and honey lost to the heathen due to the sinfulness of Christians in the region. Third, it calls on the “soldiers of Christ” to liberate this Jerusalem, implying that doing so would create conditions favorable not only for settlement but also for evangelization.[49]
Although the charter’s call to arms had no immediate effect, it reflected ideas widely circulating among regional clerics, which over time would exert a growing influence on the collective imagination of the highest levels of ecclesiastical leadership.
The formal introduction of the Crusade to northern Europe can be attributed to Pope Eugenius III’s 1147 encyclical Divini dispensatione, which extended the scope of the Second Crusade to include not only the Holy Land but also Iberia and the Wendish (West Slavic) lands adjoining Saxony. The explicit objective of the expedition was to convert the pagans to Christianity—a goal that nearly contradicted canon law prohibiting forced conversions.
Reflecting many themes of the Magdeburg Charter, senior Church officials—including Pope Eugenius and Bernard of Clairvaux, the chief ideologist of the Second Crusade—likely viewed this expedition as a just war aimed primarily at protecting Christian missionaries and converts from harassment by the pagan Wends while fostering a political climate conducive to the peaceful expansion of Christendom through missionary work. As Hans-Dietrich Kahl has argued, these core eschatological motives were also influenced by a strong belief that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, with all its implications for mass conversion.[50]
Alongside Saxon territorial expansion, the region had experienced extensive missionary activity in previous decades. Not surprisingly, the Wends resisted both, waging military campaigns against the Saxons while also destroying missions, martyring missionaries, and pressuring local converts into apostasy. When the crusade encyclical Quantum praedecessores was proclaimed after the fall of Edessa in 1144, the situation on the Wendish frontier led the Saxon nobility to respond only half-heartedly to the Church’s call, instead requesting permission to campaign against the pagan Wends, with whom they were already in conflict. Local clergy supported this, arguing that Christian converts—and thus the future of evangelization in the region—could only be secured if the Wends were brought under Christian rule.
Given the central role of evangelization in the Church’s mission—and perhaps the general enthusiasm generated by the proclamation of the Second Crusade—Eugenius unsurprisingly granted this request. He then appointed Bishop Anselm of Havelberg as papal legate, authorized an expedition to bring the Wends under Saxon rule—creating conditions for their permanent evangelization—and promised Crusaders in the North the same indulgence and many of the same privileges granted by Urban II to those fighting in the First Crusade.
Responding to the papal proclamation, in 1147 a crusader army comprising Saxon, Polish, and Danish contingents invaded the Wendish lands. While this army enjoyed some successes on the battlefield, however, it ultimately failed to achieve its primary goal: the destruction of paganism in the Wends’ territories and their decisive incorporation into Latin Christendom. As Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt has shown, this prompted the Church to reconsider the whole enterprise of crusading in the Baltic.[51]
For several decades after 1147, the papacy showed little enthusiasm for further crusading in the North, and neither local ecclesiastical nor lay authorities petitioned for one. Wars continued to be fought in the region in the aftermath of the Wendish Crusade, of course, but “they were fought without benefit of papal authorization or any of the apparatus of the Crusade; there was no vow, no ad hoc legatine commission, no special preaching, or promises of Crusade privileges.”[52] Indeed, it was not until 1171 that Pope Alexander III (1159–1181) issued a new crusading bull for the region (Non parum animus noster), and even then, he recast these expeditions as “penitential wars”—similar to Crusades to the Holy Land, but offering fewer spiritual rewards, privileges, and protections while holding a somewhat lower status.[53]
Wars against the Wends continued, however, led by figures such as Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony (1142–1195) and King Valdemar the Great of Denmark (1157–1182). As Christiansen puts it, these campaigns were “wars carried out successfully in the shadow of the unsuccessful 1147 Crusade.”[54] After decades of brutal conflict, by 1185, the Wends had been effectively pacified, their pagan regime destroyed, and political and ecclesiastical structures more conducive to Christianization established in their place.
When Alexander issued his bull of 1171, he not only reintroduced the institution of the Crusade—or at least a diluted version in the form of “penitential war”—to Northern Christendom. In a marked departure from past practice,[55] he also outlined a papal vision for the evangelization of the entire East Baltic region.
This vision had two key elements. First, it entailed a commitment to the armed defense of the Christian Church and its missions in the region. Alexander had received troubling reports that the mission in Estonia was subjected to repeated pagan attacks—attacks he viewed as both unjust (contrary to the ius gentium) and a serious threat to the Church’s core mission of evangelization. Accordingly, he authorized the use of armed force to defend the Estonian mission and granted limited indulgences to those fighting in this just cause.[56]
Second, Alexander envisioned a significant expansion of Latin Christendom’s northern frontiers to include at least Estonia and Livonia. This latter part of the vision, Alexander argued, was to be accomplished through peaceful missionary work if at all possible, but through the use of armed force if necessary.
By combining the goals of defensio and dilatio, Alexander’s 1171 bull established the fundamental approach to crusading in the North—in Erdmann’s terms, “indirect missionary war.” In the future, when these missions faced local hostility, they and their activities would be defended by penitential warriors. Finally, when circumstances seemed favorable, the pagan “problem” in that region would be resolved by forcibly incorporating the surrounding area of the endangered mission into Latin Christendom through Crusade.
The mission of Bishop Meinhard to the pagan Livonians powerfully illustrates this expansionary dynamic. With the support of both the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and the papacy, Meinhard established a mission in the Dvina River basin around 1180. Sensing an opportunity for large-scale conversion, Meinhard offered the Livonians a bargain: in return for their agreement to undergo baptism, he would build two fortifications on islands in the Dvina River (Üxküll and Holm) to protect them from their enemies among the other pagan peoples of the region. According to the chronicler Henry of Livonia, the Livonians freely accepted this offer.[57]
However, when they realized that all converts would be financially responsible for maintaining these fortifications, the Livonians balked. Few actually accepted baptism or submitted to the bishop’s authority. From Meinhard’s perspective, this was a grave breach of their promise to convert. It also created a serious problem—he was not attracting many converts, and those he did baptize were not a sufficient tax base to support the mission’s castles and garrisons. Without these forces, he could not provide the promised protection, which would fatally undermine his entire evangelization strategy.
To address this, Meinhard sought to expand the tax base by forcing the Livonian people to uphold what he saw as their promise to convert.[58] When persuasion and threats failed to bring the Livonians into the fold, the bishop appealed to Rome for military support to enforce this strategy.
Gravely concerned by the Livonians’ apostasy and their failure to honour their agreement with Meinhard, in 1195, Pope Celestine III responded positively to the bishop’s appeal, granting limited remission of sins to those who took the cross to fight in Livonia. An expedition was subsequently launched under the Duke of Sweden, but it failed to achieve much before the duke returned home with most of the crusader army.
After Meinhard’s death in 1196, his successor, the Cistercian Bishop Berthold, led another expedition against the Livonians, explicitly justifying it as a mission to restore the apostates to the faith.[59] After Berthold was killed in 1198, Pope Innocent III authorized another Livonian crusade, this time led by the newly elected Bishop Albert of Buxhövden.
This and subsequent crusades—all explicitly justified as efforts to defend the Church from pagan harassment, restore apostates to the faith, and create conditions favorable for evangelization—proved far more successful, ultimately destroying the Livonians’ war-making capacity and their ability to resist incorporation into Latin Christendom. By the time of Albert’s death in 1229, Livonia had become an imperial fief, and most Livonians had converted to Latin Christianity.[60]
Thus, the early phase of Northern crusading came to an end. The crusades of the subsequent high phase—specifically, the Prussian Crusades (1230–1283), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–16th century)—shared the same fundamental structural character as the indirect missionary wars against the Livonians but differed in significant ways.
First, from the early 13th century onward, the Baltic wars were distinguished from earlier expeditions by their elevation from “penitential wars” to full-fledged “crusades.” As Fonnesberg-Schmidt has convincingly demonstrated, Baltic crusading before 1230 involved the gradual application of crusading ideas and practices primarily shaped by the Church’s experience in the Holy Land. As a result, it took on the character of what she calls “penitential war”—a form of ecclesiastical warfare that conferred fewer spiritual rewards and held less prestige than the Crusades to the East.
Under Pope Honorius III (1216–1227), however, papal policy changed: largely due to increasing papal involvement in missionary efforts, the ecclesiastical wars in the Baltic were decisively elevated to full Crusade status, granting them the same indulgences, privileges, and protections as those in the Holy Land.
Before the pontificate of Innocent III (Honorius’ predecessor), missions had largely been the responsibility of frontier bishops, kings, and princes. During the pontificates of Innocent and Honorius, however, the papacy assumed greater responsibility for initiating and directing large-scale missions among both heretics and pagans—largely due to the post-Gregorian papacy’s self-conception and its core interest in active preaching and evangelization (i.e., living the “apostolic life”).[61] Not surprisingly, as missions became an increasingly important papal priority, so too did their defense against forces that opposed their evangelization efforts.
In practical terms, this led to the creation of two new models for Baltic crusading. During the early phase, expeditions were initiated by local bishops or princes who sought and received papal authorization but essentially retained control over planning, preaching, financing, and other practical matters.
As Fonnesberg-Schmidt demonstrates, although this pattern continued throughout the later Middle Ages, from the early 13th century onward it was supplemented by two new forms of crusade. The first involved a partnership between the Dominicans and the Teutonic Order, in which the former preached and recruited for the crusade, while the latter financed and conducted it.
