St. Louis leading a crusade.
Mahdian Crusade 1390: The Crusade-fleet with her leader, the Duke of Bourbon. The Mahdian Crusade, also called the Barbary Crusade or Crusade of Barbary, was a Franco-Genoese military expedition in 1390 that led to the siege of Mahdia, then a pirate stronghold in Tunisia. Froissart’s Chronicles is the chief account of what was one of the last crusades.
Briefly, in the early months of 1300, it looked as though Jerusalem might be recovered for Christendom. The Mongol il-khan, Ghazan, won a dramatic victory over the Mamluks at Homs, in northern Syria. When the news reached the West, diplomatic efforts were launched to revive the Frankish–Mongol alliance, this time with Armenian help. This was the best opportunity for recovering the holy city since the 1240s, and it seemed particularly apt that in 1300, the year proclaimed by Pope Boniface VIII as a ‘Jubilee Year’ for Christendom, Christian forces – albeit Armenians rather than Franks – should have entered Damascus and Jerusalem in triumph (Schein 1979: 805–19). According to western chroniclers, Ghazan wrote asking for westerners to come and resettle the Holy Land. Henry II of Cyprus, eager to press the advantage, sent sixteen galleys to raid Alexandria. But if the episode showed how easily the Mamluks might be defeated in battle, its aftermath demonstrated how ephemeral the results of such victories were in reality. After a brief and largely symbolic occupation of Jerusalem, Ghazan withdrew to Persia, and a year later was unable to coordinate his forces with the Cypriots. In 1303 he once again invaded Syria, but this time he was defeated by the Mamluks, and a year later he died. In fact, what looked in western chronicles like an apocalyptic liberation through the instrument of God was nothing more than an episode in the long-running struggle between Mongols and Mamluks for mastery of the Levant (Schein 1991: 167–75). The irony is that the instrument of God, Ghazan, had in 1295 converted to Islam. His ‘conquest’ was motivated by territorial rather than religious aspirations.
Crusade planning continued regularly throughout the first half of the fourteenth century, but it became increasingly difficult to put well-conceived projects for the recovery of the Holy Land into practice. In part, this was the inevitable consequence of the passage of time, for the longer the Holy Land was in Muslim hands, the easier it was for Christendom to become accustomed to the idea of not having possession of its spiritual treasures. By 1336, when the last serious attempt by the French monarchy to launch a crusade collapsed, only people in middle age could remember a time when any part of the Holy Land had been in western possession, and one would have had to be elderly to recall a flourishing state in the Levant. And of course, the Mongols’ failure to dominate western Asia as they did eastern, and the collapse of Armenian Cilicia as an effective independent power, meant increasingly that all the work of conquest would have to be done from the West. This had been the case also in 1095, but the First Crusade had taken advantage of a moment of unique dislocation in the political climate of the Near East – and it had also been singularly lucky in succeeding even in such conditions. Turkish political unity more or less since the collapse of Fatimid Egypt in 1169–71 meant that those conditions were never again replaced.
There were also reasons quite external to the politics of the Near East why crusades never reached far beyond the planning stage in the fourteenth century. Simply, the political society of the West was more complex than it had been in the late eleventh century; and although governmental bureaucracy, both ecclesiastical and secular, was far more effective, this did not mean that it was easier either for Clement V (1305–14) or John XXII (1316–34) to launch a crusade than it had been for Urban II, or for kings or great lords to respond to an appeal. It is true that financing and recruitment of crusading, which had been haphazard in 1095–1101, was in contrast efficient and well organised by the 1270s. But the process that had made such efficiency possible was the growth of political bureaucracies that had their own ideologies and their own national interests. The increased power of European sovereign states made it less likely that Christendom could react spontaneously or with any degree of unity. Moreover, the papacy itself had changed. The long struggle against the Hohenstaufen in Italy and the subsequent entanglement of the popes from the 1260s onward with the Sicilian succession had the effect of making the institution appear unable to rise above the interests of national politics in the way in which an Urban II, Eugenius III or Innocent III had done. The domination of the office by French prelates, and from 1305 the residence of the popes themselves in Avignon, only exacerbated such perceptions. This is not to say that the Avignon papacy was uninterested in crusading (Housley 1986), but rather that its voice was less universally heard than had been the case up to the late thirteenth century.