The Teutonic Order arrived in the region in the 1220s and subsequently secured from Pope Innocent IV the right to launch expeditions and issue indulgences to those fighting in its ranks without requiring additional papal authorization.[62] This effectively created a permanent crusade led by the knights, who went on to conquer Prussia and Lithuania and establish the Teutonic Order State.
The second model introduced a more active leadership role for the papal curia. In this model, the pope initiated the crusade, while a papal legate was responsible for its preaching and direction. A prime example of this model is the Livonian Crusade, proclaimed by Pope Gregory in his 1236 encyclical Ne Terra Vastae.
In both cases, the rationale remained the defense of missions and their newly converted flocks; the “liberation” of Christians from pagan oppression and pagans from ignorance; and the vindication of injuries done to Christ and His Church.[63] From the early 13th century onward, however, the Church’s approach to mobilizing its martial resources became more structured.
It was once believed that the Northern Crusades were merely an unremarkable part of the broader historical process of conquest and colonization known as the Ostseidlung. According to this view, the ecclesiastical wars in the Baltic region were little more than a series of mundane campaigns to acquire fish, fur, and land—campaigns cloaked in a thin religious veil, to be sure, but ultimately reducible to the pursuit of wealth and power.
However, as Housley points out, recent research has begun to shift in a different direction. Rather than focusing solely on the socio-political determinants of these crusades, researchers have increasingly explored their religious causes and character.[64] The emerging consensus suggests that the causes and character of the Baltic Crusades were shaped by the convergence of socio-political and socio-religious factors.
On one hand, many Christian marcher lords were undoubtedly motivated to wage war on their pagan neighbors for reasons unrelated to religion—specifically, the desire to acquire productive land and peasants through violent political expansion. Similarly, the dynamics of state-building were undoubtedly at play in many of these expeditions.
On the other hand, key Church officials behind the Northern Crusades were primarily motivated by religious concerns, particularly the perceived need to create a political environment conducive to the peaceful expansion of Christendom through missionary work. Many Christian warriors also waged war not for worldly gain, but out of deeply held religious convictions.
Crusades Against Christians
Thus far, we have examined three expressions of religious war along Latin Christendom’s long frontier with the non-Christian world: the Crusades to the Holy Land, those in Iberia, and those along the Baltic coastline. However, the final form of religious war was not directed outward against Muslims or pagans but inward, against Christians within Catholic Christendom.[65]
The most notable example of an ecclesiastical war against a heretical social movement was the campaign against the Cathars, or Albigensians, in the Languedoc region, now southwestern France.[66] The Cathars were a dualist, Manichean sect that rejected nearly every element of Latin dogma, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical structure.[67] By the early 13th century, the movement had spread to regions such as the Rhineland and northern Italy but was especially strong in the Languedoc, where it gained favor not only among peasants and burghers but also among several influential nobles.
The reasons for its popularity in this region are complex, but a crucial factor was the absence of effective political authority. For centuries, the Church had relied on secular authorities to establish the political conditions necessary for its core mission. This included suppressing unorthodox religious movements that threatened this mission. For most of the past 900 years, this had not been a pressing issue, as such movements usually consisted of individual preachers and small groups of followers.
In the Languedoc, however, Catharism had become an increasingly pervasive and institutionalized mass movement—one that threatened to displace Christianity throughout the region and inflict grievous harm on both the Church and the respublica Christiana. It was also seen as a manifestation of the collective sinfulness that had led to the disasters in the Holy Land in 1187—that is, as a sign of the spiritual disorder afflicting Christendom, which God had punished by laying low the Crusader principalities.
It is unsurprising, then, that the Church turned to temporal authorities—including Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the nominal prince of the region, and King Philip of France—to suppress the movement. Only when these powers proved unable or unwilling to confront the Cathar threat did the Church seek alternative remedies.
Catharism had been an issue in the region since at least 1178, when Count Raymond V appealed to temporal and spiritual authorities for assistance in addressing the emerging heresy in his domain. The initial response—a Cistercian preaching mission—failed to stem the rising Cathar tide, as did a subsequent military expedition against Roger Trencavel II, who was believed to be aiding the heretics.
When Innocent III ascended to the papacy in 1198, he was determined to enforce orthodoxy in the region. As a reform pope, he began his campaign by dispatching preachers to the region and implementing reforms in the local Church. When these efforts again failed to produce the desired results, Innocent concluded that he had no option but to suppress Catharism by force.
In 1204, he called on Philip of France to aid the Church, promising indulgences to all the king’s subjects who fulfilled their duty to suppress heretical movements. Philip initially declined to provide aid, concerned that King John of England would exploit the opportunity to reclaim territories recently lost to France.
Innocent renewed his appeals in 1205 and 1207, sweetening the offer by promising all who took the cross the privileges and protections typically granted in a crusade—although none had yet been proclaimed. Philip, however, once again refused to act. Frustrated by the temporal powers’ failure to fulfill what he saw as their duty to aid the Church, Innocent eventually concluded that he would have to mobilize the Church’s own war-making capabilities to confront the Cathars.
However, he was unable to act militarily until 1208, when one of his legates, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered after excommunicating Raymond VI for failing to suppress the heresy. Upon learning of Peter’s death—which he suspected was orchestrated by Raymond—Innocent seized the opportunity to mobilize the armed laity of Latin Christendom against the Cathars and their suspected protectors, including Raymond, by proclaiming a crusade.
The response among French nobles was “enthusiastic, even fervent,” and a large crusader army was swiftly dispatched to attack the lands of Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, a suspected Cathar sympathizer.[68] Thus began a brutal two-decade-long war that ultimately shattered the power of the temporal lords who had sheltered the heretics, leaving the newly established Inquisition free to eradicate Catharism as a threat to Latin Christendom once and for all.
[1] Given the focus of the existing constructivist literature on the crusades, Appendix 1 provides an account of these religious wars organized around the framework developed here.
[2] Para-crusaders, or milites ad terminum, served for a fixed amount of time as an act of devotion. See Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 103.
[3] Key contemporary secondary sources related to the Crusades to the Holy Land include Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History; Helen Nicholson, The Crusades, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004; Thomas F. Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999; France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom; Lock, Companion to the Crusades; Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[4] Christopher Tyerman, God’s War, 660. The authoritative study of the Iberian Crusades in English is Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. See also Jean Flori, La guerre saint: La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Occident chrétien, Paris: Aubier, 2001. 277-91. For a good overview of the evolution of the historiography of these crusades see Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 100-109.
[5] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 21.
[6] Tyerman , God’s War, 655; Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 211.
[7]See William Urban, The Baltic Crusade, 2nd ed., Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1994; Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1997; Alan V. Murray, (ed.), Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; Sven Ekdahl, “Crusades and Colonization in the Baltic,” in Helen J. Nicholson (ed.), Palgrave Advances in the Crusades (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[8] See Christiansen, The Northern Crusades for a different historical schema.
[9] Although scholars once overwhelmingly viewed this type of war as a distortion or perversion of the institution of the crusade, in recent years it has come to be seen instead as perfectly legitimate extension of that institution – little different, in fact, from its application in Iberia or the Baltic. See Housley,Contesting the Crusades, 115-121.
[10] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 20.
[11] Ibid., 22.
[12] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 297-8.
[13] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 112-36. For an alternative periodization see Helen Nicholson, The Crusades, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004, 1-20.
[14] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 104.
[15] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 124.
[16] More detailed summaries of the Second Crusade include Thomas F. Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 57-63; John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000-1714, New York, NY: Routledge, 2005, 130-139; and Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 121-133.
[17] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137-82.
[18] Ibid., 107.
[19] More detailed summaries of the Third Crusade include Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 65-98; and Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137-45.
[20] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137.
[21] Lock, The Routledge Companion to the Crusades, London: Routledge, 2006, 152.
[22] Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 81.
[23] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 156.
[24] Ibid., 158.
[25] For summary accounts see Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 169-170 and Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 155-165.
[26] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 183-214.
[27] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 23.
[28] France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 29.
[29] Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 658.
[31] While some, such as Riley-Smith, have questioned the claim that this was a précroisade, O’Callaghan makes a convincing case that it was. See O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 24-7.
[32] Ibid., 27-9.
[33] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 31.
[34] Tyerman, God’s War, 662.
[35] Lawrence J. McCrank, Medieval Frontier History in New Catalonia. No. III, Aldershot: Variorum, 1996 as cited in O’Callghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 32.
[36] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 206, 307.
[37] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 35-6.
[38] Ibid., 36-8.
[39] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 103.
[40] Ibid., 102-3.
[41] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 44-6.
[42] Tyerman, God’s War, 667.
[43] This latter crusade was preceded by the promulgation of a Peace and Truce of God in order to ensure the internal tranquility necessary for a successful campaign against the Muslims. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 47.
[44] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 105.
[45] For a discussion of the military religious orders in Iberia, see O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 55-8 and Tyerman, God’s War, 667-8.
[46] Tyerman, God’s War, 668; Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 105.
[47] See Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades. 2nd ed., London; Macmillan, 1997 for a different historical schema.
[48] Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008, 197-204.
[49] For a translation of this Charter, see Ibid., 211-4.
[50] Hans-Deitrich Kahl, “Crusade Eschatology as Seen by Saint Bernard in the Years 1146-1148”, as cited in Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 111, fn. 53. Regarding the so-called Sybelline prophesies, see also Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 1147-1254. Boston: Brill, 2007, 28.
[51] Fonnesberg-Schmidt,The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[52] Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 65.
[53] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[54] Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 65.
[55] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[56] One year’s remission of sin rather than the plenary indulgences granted by Eugenius in 1147 and typical of the crusades to the Holy Land. Probably in order to make crusades to the Holy Land more appealing, Alexander also offered none of the related privileges and protections. See Fonnesberg-Schmidt,The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 56-65.
[57] Urban, The Baltic Crusade, 2nd ed., Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1994, 25-6.
[58] Ibid., 27-8.
[59] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 72.
[60] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 220.
[61] See Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 183-6.
[62] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 197-8.
[63] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 193.
[64] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 115.
[65] Although scholars once overwhelmingly viewed this type of war as a distortion or perversion of the institution of the crusade, in recent years it has come to be seen instead as perfectly legitimate extension of that institution – little different, in fact, from its application in Iberia or the Baltic. See Housley,Contesting the Crusades, 115-121.
[66] Other crusades against heretics include the so-called “Hussite Crusade”, 1420 to c. 1434 and the Waldensian crusade in the Dauphine, 1487-8. See, respectively, Lock Routledge Companion to the Crusades, 201-2 and 204-5.
[67] For an extended discussion of the nature of Catharism, see Malcom Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages, Harlow: Longman, 2000. For an alternative perspective, see Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[68] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 167.
Top Image: British Library MS Royal 19 D. I f.187v
By Andrew Latham
Between the mid-11th and late-15th centuries, a historically specific configuration of material and ideational factors gave rise to a constellation of religious wars now known as “the Crusades.”
This constellation included Church-organized wars in the Holy Land, Iberia, and along the Baltic frontier, as well as within Latin Christendom itself.[1] The Crusades to the Holy Land were “wars of liberation” initially launched by the Church to restore Jerusalem to Christian rule. Following the First Crusade and the establishment of the Crusader principalities—collectively known as Outremer—the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem became key strongholds. These expeditions were conducted primarily to defend the Holy Places against Muslim attempts at reconquest or, following its loss in 1187 and again in 1244, to recover Jerusalem for Latin Christendom.
While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were prosecuted by princes, nobles, and knights from every corner of Latin Christendom, as well as by so-called “para-crusaders” (milites ad terminum) and members of military orders such as the Templars, Hospitallers, and Teutonic Knights.[2] They were fought primarily against a range of Muslim powers, although the Fourth Crusade ended up being waged largely against adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite. Although the idea of launching additional expeditions to liberate Jerusalem persisted for a considerable time, the Crusades to the Holy Land effectively came to an end with the fall of the last Christian stronghold in Palestine—Acre—in 1291.[3]
The Iberian Crusades were a series of military campaigns launched by the Church to liberate Christians from Muslim rule in what are now Spain and Portugal.[4] While undertaken against the backdrop of the Reconquista, they are neither reducible to nor synonymous with this much broader and more complex geopolitical phenomenon. Although it came to be seen as a sanctified enterprise, the Reconquista was in large measure a “political” process of conquest, conversion, and colonization that unfolded over several centuries. The Iberian Crusades, on the other hand, were a series of discrete, papally authorized, religiously motivated military campaigns that punctuated that centuries-long process.[5] The Reconquista was not, in other words, an “eternal” or “perpetual” crusade, such as would emerge in the Baltic region.[6] Just as clearly, however, these two phenomena remained distinct expressions of the historical structure of medieval war.
Unlike the Crusades in the Holy Land and Iberia, which were understood to be elements of the Church’s eschatological struggle against Islam, the Northern Crusades were “indirect missionary wars” launched by the Church to create the conditions necessary for the subsequent evangelization of the pagan Baltic region.[7] As with their Iberian counterparts, these crusades were part of a broader phenomenon of territorial conquest and colonization—in this case, the medieval German Ostsiedlung, or “settlement of the East”—but were not reducible to it. Although in this case there was a dimension of “perpetual crusade” that was not found in Spain, the Northern Crusades were nevertheless discrete campaigns punctuating the three-century-long process of conquest and colonization that Germanized and Christianized the Baltic region. As Peter Lock has argued, this process unfolded in five partly overlapping phases: the Wendish Crusades (1147–85), the Livonian and Estonian Crusades (1198–1290), the Prussian Crusades (1230–83), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–15th century).[8]
While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were prosecuted by Danish, Saxon, and Swedish princes, as well as by military orders such as the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights. They were fought primarily against a range of pagan adversaries—Wends, Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Suomi, and Prussians—although some were also waged against Russian Christian schismatics (i.e., adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite). By the early 16th century, these ecclesiastical wars—always only one element of the broader process of medieval Europe’s expansion—had contributed significantly to the extension of the northeastern frontier of Latin Christendom and the transformation of the Baltic from a pagan mare incognita into a stronghold of Latin Christendom.
The final expression or form of religious war, however, was not directed outward against Muslims or pagans, but inward against Christians within Latin Christendom.[9] These “internal crusades” were of two types. The first involved Church-organized wars against schismatics and heretics such as the Cathars, Hussites, and Waldensians. These heterodox religious movements were seen as “a threat to Christendom, a threat, as Hostiensis put it, to Catholic unity, which was in fact more dangerous than the threat to the Holy Land.”[10] This type of crusade was thus seen as a defensive war fought against those who threatened the Church’s spiritual authority.
The second type of internal crusade involved wars launched by the papacy against temporal powers it viewed as threats to the Church’s political authority. Examples include Pope Innocent II’s 1135 crusade against the South Italian Normans “for the liberation of the Church” and Pope Innocent III’s 1199 crusade against Markward of Anweiler, who, the pope charged, was impeding the Fourth Crusade. As Riley-Smith notes, these internal crusades were always framed as being necessary for the defense of the Catholic faith and/or the liberty of the Church.[11]
Reflecting the very different “political” conditions encountered in these distinct contexts, each of these types of religious war developed its own distinctive character. But each was also powerfully conditioned—indeed, made possible—by a common institutional and legal framework—the idea of the “crusade” as codified in canon law and theology—a common politico-military infrastructure—the crusader army and the military religious orders—and a common moral purpose—the defense of the Church and Christendom, and the redress of injustice. Put slightly differently, each was a manifestation of a common historical structure of war.
The Crusades, on this account, were artifacts of neither the timeless logic of anarchy nor the feudal mode of production and exploitation. Nor were they simply the geopolitical derivatives of socially constructed religious mentalités collectives. Nor, significantly, were they a function of the logic of the late medieval state system. Rather, they were organic expressions of the historical structure of medieval religious war. This structure comprised three elements. The first of these was the development of a distinctive war-making capability on the part of the post-Gregorian Church. The second was the crystallization of a socially constructed identity-interest complex that placed this Church in a structurally antagonistic relationship with a range of other social forces both within and beyond Latin Christendom. And the third was the evolution of the social institution of “crusade”—an institution that both legitimized war as an instrument of ecclesiastical statecraft and re-constructed the armed nobility that provided the core of Latin Christendom’s war-fighting capacity as “soldiers of Christ” willing and able to fight on behalf of the Church and its interests.
This historical structure did not “cause” the Crusades—at least not directly. Rather, it established the essential conditions of possibility for each of the specific Crusades that took place during the later medieval era. Once it had crystallized, ecclesiastical war became an ever-present feature of the geopolitical relations of Latin Christendom. Once it faded from the historical scene, crusading—while formally persisting for centuries—became little more than a vestigial remnant of a bygone era, increasingly out of place in the post-medieval world order of Early Modern Europe.[12]
The Crusades to the Holy Land
As Riley-Smith has argued, following the “birth” of the crusading movement and the First Crusade, the history of the Crusades to the Holy Land can be organized into several discrete phases. The first of these, c. 1102–87, he describes as that of “crusading in adolescence.”[13] During this phase, the Church and Crusader principalities were forced decisively onto the defensive by an increasingly unified Islamic polity committed to the reconquest of Jerusalem and the extirpation of the Christian presence in Syria and Palestine. The success of the First Crusade was largely a function of disunity and internecine conflict in the Islamic world. This was also true of the period in which the Crusader States were established—disunity among the contiguous Muslim polities (Rum, Aleppo, Mosul, Damascus, Egypt, Sinjar, Hama, Homs) meant that the Christian princes could strategically play them against one another to great effect.
Almost immediately after capturing Jerusalem in 1099, the crusader leadership recognized the need for a defensive buffer around the city to secure the Holy Land. Egyptian forces, for example, attempted to retake Jerusalem as early as 1099, as did those of the Sultanate of Iraq beginning in 1110.[14] Ominously, from the Church’s perspective, an increasingly unified Muslim state centered around Mosul and Aleppo began to coalesce in the 1120s. When a new governor, ‘Imad as-Din Zengi, was appointed in 1128, he led this newly unified emirate on a series of campaigns intended to further extend what had become his personal domain at the expense of both his Christian and Muslim neighbors. When, in 1144, the Count of Edessa entered into a defensive alliance with one of Zengi’s Muslim adversaries, Zengi sensed an opportunity and attacked the county. Edessa, the capital of the first Crusader principality and a cornerstone of the strategic defenses of Jerusalem, fell to Zengi’s forces on Christmas 1144.
Almost as soon as they had taken Jerusalem, the crusader leadership realized that securing the Holy Land required more than just an “inner ring” formed by the principalities founded during the First Crusade. It also necessitated an “outer ring” comprising key strategic towns—Ascalon, Aleppo, Damascus—and Mediterranean ports, which could serve as staging areas for any future Muslim counteroffensive against the Kingdom of Jerusalem. With the fall of Edessa, this strategy was seriously compromised.