It may appear paradoxical that a system of financing crusades that had become better organised since 1274 should have been correspondingly unable to deliver results in respect of armies in the field. Thirteenth-century popes realised that the best way of ensuring a steady income stream to pay for crusading was to tax clerical incomes. Despite attempts in England and France, the imposition of a regular tax on the laity on the model of the ‘Saladin tithe’ of 1188 proved impossible to enforce. Taxing the Church, however, was a way of taxing the whole of Christian society, because clerical incomes were made up, at the lowest level, of the tithes paid to their parish by every parishioner. Moreover, taxing clerical incomes was also a means of retaining control of crusading by the Church: according to Innocent III’s doctrine, what was the business of the Church ought to be organised by the Church. Gregory X’s bull Cum pro negotio (1274) laid down the way tithes were to be assessed and collected throughout Christendom. Although setting up an institutional strategy does not guarantee that the money will flow in, the fact that money from tithes was spent by popes from the 1270s to c.1300 on a variety of crusading projects is testimony to the effectiveness of the system. Sources reflecting both those taxed and those implementing taxation indicate the level of the practical problems to be overcome. First, there was the difficulty of assessing levels of taxation. Since each bishopric had a different income, which was made up from a variety of sources and would fluctuate yearly, this was a complex matter. Then there were the practical problems of collection. In 1277, the papal collectors in England found that travelling around the country to do their job was dangerous because of the brigandage that increased whenever the king was fighting outside the kingdom. There was evasion on a massive scale: from delays, appeals and claims of exemption by monastic and other institutions to open defiance. Some clergy were even claiming that after Gregory X’s death in 1276 they were no longer under any obligation to pay. The most telling part of the letter from which these complaints are taken is the statement ‘We see no way in which this can be remedied other than by calling on the assistance of the secular arm’ (Lunt 1917: 66–9; Housley 1996: 21–5).
Even when the correct amount was finally collected, it had to be accounted for. At one level, this meant record-keeping on a huge scale; at another, the far more difficult process of ensuring that the money collected was actually spent on crusading. As we have seen, opinions about the most legitimate use of tithes could be fiercely critical of papal policy, but a more serious problem in the fourteenth century was the difficulty of holding crusading kings to their vows so that tithes collected under the terms of their vow were indeed spent on the crusade and not on some other purpose. For example, when Charles IV succeeded his brother Philip V as king of France in 1322, the pope took up with him the crusade project that Philip had been pursuing. Philip had been granted a tax of one-tenth in 1321 in addition to some of the proceeds from the one-tenth levied for six years at the Council of Vienne (1314), but Charles found that this had already been spent. Pope John XXII’s reply more or less accuses the French crown of only feigning interest in crusading as a pretext for enjoying the fruits of clerical taxation (Housley 1980: 166–9). A king could take the cross, receive a grant of tithes – and perhaps an additional papal subsidy – then find reasons for delaying an expedition, while all the while using the money to fund other projects – as, for example James II of Aragon had done from 1305 onward when he used the tithes granted him by Clement V to fund his conquest of Sardinia and Corsica. This is why, in 1321, John’s negotiations with Philip V involved the clause that the king should agree to go on crusade in person before a set date, rather than sending a proxy commander in his place.
Ten years later, in 1331, the boot was on the other foot, as Philip VI accused John XXII of spending money set aside for the Holy Land on other purposes. Now the pope had to defend not only his specific conduct – the use of the money for the defence of the Church against schism (in this case the imperialist anti-pope Nicholas V in 1328) – but also the more general principle that tithes and subsidies for crusading could in emergencies be spent on other campaigns. He gave as instances the cases of Philip IV and Philip V in France, and implied that since 1295 the practice had been widespread (Housley 1996: 64–7). He might also have mentioned that even forces raised for crusading were diverted for service elsewhere: in 1319, for example, the ten war galleys equipped at papal expense for a passagium particulare by Philip V were instead lent to Robert, king of Naples, when bad weather prevented them from sailing to the East. What such examples indicate is that popes and kings alike, as figures on an international stage, had finite resources that had to be deployed to meet immediate demands. This does not necessarily mean that they were insincere in their concern for the fate of the Holy Land, or more generally of the Christians in the East. But the very processes that made the collection of taxes possible in England, France or Castile, for example – in other words, more effective governmental methods – also made it less likely that rulers would allow those taxes to be used by other kings who might be rivals. Philip IV clashed with Boniface VIII when he refused to allow French tithes to be used by the king of England, with whom he was at war – for how was Philip to know that they would not be used to finance a campaign in Gascony, rather than a genuine crusade?
National interests may have prevailed in different ways over the desire to reconquer the Holy Land. Yet nationalist ambitions and crusading were no less incompatible in the fourteenth century than they had been for St Louis. The last attempt to mount a ‘traditional’ crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land was the projected expedition of Philip VI in 1336 (Tyerman 1985: 25–52). The preaching began in France at the end of 1331, but it took a further sixteen months (February 1332–July 1333) before the details of who was to go, how much money was to be collected and how, and what indulgence was offered, were agreed. Philip wanted control of tithes collected outside France, which was impossible for the pope to deliver. By the summer of 1336, the pope was complaining that there was no evidence that even a single galley had been built. In fact a fleet was amassed, because when the crusade was eventually cancelled, the sailors waiting in Marseilles staged a mock sea-battle in which they hurled oranges at each other (Tyerman 1985: 47). Philip would not leave until a safe peace had been concluded with Edward III of England over the future of Gascony, England’s last Angevin possession. It is easy to accuse Philip of insincerity in his planning, but the diversion of crusading taxes to the start of war against England (1336–7) in fact represented the failure of French policy. Philip knew that his political aspirations would have been better served by going on crusade than by fighting the English.