On 1 December 1145, Pope Eugenius III reacted to this unwelcome development by issuing a general letter entitled Quantum praedecessores, calling for a Second Crusade to defend the Holy Land. Following a poor initial response, the encyclical was reissued on 1 March 1146, and Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux was charged with preaching the Crusade in France and Germany. Quantum praedecessores was augmented by a second encyclical, Divini dispensatione, issued in October of that year and addressed specifically to the Italian clergy. In addition to calling on the armed laity to take the cross and aid their besieged brethren in Outremer, both of these letters offered those who took the cross remission of sins, protection of property, and other privileges. The former also outlined the motives behind this call to Crusade: first, the need to right the injustices perpetrated by the Muslims—including the unlawful seizure of one of the oldest Christian cities, the spoliation of the local Church and its relics, and the murder of the local archbishop and clergy. Second, the need to address the broader threat posed to the Church and Christendom by the loss of the city. The latter extended the Crusade to Iberia and the Baltic frontier, in effect authorizing a three-front campaign to defend and expand Latin Christendom.[15]
The response to the call was an extraordinary mobilization of the armed laity of the Latin world. In 1147, two massive armies—one led by King Louis VII of France, the other by Conrad III of Germany—embarked in quick succession on the overland route through Byzantine Greece and Anatolia to Syria. Despite the tremendous enthusiasm generated by the venture, however, the harsh reality from the Church’s perspective was that these Crusader armies were simply not up to the task of confronting the Muslims threatening Outremer. Amid political maneuvering among the French, German, and Byzantine leaders, the Seljuk Turks inflicted crushing defeats on Conrad’s army at Dorylaeum and Louis’ army at Laodicea, both in Asia Minor. Despite the clear danger posed by the unification of Egypt and Syria under Saladin in 1174, the resulting demoralization and disillusionment delayed the possibility of a major Crusade to the East for the better part of a generation.[16]
The second phase in the history of the Crusades to the Holy Land—often described as their “coming of age”—began with the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 and ended with its restoration to Latin Christendom in 1229.[17] Above all else, this phase was characterized by a profound change in geopolitical purpose: during this period, the Crusades were no longer prosecuted in defense of Jerusalem but for its recovery. After the failure of the Second Crusade, the jihad against the Christian principalities provided both a common goal and a unifying religious focal point for the Muslim polities in the region. Building on this, Zengi’s son and successor, Nur al-Din, first created a unified Syrian emirate and then entered into an alliance with Egypt to put pressure on the Christians. Upon his death, the vizier of Egypt, Saladin, invaded Syria, creating for the first time a truly unified Muslim polity surrounding Outremer. Once he had consolidated his hold over this “empire,” Saladin resumed the jihad against the Crusader principalities.
After a turbulent period marked by a few notable victories and several serious defeats, and at a time when “the Christians were exceptionally weak and divided,” Saladin’s army attacked Tiberias.[18] When the Christian army marched to relieve the besieged citadel, Saladin caught them in a highly unfavorable position and inflicted a devastating defeat upon them at the Battle of Hattin. The majority of the massive Christian host was killed or captured, including the King of Jerusalem, the Master of the Temple, and many other important leaders. The True Cross, recovered during the First Crusade and traditionally carried into battle by the King of Jerusalem, was captured and paraded upside down through the streets of Damascus by the victorious Muslims.
With the principalities deprived of their best fighting men, Jerusalem fell to Saladin’s forces on 2 October 1187. By the time Saladin had completed his campaign, Outremer had been reduced to little more than the coastal enclaves of Tripoli, Antioch, and Tyre.
On October 29, 1187, Pope Gregory VIII responded to these catastrophic developments by issuing an encyclical, Audita tremendi, that called upon the princes, nobles, and knights of Latin Christendom to launch an expedition to liberate Jerusalem once again from the Muslims.[19] The encyclical began by characterizing the disastrous fall of Jerusalem as punishment for the collective sinfulness of all Christendom; the city had been lost, the pope argued, because of the sins of Christians everywhere. This being the case, the encyclical continued, the redemption and liberation of the Holy Sites necessarily required acts of penitential sacrifice by Christians everywhere.[20]
In effect, the pope called on Latin Christendom to redeem itself through acts of contrition, piety, and purification, including participation in an expedition to reclaim Jerusalem. In practical terms, the encyclical also sought to facilitate such an expedition by imposing a seven-year truce throughout Latin Christendom and mobilizing its princes and nobles by offering them the now-customary indulgences, privileges, and protections in exchange for their penitential participation in an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem.[21]
The response to Gregory’s call was “the largest military enterprise in the Middle Ages.”[22] Richard I (Lionheart) of England, Philip II (Augustus) of France, and Frederick I (Barbarossa) of the Holy Roman Empire all led vast armies to the Holy Land. Once again, however, the campaign was to prove ill-fated. Frederick drowned en route, leaving only a rump force under the command of Duke Leopold IV of Austria to press on to Palestine. Divisions among the three temporal Crusade leaders subsequently led to the departure of Leopold and Philip from the Holy Land in 1191. This left only Richard to continue the campaign, which he did ably, achieving notable military successes against Saladin.
When he began his campaign, the Latin kingdom comprised little more than a handful of coastal cities and a few isolated inland fortresses; when he was finished, it consisted of the entire coastline from Tyre to Jaffa. However, while Richard had effectively reversed most of Saladin’s gains since the Battle of Hattin, he was unable to break the sultan’s army or force him to abandon Jerusalem. The best he could manage was a negotiated settlement that guaranteed unarmed Christian pilgrims access to the holy sites but left the Holy City in Muslim hands. Having achieved this—and having created the geopolitical conditions necessary for the Kingdom of Jerusalem to survive for another century—Richard left the Holy Land for good in 1192.
While Richard’s campaign against Saladin was in some ways remarkably successful, from the Church’s perspective, it failed to achieve the goals articulated in Audita tremendi. Certainly, the Crusader principalities had been restored, and their strategic position greatly enhanced. But, as Madden puts it, “the purpose of these states was the protection of the holy sites; they were not an end in themselves.” To the papacy and many of Latin Christendom’s temporal leaders, Richard’s inability to liberate Jerusalem was a crushing setback—one that needed to be reversed at the earliest opportunity.
The failure to realize this crucial objective thus set the stage for three more major Crusades, all intended to restore the holy sites to Latin Christendom. In 1198, Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) issued the encyclical Post miserabile, launching the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204). The avowed objective of this campaign was “the liberation of Jerusalem by an attack on Egypt.”[23] It was, however, soon diverted into an attack on the Byzantine capital, largely as a result of the strategic calculation that “a Constantinople in reliable western hands might be deemed as much of an asset for the liberation of Jerusalem as the conquest of Alexandria.”[24] While it succeeded in establishing the Latin Kingdom of Constantinople, this Crusade also failed to achieve its declared goal of liberating Jerusalem.
The Fifth Crusade (1217–1221), also launched by Innocent, was similarly intended to harness the “full economic, military, and spiritual might” of Latin Christendom to the task of liberating Jerusalem, this time under even tighter Church leadership. The proximate objective of the Crusade was again Egypt—the Nile port of Damietta was to be captured and used as a base for an attack on Cairo, which was in turn to be used as a staging ground for the liberation of Jerusalem. Following extensive preparations, Damietta was attacked and captured in 1219. In August 1221, however, the Crusader army found itself surrounded by Muslim forces near El Mansura and was forced to withdraw from Egypt. For all its efforts, this Crusade achieved little more than an eight-year truce and an unfulfilled promise that the relic of the True Cross—lost to Christendom at the Battle of Hattin in 1187—would be returned.
The Sixth Crusade (1228–1229) was to prove considerably more successful, though more due to skillful diplomacy than martial prowess.[25] Under pressure from Pope Honorius III and later from Gregory IX, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Jerusalem, Frederick II, finally embarked on his long-promised Crusade in 1228. He launched his expedition, however, without papal approval, as he had long failed to fulfill his Crusader vow and was under the sanction of excommunication. While his status as an excommunicate caused him considerable political difficulty—he was not afforded Crusader protections and privileges; he was opposed by the military orders—Frederick was nevertheless able to force the sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil, to the bargaining table. Against the backdrop of al-Kamil’s efforts to consolidate control over his own newly acquired Syrian territories, Frederick was then able to pressure him into signing a treaty that effectively surrendered Jerusalem to the Christians.
While the treaty itself no longer survives, its terms were widely reported in contemporary accounts. On the one hand, in return for a much-needed ten-year truce, al-Kamil agreed that the Kingdom of Jerusalem would extend from Beirut to Jaffa and would include Bethlehem, Nazareth, Belfort, Montfort, and the city of Jerusalem (which would be demilitarized). On the other, Frederick agreed that the Muslim inhabitants would retain control over their holy sites (the Dome of the Rock and the Temple of Solomon), remain in possession of their property, and administer their own system of justice. He also agreed that the Kingdom of Jerusalem would stay neutral in any future conflict between the sultanate and the Christian principalities of Tripoli and Antioch.
While many at the time condemned its outcome as “humiliating,” in geopolitical terms, the Crusade was clearly a success: the city of Jerusalem was restored to Latin Christendom, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem was rebuilt as its defensive glacis.