Other national interests than those of defence could also interfere with crusading plans. James II of Aragon (1291–1327) declared his intent to go on crusade in c.1289–91, and in 1293 launched a diplomatic mission to construct alliances in the East to prepare the way for a crusade. During the 1290s he was seen by the papacy as the natural leader of a crusade because of Aragon’s maritime power (Schein 1991: 151–2, 188–92). But although he periodically remembered his vow – in 1296, in 1300 and in 1305, for example – he also exchanged friendly embassies with an-Nasir, the sultan of Egypt, on five occasions between 1303 and his death in 1327 (Atiya 1938a, 1938b: 510–17). Flouting Nicholas IV’s ban on trade with Egypt – for which he was excommunicated by Boniface VIII – James’ embassies sought to establish commercial relations with the most important power in the eastern Mediterranean. In fact, although James legislated in his own kingdom against trade with Egypt in 1302, this law was never enforced, and in 1326 he was remitting fines against illegal traders in return for payoffs to the crown (Housley 1986: 203).
On the surface, it looks as though James simply paid lip-service to commitments expected of him, while pursuing a policy diametrically opposed to the interests of crusading. But it would be simplistic to assume that there was an equation of ‘either the crusade or commerce’. In the first place, James was certainly not opposed to crusading in itself; in 1305 he linked the recovery of the Holy Land with a crusade against the Muslims of Granada, and Ramon Lull, the influential Dominican crusade planner, was impressed by the king’s zeal (Schein 1991: 190). Besides, James would have been more than willing to bring about the recovery of the Holy Land if it could be achieved without jeopardising the profitable relations with Egypt that were so important to all Mediterranean maritime powers. As we shall see, his interest in the Holy Land and the fate of eastern Christians was profound. Aragonese policy in this regard was similar to that of Genoa and Venice; and James’ successor Alfonso IV continued to play the same hand, to the extent that Aragon was later accused by the French of sabotaging the mission of Peter de Palud, the patriarch of Jerusalem, to Egypt in 1329–30 (Dunbabin 1991: 164–73).
Problems of finance and national policy provide two fundamental and interlinked reasons why plans for the recovery of the Holy Land never materialised into action in the fourteenth century. A third is the nature of warfare in general, and of the specific form of warfare required in the eastern Mediterranean in particular. Urban II and his twelfth-century successors saw participation in crusades as a voluntary activity, albeit one in which a strong sense of moral obligation ought to figure. We cannot assume that even in 1095, this meant that every crucesignatus made entirely individual decisions: recruitment always followed patterns set by family interests, networks of patronage and political alliances. Even in the mid-thirteenth century, recruitment to crusades seems to have been largely traditional. The process described by Joinville, for example, does not seem to have differed far from that in the chronicles of the First Crusade: lords formed individual military households by taking vassals with them, and if they ran short of the means to support them, they and their knights had to hope they could be taken on by a greater lord (Shaw 1963: 191–2). But by 1291 most European kings no longer recruited armies according to older feudal patterns. Charles IV and Philip VI, for example, negotiated the terms of their proposed crusades with the papacy on the assumption that they would provide given numbers of ships and men. These quotas could not be met by the haphazard method of sending out preachers and waiting for crusade vows to yield manpower and money. Instead, taxation of clerical income brought with it, by the end of the thirteenth century, a more systematic method of contractual recruitment. If a king knew roughly how much he could expect to raise for his crusade from the grant of a tithe or a papal subsidy, he could estimate the numbers of knights, foot soldiers and archers that could be supported by that amount, and for how long.
This more streamlined and efficient process of raising armies ought perhaps to have made it easier for kings to implement their vows. At least it ensured that the fiasco of 1202, when an over-estimate of manpower scuppered the crusade, would not be repeated. But at the same time it created a distance between vow and participation. Crusading vows were still made, but except in the case of those at the top of society, they had little effect in determining the shape or nature of an expedition. Popes could no longer, like Innocent III, expect to create little communities of Christendom to recover the Holy Land; even Gregory X realised that the knighthood was no longer in a position to direct crusading, and that he had to deal with kings. The real value of the crusading vow, by the end of the thirteenth century, was to raise extra money through redemptions sold to people who would never in any case have been participants. But should this necessarily have meant that crusades to the East were less likely to take place? The benefits of central organisation of recruitment and financing by royal governments are undoubted; conversely, however, greater systemisation resulted in a narrowing of the executive authority that could make crusading actually take place. Royal governments were more likely to recruit and finance successfully, but they were also more prone to subordinate the crusade itself to national policy. The centralisation of political life in the West may have made a crusade for the recovery of the Holy Land more effective if it ever took place; the problem was that it was by the same measure less likely ever to take place.