The third phase of crusading in the Holy Land—its “maturity”—began with the expiration of Frederick’s truce in 1239 and ended with the fall of the last remnant of Outremer, the city of Acre, in 1291.[26] Its opening act involved the occupation of the defenseless city of Jerusalem by the forces of the Muslim emir of Kerak in 1239. Against the backdrop of internecine conflict in the Muslim world, over the next two years, minor Crusader armies were able to play Muslim factions off against each other, thereby securing the return of the city of Jerusalem and greatly extending the frontiers of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. However, the regional balance of forces soon shifted again, and the Muslims retook the defenseless city in 1244, subsequently massacring its Christian inhabitants and torching the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
This set the stage for the final three acts of this phase of the Crusades to the East. The Seventh Crusade (1248–1254), led by King Louis IX of France, was a direct response to the loss of the Holy City. Louis led a massive army to Egypt, occupying Damietta almost without resistance and then advancing on Cairo. However, increasing Muslim resistance and an outbreak of dysentery within the Crusader army turned the tide, forcing Louis to withdraw toward his operational base at Damietta. Additional Muslim successes soon rendered the Crusader army’s position untenable, and Louis’s first bid to liberate Jerusalem ended with his surrender to the sultan of Egypt on April 6, 1250.
The Eighth Crusade (1270) was King Louis’s second attempt to liberate the holy sites. This time, he adopted a three-step strategy: first, attack Tunis; second, advance along the North African coast and capture Egypt; and third, liberate Jerusalem. At first, the expedition went well: Carthage fell to Louis in July 1270, and a Sicilian fleet led by Charles of Anjou neared the port with reinforcements that would allow the king to capitalize on this initial victory. However, on August 25, Louis died of dysentery, and the Crusade was abandoned shortly thereafter.
Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the failed Eighth Crusade, Prince Edward of England led an expedition to the Holy Land to aid in the defense of Tripoli and the weakened Kingdom of Jerusalem. This was the Ninth Crusade (1271–1272), conventionally considered the last major Crusade to the Holy Land. It ended when a treaty was signed between Egypt and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Upon his father King Henry III’s death, Edward returned home to assume the English throne.
As this necessarily schematic sketch clearly indicates, the Crusades to the Holy Land were a powerful expression of the historical structure of war in later medieval Latin Christendom: they reflected the distinctive war-making capacity of the Church (the Crusader army and the military religious orders); they expressed the socially constructed interests of the reform papacy (the liberation and defense of Jerusalem); and they were made possible by the institution of the Crusade (establishing the Church as a legitimate war-making entity and the ‘Crusader’ as a recognizable actor with a defined portfolio of religious interests).
Of course, crusading was not the only form of war conducted by Christian powers in the Holy Land. The dynamics of public war were clearly at work throughout the two-century-long Latin political presence in Syria and Palestine. Nevertheless, any serious account of medieval geopolitics must recognize and take into account the distinctiveness of these ecclesiastical wars. While often intertwined with other forms of violent conflict, the Crusades were distinct and not reducible to them. Nor were they driven by the same constellation of war-making units, structural antagonisms, and institutions that shaped other conflicts. Rather, they were a distinctive form of organized violence—one that would soon manifest in other parts of Latin Christendom.
The Iberian Crusades
The pre-history of the Iberian Crusades can be traced to the disintegration of the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba in 1031 and the subsequent emergence of a constellation of weak successor kingdoms—Badajoz, Seville, Granada, Málaga, Toledo, Valencia, Denia, the Balearic Islands, Zaragoza, and Lérida—known as taifas. Locked in intense internecine competition, these emirates soon began to seek the “protection” of the militarily stronger Christian kingdoms of León, Castile, Navarre, Aragón, and Catalonia. In turn, these Christian kingdoms began to vie with one another for the tributary payments (parias) paid by the taifas for protection.
In this complex regional system, the geopolitical fault lines were not always defined by religious or civilizational divisions. As O’Callaghan puts it, “[j]ust as Muslim kings concluded that it was prudent to become vassals of their Christian neighbors, paying tribute and joining in attacks on their fellow Muslims, so too, when it suited their purpose, Christian princes did not hesitate to make alliances with Muslims.”[27] Nor were these alliances stable; arrangements shifted as perceptions of advantage or insecurity changed.[28] While territorial expansion at the expense of the taifas was certainly a factor in this system—such as Fernando I’s conquest of Coimbra from the taifa of Badajoz in 1064—it was not its defining characteristic. Rather, the dominant logic of Iberian geopolitics during this period was maneuvering for advantage among the taifa statelets, coupled with competition over the parias (which had both proprietorial and state-building dimensions) among the now-dominant Christian principalities.[29]
Against this backdrop, in 1063, Pope Alexander II encouraged Christian knights from within and beyond Iberia to wage war on the taifas. Reflecting his worldview as one of the early reform popes, Alexander was greatly concerned by the general military threat posed to Christendom by Islam. Indeed, like Gregory VII and Urban II, Alexander “considered the military threat posed to Christianity by Islam, and its eschatological context, at least as much in terms of the struggle in Iberia as in the wars occurring in the Middle East.”[30] Sensing an opportunity to liberate at least some of the once-Christian lands of the peninsula from Muslim rule, Alexander responded to an appeal for assistance from the Christian king of Aragón by issuing a bull, Clero Vultutnensi, that offered relief from penance and remission of sins to any and all Christian warriors participating in his planned expedition against the taifa of Zaragoza.[31]
In response, a large number of knights from Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine, Italy, and across Christian Iberia journeyed to Aragón to take part in the campaign. The fort at Barbastro—a strategically important site about sixty miles north of Zaragoza—was taken by this army and held until it was recaptured by Muslim forces in late 1065.
Following several lesser actions in which Pope Gregory VII may have offered similar religious inducements to fight,[32] in 1089, another major proto-Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II. The geopolitical context of this campaign was quite different from that of the 1060s. In 1085, King Alfonso VI of Castile captured Toledo, convincing the emirs of the taifa statelets that they faced an increasingly lethal threat to their existence. They subsequently appealed to the Almoravids—a puritanical Sunni sect that had recently subjugated Morocco—for help in resisting the Christian campaign of reconquest. Responding to this appeal, but also acting on their belief that the taifas were decadent and in need of religious reinvigoration, the Almoravids crossed the Straits of Gibraltar and entered Iberia in force.
In 1087, they routed King Alfonso’s army at the Battle of Sagrajas near Badajoz, stemming the Christian advance, ending the parias system, and dealing a severe geopolitical and economic blow to the Christian principalities. Over the next two decades, the Almoravids proceeded to incorporate the remaining taifas into their empire. These developments deeply concerned Church officials, who saw them not only as a reversal of the Reconquista but as a growing threat to Christian Spain, southern France, and ultimately, all of Christendom.[33]
In a bid to “create a wall and bastion against the Saracens,”[34] the pope offered remission of sins to those Catalan nobles who undertook to liberate and restore a number of important metropolitan sees under Muslim control (Braga, Mérida, Seville, and Tarragona). While not yielding immediate successes, the call nevertheless mobilized a significant number of knights committed to liberating Tarragona. In some ways anticipating the future evolution of the Military Orders (Templars, Hospitallers, Teutonic Knights, etc.), it even led to the creation of a novel form of “military confraternity,” comprising knights living communally in frontier fortresses, dedicated to liberating and restoring the See in return for remission of sins.[35]
These early campaigns, clear expressions of the evolving historical structure of medieval war in the 11th century, are significant for two reasons. First, they contributed to the evolution of the Crusade proper as a defining element of the geopolitical system of medieval Latin Christendom. Many of the elements that later coalesced into the institution of the Crusade were first developed in these campaigns: the use of papal bulls to mobilize the armed laity, the remission of sins in return for service, the invocation of the Peace of God to ensure internal stability for campaigns against the Muslims,[36] and the trans-local nature of the forces responding to the call.
While some of the institution’s defining elements—such as the vow and the sense of pilgrimage—were absent in these pre-1095 campaigns, these experiments nonetheless laid the institutional groundwork for the First Crusade to the Holy Land. Second, these campaigns initiated a transformation that radically altered the overall character of the Reconquista. Whereas before the 1060s the Reconquista was driven by the intertwined logics of lordly political accumulation and princely state-building, after the Barbastro campaign, it increasingly followed the logic of religious defense and expansion (defensio and dilatio).
While it may not have fully transformed the Reconquista into a perpetual Crusade—as O’Callaghan suggests—this development undeniably reshaped the patterns of violent political conflict in the peninsula for centuries to come.
The next phase of Iberian crusading—running from 1095 to 1123—was a period of bricolage and experimentation during which the constitutive ideal of the Crusade, decisively forged during the successful expedition to Jerusalem in 1099, was purposefully introduced to Iberia. As with the experiments before 1095, the impulse to introduce Crusading proper to the peninsula was driven primarily by developments in the Islamic world—specifically, by the continuing successes of the Almoravids in both weakening the Christian kingdoms and consolidating their own. By 1110, this process was completed with the incorporation of the last remaining taifa—Zaragoza—into their empire. With internal consolidation complete, the Almoravids were free to intensify their pressure on the Christian kingdoms of León-Castile and Aragón, prompting the rulers of these kingdoms to appeal to the papacy for assistance.
The reform popes of the period—Urban II, Paschal II, Gelasius II, and Calixtus II—viewing the threat in Iberia in its broader eschatological context, responded to this appeal by mobilizing the only military instrument then available to them: the Crusader army. Drawing on the constitutive ideal of the successful 1095 expedition to Jerusalem, the papacy almost immediately began introducing the formal apparatus of Crusading—papal bull, preaching, vow, indulgence, privilege, and signing with the cross—to the Iberian region in order to mobilize the martial resources of Christendom against the Almoravids.
This resulted in two Crusades between 1113 and 1118. The first, authorized by Pope Paschal in 1113, was a joint Pisan-French-Catalan expedition to liberate Christian captives being held in the Balearic Islands;[37] the second, proclaimed in 1118 and led by King Alfonso I of Aragón and Navarre, was a campaign to capture Zaragoza.[38] While there is some debate over whether they were full-fledged Crusades or merely a form of Iberian proto-Crusade,[39] these two campaigns clearly reflected the Church’s newfound desire not merely to sanctify and encourage the Reconquista, but to use its recently acquired and distinctive war-making capacity to advance its own socially constructed interests in the region.
The final stage, beginning in 1123, marked the maturity of Iberian crusading. As argued above, crusading in Iberia prior to 1123 involved either innovations that anticipated the First Crusade of 1095 or, after 1099, piecemeal applications of Crusading practices that had crystallized as a result of that campaign. In 1123, however, the First Lateran Council decisively ruled that the Iberian Crusades were of a piece with those to the Holy Land.[40] From this point on, the Crusades in Iberia were seen as part of a wider conflict against Islam—usually as a kind of “second front,” though sometimes as an alternate route to the East—and efforts were often made to coordinate—or at least deconflict—Crusades in the two theaters.
As importantly, with the full application of the increasingly well-defined Crusade institution in Iberia, Crusader armies could be more readily mobilized by the Church to advance its interests in the peninsula. Taking advantage of this new capacity, the papacy authorized several Iberian campaigns—one conducted by Alfonso VII of Castile against Almería on the southern coast of Granada in 1147;[41] another, conducted by a joint Catalan-Genoese force, against Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro in 1148 in support of the Second Crusade (1145–1149).[42] Popes Eugenius III and Anastasius IV also authorized a Crusade by Count Ramon Berenguer IV to secure control of the Ebro Valley between 1152 and 1154, and one by King Alfonso VII to capture Andújar in 1155.[43]
From the mid-1100s onward, however, the Church grew increasingly concerned about the threat to Christendom posed by the Almohads, a fundamentalist Islamic sect originating in Morocco that had begun displacing the Almoravids as rulers of Muslim Iberia. Against the backdrop of continuing rivalry among the Christian principalities, this new empire reversed the geopolitical dynamic in the peninsula for several decades, winning several important battles and retaking territory lost in the later years of the Almoravid regime. In 1172, the Almohads seized the last Almoravid emirate in Iberia.
However, the period of Almohad expansion was short-lived. In response to the grave threat posed by resurgent Muslim forces, the Christian princes, with papal encouragement, began employing religious military orders as a bulwark against further Almohad advances. As Houlsey observes, this phenomenon had both local and translocal dimensions.[44]
Each of the Christian kingdoms (except Navarre) established its own orders. These included the larger and more enduring orders such as Alcántara, Calatrava, and Santiago, as well as more ephemeral ones such as La Merced, Monte Gaudio, San Jorge de Alfama, and Trujillo. Meanwhile, the Templars and Hospitallers, two iconic translocal orders, maintained a significant presence in the peninsula, particularly in Aragón and Catalonia.[45]
Together, these orders formed a permanent defensive stronghold along the frontier, significantly hindering the Almohad advance in the latter part of the 12th century.
Not content with merely stabilizing the frontier in Iberia, during this period, successive popes offered remission of sins and other spiritual inducements to those fighting to drive the Muslims out of Iberia. In 1175, Pope Alexander III used the promise of the same indulgence granted to Crusaders in the Holy Land to encourage the Christian rulers of León, Castile, and Aragón to go on the offensive against the Almohads. In an effort to prevent a large-scale departure of penitential warriors from Spain to the Holy Land following the proclamation of the Third Crusade (to liberate Jerusalem, which had fallen in 1187), Pope Clement III extended the scope of that Crusade to include Iberia.
In response, Alfonso VIII went on the offensive south of the Guadiana River, and more importantly, non-Iberian Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land engaged in a joint venture with Sancho I of Portugal to capture the town of Silves (the Crusade of Silves, 1189). Also encouraged by the extension of the Crusade bull to Iberia, Alfonso VIII embarked on the ill-fated Crusade of Alarcos (1193).
Amid successful papal efforts to end internecine struggles among the peninsula’s Christian princes, the Crusade of Las Navas de Tolosa was launched in 1212. This decisive Christian victory shattered the Almohad empire and marked a turning point in the long conflict in Iberia. The preceding century had been one of geopolitical stalemate, with the frontier shifting back and forth according to the ever-changing balance of power between Muslim and Christian forces. After Las Navas, however, the Almohads never regained their footing, and their empire entered a period of terminal decline. Four decades and several Crusades later, al-Andalus had been nearly extinguished, and almost all of Iberia had been permanently reincorporated into the Latin Christian world order.
Perhaps not surprisingly, over the course of several centuries, the Iberian Crusades developed their own distinctive character: “pilgrimage” was far less important than in the Crusades to the Holy Land; they were closely controlled by Iberian monarchies (especially León-Castile); they proved more successful than those in the East, particularly after the Battle of Las Navas in 1212; they relied more on both regional and transregional military orders; and the Iberian “Crusader states,” unlike those in the Holy Land, developed strong fiscal and administrative foundations from which to launch both political wars and Crusades.[46]
Nevertheless, they were also clear expressions of a historical structure of war that transcended the Iberian sub-system. They reflected the distinctive war-making capacity of the Church (the Crusader army and the military religious orders); they expressed the socially constructed interests of the reform papacy (the restoration of once-Christian lands in Spain to the Latin Christian fold); and they were made possible by the institution of the Crusade, establishing the Church as a legitimate war-making entity and the “Crusader” as a recognized agent with a defined portfolio of religious interests.
Of course, this does not explain the totality of the historical process known as the Reconquista. It does, however, highlight the distinctively ecclesiastical or religious dimension of the process—a dimension that was organic to the historical structure of war in later medieval Latin Christendom.
The Northern Crusades
As Peter Lock has characterized them, the Northern Crusades took place in five partly overlapping phases: the Wendish Crusades (1147–1185), the Livonian and Estonian Crusades (1198–1290), the Prussian Crusades (1230–1283), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–15th century).[47] While authorized by and fought on behalf of the Church, these wars were waged by Danish, Saxon, and Swedish princes as well as by military orders such as the Sword Brothers and the Teutonic Knights. They were fought primarily against pagan adversaries—including Wends, Livonians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Suomi, and Prussians—though some also targeted Russian Christian schismatics (i.e., adherents to the Greek Orthodox rite).
By the early 16th century, these ecclesiastical wars—always only one element of the broader process of medieval European expansion—had significantly contributed to the expansion of Latin Christendom’s northeastern frontier and the transformation of the Baltic from a pagan mare incognita into a Latin Christian lake.
The prehistory of the Northern Crusades can be traced to the so-called Magdeburg Charter of 1107/8—a document that explicitly called for an expedition against the Baltic pagans. Although debates persist regarding its provenance and purpose,[48] it is significant in that it constitutes the earliest known text in which the Crusading ideal was grafted onto preexisting ideas about the dangers and opportunities confronting the Church on the northeastern frontier of Latin Christendom (i.e., the earliest translation of the Crusading ideal to the Baltic region).
Several themes in the document are particularly noteworthy. First, it depicts the pagan Slavs in terms reminiscent of descriptions of Muslims in accounts of the First Crusade—portraying them as “oppressors” guilty of committing grievous “injuries” against the Church and its members. Second, it presents the pagan lands as “our Jerusalem,” a land of milk and honey lost to the heathen due to the sinfulness of Christians in the region. Third, it calls on the “soldiers of Christ” to liberate this Jerusalem, implying that doing so would create conditions favorable not only for settlement but also for evangelization.[49]
Although the charter’s call to arms had no immediate effect, it reflected ideas widely circulating among regional clerics, which over time would exert a growing influence on the collective imagination of the highest levels of ecclesiastical leadership.
The formal introduction of the Crusade to northern Europe can be attributed to Pope Eugenius III’s 1147 encyclical Divini dispensatione, which extended the scope of the Second Crusade to include not only the Holy Land but also Iberia and the Wendish (West Slavic) lands adjoining Saxony. The explicit objective of the expedition was to convert the pagans to Christianity—a goal that nearly contradicted canon law prohibiting forced conversions.
Reflecting many themes of the Magdeburg Charter, senior Church officials—including Pope Eugenius and Bernard of Clairvaux, the chief ideologist of the Second Crusade—likely viewed this expedition as a just war aimed primarily at protecting Christian missionaries and converts from harassment by the pagan Wends while fostering a political climate conducive to the peaceful expansion of Christendom through missionary work. As Hans-Dietrich Kahl has argued, these core eschatological motives were also influenced by a strong belief that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent, with all its implications for mass conversion.[50]
Alongside Saxon territorial expansion, the region had experienced extensive missionary activity in previous decades. Not surprisingly, the Wends resisted both, waging military campaigns against the Saxons while also destroying missions, martyring missionaries, and pressuring local converts into apostasy. When the crusade encyclical Quantum praedecessores was proclaimed after the fall of Edessa in 1144, the situation on the Wendish frontier led the Saxon nobility to respond only half-heartedly to the Church’s call, instead requesting permission to campaign against the pagan Wends, with whom they were already in conflict. Local clergy supported this, arguing that Christian converts—and thus the future of evangelization in the region—could only be secured if the Wends were brought under Christian rule.
Given the central role of evangelization in the Church’s mission—and perhaps the general enthusiasm generated by the proclamation of the Second Crusade—Eugenius unsurprisingly granted this request. He then appointed Bishop Anselm of Havelberg as papal legate, authorized an expedition to bring the Wends under Saxon rule—creating conditions for their permanent evangelization—and promised Crusaders in the North the same indulgence and many of the same privileges granted by Urban II to those fighting in the First Crusade.
Responding to the papal proclamation, in 1147 a crusader army comprising Saxon, Polish, and Danish contingents invaded the Wendish lands. While this army enjoyed some successes on the battlefield, however, it ultimately failed to achieve its primary goal: the destruction of paganism in the Wends’ territories and their decisive incorporation into Latin Christendom. As Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt has shown, this prompted the Church to reconsider the whole enterprise of crusading in the Baltic.[51]
For several decades after 1147, the papacy showed little enthusiasm for further crusading in the North, and neither local ecclesiastical nor lay authorities petitioned for one. Wars continued to be fought in the region in the aftermath of the Wendish Crusade, of course, but “they were fought without benefit of papal authorization or any of the apparatus of the Crusade; there was no vow, no ad hoc legatine commission, no special preaching, or promises of Crusade privileges.”[52] Indeed, it was not until 1171 that Pope Alexander III (1159–1181) issued a new crusading bull for the region (Non parum animus noster), and even then, he recast these expeditions as “penitential wars”—similar to Crusades to the Holy Land, but offering fewer spiritual rewards, privileges, and protections while holding a somewhat lower status.[53]
Wars against the Wends continued, however, led by figures such as Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony (1142–1195) and King Valdemar the Great of Denmark (1157–1182). As Christiansen puts it, these campaigns were “wars carried out successfully in the shadow of the unsuccessful 1147 Crusade.”[54] After decades of brutal conflict, by 1185, the Wends had been effectively pacified, their pagan regime destroyed, and political and ecclesiastical structures more conducive to Christianization established in their place.
When Alexander issued his bull of 1171, he not only reintroduced the institution of the Crusade—or at least a diluted version in the form of “penitential war”—to Northern Christendom. In a marked departure from past practice,[55] he also outlined a papal vision for the evangelization of the entire East Baltic region.
This vision had two key elements. First, it entailed a commitment to the armed defense of the Christian Church and its missions in the region. Alexander had received troubling reports that the mission in Estonia was subjected to repeated pagan attacks—attacks he viewed as both unjust (contrary to the ius gentium) and a serious threat to the Church’s core mission of evangelization. Accordingly, he authorized the use of armed force to defend the Estonian mission and granted limited indulgences to those fighting in this just cause.[56]
Second, Alexander envisioned a significant expansion of Latin Christendom’s northern frontiers to include at least Estonia and Livonia. This latter part of the vision, Alexander argued, was to be accomplished through peaceful missionary work if at all possible, but through the use of armed force if necessary.
By combining the goals of defensio and dilatio, Alexander’s 1171 bull established the fundamental approach to crusading in the North—in Erdmann’s terms, “indirect missionary war.” In the future, when these missions faced local hostility, they and their activities would be defended by penitential warriors. Finally, when circumstances seemed favorable, the pagan “problem” in that region would be resolved by forcibly incorporating the surrounding area of the endangered mission into Latin Christendom through Crusade.
The mission of Bishop Meinhard to the pagan Livonians powerfully illustrates this expansionary dynamic. With the support of both the Archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen and the papacy, Meinhard established a mission in the Dvina River basin around 1180. Sensing an opportunity for large-scale conversion, Meinhard offered the Livonians a bargain: in return for their agreement to undergo baptism, he would build two fortifications on islands in the Dvina River (Üxküll and Holm) to protect them from their enemies among the other pagan peoples of the region. According to the chronicler Henry of Livonia, the Livonians freely accepted this offer.[57]
However, when they realized that all converts would be financially responsible for maintaining these fortifications, the Livonians balked. Few actually accepted baptism or submitted to the bishop’s authority. From Meinhard’s perspective, this was a grave breach of their promise to convert. It also created a serious problem—he was not attracting many converts, and those he did baptize were not a sufficient tax base to support the mission’s castles and garrisons. Without these forces, he could not provide the promised protection, which would fatally undermine his entire evangelization strategy.
To address this, Meinhard sought to expand the tax base by forcing the Livonian people to uphold what he saw as their promise to convert.[58] When persuasion and threats failed to bring the Livonians into the fold, the bishop appealed to Rome for military support to enforce this strategy.
Gravely concerned by the Livonians’ apostasy and their failure to honour their agreement with Meinhard, in 1195, Pope Celestine III responded positively to the bishop’s appeal, granting limited remission of sins to those who took the cross to fight in Livonia. An expedition was subsequently launched under the Duke of Sweden, but it failed to achieve much before the duke returned home with most of the crusader army.
After Meinhard’s death in 1196, his successor, the Cistercian Bishop Berthold, led another expedition against the Livonians, explicitly justifying it as a mission to restore the apostates to the faith.[59] After Berthold was killed in 1198, Pope Innocent III authorized another Livonian crusade, this time led by the newly elected Bishop Albert of Buxhövden.
This and subsequent crusades—all explicitly justified as efforts to defend the Church from pagan harassment, restore apostates to the faith, and create conditions favorable for evangelization—proved far more successful, ultimately destroying the Livonians’ war-making capacity and their ability to resist incorporation into Latin Christendom. By the time of Albert’s death in 1229, Livonia had become an imperial fief, and most Livonians had converted to Latin Christianity.[60]
Thus, the early phase of Northern crusading came to an end. The crusades of the subsequent high phase—specifically, the Prussian Crusades (1230–1283), the Lithuanian Crusades (1280–1435), and the Novgorod Crusades (1243–16th century)—shared the same fundamental structural character as the indirect missionary wars against the Livonians but differed in significant ways.
First, from the early 13th century onward, the Baltic wars were distinguished from earlier expeditions by their elevation from “penitential wars” to full-fledged “crusades.” As Fonnesberg-Schmidt has convincingly demonstrated, Baltic crusading before 1230 involved the gradual application of crusading ideas and practices primarily shaped by the Church’s experience in the Holy Land. As a result, it took on the character of what she calls “penitential war”—a form of ecclesiastical warfare that conferred fewer spiritual rewards and held less prestige than the Crusades to the East.
Under Pope Honorius III (1216–1227), however, papal policy changed: largely due to increasing papal involvement in missionary efforts, the ecclesiastical wars in the Baltic were decisively elevated to full Crusade status, granting them the same indulgences, privileges, and protections as those in the Holy Land.
Before the pontificate of Innocent III (Honorius’ predecessor), missions had largely been the responsibility of frontier bishops, kings, and princes. During the pontificates of Innocent and Honorius, however, the papacy assumed greater responsibility for initiating and directing large-scale missions among both heretics and pagans—largely due to the post-Gregorian papacy’s self-conception and its core interest in active preaching and evangelization (i.e., living the “apostolic life”).[61] Not surprisingly, as missions became an increasingly important papal priority, so too did their defense against forces that opposed their evangelization efforts.
In practical terms, this led to the creation of two new models for Baltic crusading. During the early phase, expeditions were initiated by local bishops or princes who sought and received papal authorization but essentially retained control over planning, preaching, financing, and other practical matters.
As Fonnesberg-Schmidt demonstrates, although this pattern continued throughout the later Middle Ages, from the early 13th century onward it was supplemented by two new forms of crusade. The first involved a partnership between the Dominicans and the Teutonic Order, in which the former preached and recruited for the crusade, while the latter financed and conducted it.
The Teutonic Order arrived in the region in the 1220s and subsequently secured from Pope Innocent IV the right to launch expeditions and issue indulgences to those fighting in its ranks without requiring additional papal authorization.[62] This effectively created a permanent crusade led by the knights, who went on to conquer Prussia and Lithuania and establish the Teutonic Order State.
The second model introduced a more active leadership role for the papal curia. In this model, the pope initiated the crusade, while a papal legate was responsible for its preaching and direction. A prime example of this model is the Livonian Crusade, proclaimed by Pope Gregory in his 1236 encyclical Ne Terra Vastae.
In both cases, the rationale remained the defense of missions and their newly converted flocks; the “liberation” of Christians from pagan oppression and pagans from ignorance; and the vindication of injuries done to Christ and His Church.[63] From the early 13th century onward, however, the Church’s approach to mobilizing its martial resources became more structured.
It was once believed that the Northern Crusades were merely an unremarkable part of the broader historical process of conquest and colonization known as the Ostseidlung. According to this view, the ecclesiastical wars in the Baltic region were little more than a series of mundane campaigns to acquire fish, fur, and land—campaigns cloaked in a thin religious veil, to be sure, but ultimately reducible to the pursuit of wealth and power.
However, as Housley points out, recent research has begun to shift in a different direction. Rather than focusing solely on the socio-political determinants of these crusades, researchers have increasingly explored their religious causes and character.[64] The emerging consensus suggests that the causes and character of the Baltic Crusades were shaped by the convergence of socio-political and socio-religious factors.
On one hand, many Christian marcher lords were undoubtedly motivated to wage war on their pagan neighbors for reasons unrelated to religion—specifically, the desire to acquire productive land and peasants through violent political expansion. Similarly, the dynamics of state-building were undoubtedly at play in many of these expeditions.
On the other hand, key Church officials behind the Northern Crusades were primarily motivated by religious concerns, particularly the perceived need to create a political environment conducive to the peaceful expansion of Christendom through missionary work. Many Christian warriors also waged war not for worldly gain, but out of deeply held religious convictions.
Crusades Against Christians
Thus far, we have examined three expressions of religious war along Latin Christendom’s long frontier with the non-Christian world: the Crusades to the Holy Land, those in Iberia, and those along the Baltic coastline. However, the final form of religious war was not directed outward against Muslims or pagans but inward, against Christians within Catholic Christendom.[65]
The most notable example of an ecclesiastical war against a heretical social movement was the campaign against the Cathars, or Albigensians, in the Languedoc region, now southwestern France.[66] The Cathars were a dualist, Manichean sect that rejected nearly every element of Latin dogma, liturgical practice, and ecclesiastical structure.[67] By the early 13th century, the movement had spread to regions such as the Rhineland and northern Italy but was especially strong in the Languedoc, where it gained favor not only among peasants and burghers but also among several influential nobles.
The reasons for its popularity in this region are complex, but a crucial factor was the absence of effective political authority. For centuries, the Church had relied on secular authorities to establish the political conditions necessary for its core mission. This included suppressing unorthodox religious movements that threatened this mission. For most of the past 900 years, this had not been a pressing issue, as such movements usually consisted of individual preachers and small groups of followers.
In the Languedoc, however, Catharism had become an increasingly pervasive and institutionalized mass movement—one that threatened to displace Christianity throughout the region and inflict grievous harm on both the Church and the respublica Christiana. It was also seen as a manifestation of the collective sinfulness that had led to the disasters in the Holy Land in 1187—that is, as a sign of the spiritual disorder afflicting Christendom, which God had punished by laying low the Crusader principalities.
It is unsurprising, then, that the Church turned to temporal authorities—including Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, the nominal prince of the region, and King Philip of France—to suppress the movement. Only when these powers proved unable or unwilling to confront the Cathar threat did the Church seek alternative remedies.
Catharism had been an issue in the region since at least 1178, when Count Raymond V appealed to temporal and spiritual authorities for assistance in addressing the emerging heresy in his domain. The initial response—a Cistercian preaching mission—failed to stem the rising Cathar tide, as did a subsequent military expedition against Roger Trencavel II, who was believed to be aiding the heretics.
When Innocent III ascended to the papacy in 1198, he was determined to enforce orthodoxy in the region. As a reform pope, he began his campaign by dispatching preachers to the region and implementing reforms in the local Church. When these efforts again failed to produce the desired results, Innocent concluded that he had no option but to suppress Catharism by force.
In 1204, he called on Philip of France to aid the Church, promising indulgences to all the king’s subjects who fulfilled their duty to suppress heretical movements. Philip initially declined to provide aid, concerned that King John of England would exploit the opportunity to reclaim territories recently lost to France.
Innocent renewed his appeals in 1205 and 1207, sweetening the offer by promising all who took the cross the privileges and protections typically granted in a crusade—although none had yet been proclaimed. Philip, however, once again refused to act. Frustrated by the temporal powers’ failure to fulfill what he saw as their duty to aid the Church, Innocent eventually concluded that he would have to mobilize the Church’s own war-making capabilities to confront the Cathars.
However, he was unable to act militarily until 1208, when one of his legates, Peter of Castelnau, was murdered after excommunicating Raymond VI for failing to suppress the heresy. Upon learning of Peter’s death—which he suspected was orchestrated by Raymond—Innocent seized the opportunity to mobilize the armed laity of Latin Christendom against the Cathars and their suspected protectors, including Raymond, by proclaiming a crusade.
The response among French nobles was “enthusiastic, even fervent,” and a large crusader army was swiftly dispatched to attack the lands of Raymond Roger Trencavel, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne, a suspected Cathar sympathizer.[68] Thus began a brutal two-decade-long war that ultimately shattered the power of the temporal lords who had sheltered the heretics, leaving the newly established Inquisition free to eradicate Catharism as a threat to Latin Christendom once and for all.
Andrew Latham is Professor of Political Science at Macalester College. He is the author of Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in the Age of the Crusades and the fictional novel The Holy Lance. You can also follow him on X/Twitter @aalatham.
End Notes
[1] Given the focus of the existing constructivist literature on the crusades, Appendix 1 provides an account of these religious wars organized around the framework developed here.
[2] Para-crusaders, or milites ad terminum, served for a fixed amount of time as an act of devotion. See Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 103.
[3] Key contemporary secondary sources related to the Crusades to the Holy Land include Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History; Helen Nicholson, The Crusades, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004; Thomas F. Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999; France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom; Lock, Companion to the Crusades; Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
[4] Christopher Tyerman, God’s War, 660. The authoritative study of the Iberian Crusades in English is Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. See also Jean Flori, La guerre saint: La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’Occident chrétien, Paris: Aubier, 2001. 277-91. For a good overview of the evolution of the historiography of these crusades see Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 100-109.
[5] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 21.
[6] Tyerman , God’s War, 655; Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 211.
[7]See William Urban, The Baltic Crusade, 2nd ed., Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1994; Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 2nd ed., London: Macmillan, 1997; Alan V. Murray, (ed.), Crusade and Conversion on the Baltic Frontier 1150-1500, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001; Sven Ekdahl, “Crusades and Colonization in the Baltic,” in Helen J. Nicholson (ed.), Palgrave Advances in the Crusades (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); and Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[8] See Christiansen, The Northern Crusades for a different historical schema.
[9] Although scholars once overwhelmingly viewed this type of war as a distortion or perversion of the institution of the crusade, in recent years it has come to be seen instead as perfectly legitimate extension of that institution – little different, in fact, from its application in Iberia or the Baltic. See Housley,Contesting the Crusades, 115-121.
[10] Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 20.
[11] Ibid., 22.
[12] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 297-8.
[13] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 2nd ed., New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005, 112-36. For an alternative periodization see Helen Nicholson, The Crusades, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004, 1-20.
[14] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 104.
[15] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 124.
[16] More detailed summaries of the Second Crusade include Thomas F. Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999, 57-63; John France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 1000-1714, New York, NY: Routledge, 2005, 130-139; and Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 121-133.
[17] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137-82.
[18] Ibid., 107.
[19] More detailed summaries of the Third Crusade include Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 65-98; and Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137-45.
[20] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 137.
[21] Lock, The Routledge Companion to the Crusades, London: Routledge, 2006, 152.
[22] Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 81.
[23] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 156.
[24] Ibid., 158.
[25] For summary accounts see Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 169-170 and Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades, 155-165.
[26] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 183-214.
[27] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 23.
[28] France, The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom, 29.
[29] Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 658.
[30] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006, 101.
[31] While some, such as Riley-Smith, have questioned the claim that this was a précroisade, O’Callaghan makes a convincing case that it was. See O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 24-7.
[32] Ibid., 27-9.
[33] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 31.
[34] Tyerman, God’s War, 662.
[35] Lawrence J. McCrank, Medieval Frontier History in New Catalonia. No. III, Aldershot: Variorum, 1996 as cited in O’Callghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 32.
[36] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 206, 307.
[37] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 35-6.
[38] Ibid., 36-8.
[39] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 103.
[40] Ibid., 102-3.
[41] O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 44-6.
[42] Tyerman, God’s War, 667.
[43] This latter crusade was preceded by the promulgation of a Peace and Truce of God in order to ensure the internal tranquility necessary for a successful campaign against the Muslims. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 47.
[44] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 105.
[45] For a discussion of the military religious orders in Iberia, see O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain, 55-8 and Tyerman, God’s War, 667-8.
[46] Tyerman, God’s War, 668; Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 105.
[47] See Eric Christiansen, The Northern Crusades. 2nd ed., London; Macmillan, 1997 for a different historical schema.
[48] Giles Constable, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2008, 197-204.
[49] For a translation of this Charter, see Ibid., 211-4.
[50] Hans-Deitrich Kahl, “Crusade Eschatology as Seen by Saint Bernard in the Years 1146-1148”, as cited in Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 111, fn. 53. Regarding the so-called Sybelline prophesies, see also Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 1147-1254. Boston: Brill, 2007, 28.
[51] Fonnesberg-Schmidt,The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[52] Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 65.
[53] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[54] Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, 65.
[55] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades.
[56] One year’s remission of sin rather than the plenary indulgences granted by Eugenius in 1147 and typical of the crusades to the Holy Land. Probably in order to make crusades to the Holy Land more appealing, Alexander also offered none of the related privileges and protections. See Fonnesberg-Schmidt,The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 56-65.
[57] Urban, The Baltic Crusade, 2nd ed., Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center, 1994, 25-6.
[58] Ibid., 27-8.
[59] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 72.
[60] Lock, Companion to the Crusades, 220.
[61] See Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 183-6.
[62] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 197-8.
[63] Fonnesberg-Schmidt, The Popes and the Baltic Crusades, 193.
[64] Housley, Contesting the Crusades, 115.
[65] Although scholars once overwhelmingly viewed this type of war as a distortion or perversion of the institution of the crusade, in recent years it has come to be seen instead as perfectly legitimate extension of that institution – little different, in fact, from its application in Iberia or the Baltic. See Housley,Contesting the Crusades, 115-121.
[66] Other crusades against heretics include the so-called “Hussite Crusade”, 1420 to c. 1434 and the Waldensian crusade in the Dauphine, 1487-8. See, respectively, Lock Routledge Companion to the Crusades, 201-2 and 204-5.
[67] For an extended discussion of the nature of Catharism, see Malcom Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages, Harlow: Longman, 2000. For an alternative perspective, see Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
[68] Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A History, 167.
Top Image: British Library MS Royal 19 D. I f.187v
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