Abstract
The term “crusades against Christians” (or also “internal crusades”) refers to the relatively little-known but very significant conflicts within Christendom in the Central and Late Middle Ages, which shared some of the mechanisms and characteristics of crusades against Muslims in the Holy Land, including similar temporal and spiritual privileges. These crusades consisted of numerous campaigns, launched against various targets in almost every corner of Latin Christendom. But despite the pervasiveness of crusades against Christians, they remain a comparatively understudied aspect of the crusading movement. Traditionally historians dismissed these projects as aberrations of the “proper” crusades to the Holy Land, and even though in more recent years scholars have recognised the importance of crusades against Christians, studies of them remain largely restricted to specific regions, time periods, or campaigns. This Introduction outlines some key characteristics of crusading against Christians, provides a basic survey of past literature, and presents the main aims and contents of the volume.
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Notes
- 1.
For a historiographical overview, see e.g. Giles Constable, “The Historiography of the Crusades,” in idem, Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century (Farnham, 2008), 3–43; and Norman Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), esp. 2–13.
- 2.
See, e.g., Jonathan Riley-Smith, What Were the Crusades?, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke, 2002).
- 3.
A (characteristically) strong statement on the inchoate nature of crusading is made by Christopher Tyerman, “Were There Any Crusades in the Twelfth Century?”, The English Historical Review 110 (1995): 553–77.
- 4.
See, for example, the view of Hostiensis, at footnote 62.
- 5.
- 6.
Hippolyte Pissard, La guerre sainte en pays chrétien. Essai sur l’origine et le développement des théories canoniques (Paris, 1912; repr. New York, 1980).
- 7.
Ibid., 27–84.
- 8.
Ibid., 121–42. The term appears in the chapter heading and throughout the text; it includes the papal campaigns against Markward of Anweiler, Frederick II and his heirs, and other opponents in Italy, England, and across Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.
- 9.
Housley, Italian Crusades, 3, calls it “a cursory and disappointing study.”
- 10.
Pissard, La guerre sainte, passim, esp. 188–91. For Pissard, after the early fifteenth century, the fight against heresy was mainly delegated to the secular arm, while the popes’ wars against their temporal opponents were largely carried out in the same manner as those of any temporal power.
- 11.
Wilhelm Koester, Der Kreuzablass im Kampfe der Kurie mit Friedrich II. (Inaugural Dissertation, Munster, 1913); Adolf Gottlob, Kreuzablass und Almosenablass. Eine Studie über die Frühzeit des Ablasswesens (Stuttgart, 1906).
- 12.
Otto Volk, Die abendländisch-hierarchische Kreuzzugsidee (Inaugural Dissertation, Halle, 1911).
- 13.
Volk, Die abendländisch-hierarchische Kreuzzugsidee, 131–34.
- 14.
Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, 1977; original publication: Die Entstehung des Kreuzzugsgedankens, Stuttgart, 1935), 265. For the impact of Erdman’s ideas, see e.g. Christopher Tyerman, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester, 2011), 183–92.
- 15.
Austin P. Evans, “The Albigensian Crusade,” in A History of the Crusades, ed. Kenneth M. Setton, 6 vols. (Madison, WI, 1969–89), vol. 2 (1969): 277–324; Frederick G. Heymann, “The Crusades against the Hussites,” in Crusades, ed. Setton, vol. 3 (1975): 586–646.
- 16.
Joseph R. Strayer, “The Political Crusades of the Thirteenth Century,” in Crusades, ed. Setton, vol. 2 (1969): 343–75 [reprinted in Joseph R. Strayer, Medieval Statecraft and the Perspectives of History (Princeton, 1971), 123–58].
- 17.
Strayer, “The Political Crusades,” 345–48.
- 18.
Ibid., 344. A similar point of view, treating such crusades as “deviations,” is found also in the near-contemporary publication by Pierre Toubert, “Les déviations de la croisade au milieu du XIIIe siècle: Alexandre IV contre Manfred,” Le Moyen Âge 69 (1963): 391–99 [repr. in idem, Etudes sur l’Italie médiévale (IXe–XIVe s.) (London, 1976), no. XI].
- 19.
Strayer, “The Political Crusades,” 372–75, including the comment: “the political crusades were one of the factors which weakened the leadership of the church and encouraged the transfer of basic loyalty from the church to the secular state” (at 373).
- 20.
Ibid., 375; cf. Joseph R. Strayer, “The Crusade against Aragon,” Speculum 38 (1953): 102–13, at 111–13. On the same campaign, see also the earlier study by Walther Kienast, “Der Kreuzkrieg Philipps des Schönen von Frankreich gegen Aragon,” Historische Vierteljahrsschrift 28 (1933–34): 673–98.
- 21.
Elizabeth Kennan, “Innocent III and the First Political Crusade: A Comment on the Limitations of Papal Power,” Traditio 27 (1971): 231–49; eadem, “Innocent III, Gregory IX and Political Crusades: A Study in the Disintegration of Papal Power,” in Reform and Authority in the Medieval and Reformation Church, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle (Washington, DC, 1981), 15–35.
- 22.
Kennan, “Innocent III and the First Political Crusade,” 231. Innocent III’s bold approach towards crusading was examined in detail by Helmut Roscher, Papst Innocenz III. und die Kreuzzüge (Gottingen, 1969), esp. 260–91.
- 23.
Kennan, “Innocent III and the First Political Crusade,” passim, esp. 238, 244–45, 248–49.
- 24.
Kennan, “Innocent III, Gregory IX and Political Crusades,” 17, 21.
- 25.
Ibid., passim, esp. 34–35.
- 26.
See footnote 1.
- 27.
Norman Housley, The Italian Crusades: The Papal-Angevin Alliance and the Crusades against Christian Lay Powers, 1254–1343 (Oxford, 1982).
- 28.
Norman Housley, The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305–1378 (Oxford, 1986), 4–5, 12–14, 16–17, 73–81, 106–10, passim.
- 29.
Norman Housley, “Crusades against Christians: Their Origins and Early Development, c.1000–1216,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Peter Edbury (Cardiff, 1985), 17–36 [hereafter cited as Housley, “Origins”].
- 30.
Norman Housley, The Later Crusades: From Lyons to Alcazar, 1274–1580 (Oxford, 1992), 234–66.
- 31.
Ibid., 49–79, esp. 49–56.
- 32.
Norman Housley, Religious Warfare in Europe, 1400–1536 (Oxford, 2002).
- 33.
See, e.g., Housley, Italian Crusades, 1.
- 34.
Housley, Italian Crusades, passim, esp. 252–54.
- 35.
Simon Lloyd, “‘Political Crusades’ in England, c. 1215–17 and c. 1263–5,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Edbury, 113–20; idem, English Society and the Crusade 1216–1307 (Oxford, 1988).
- 36.
Alan Forey, “The Military Orders and Holy War against Christians in the Thirteenth Century,” English Historical Review 104 (1989): 1–24.
- 37.
Ibid., 9–12.
- 38.
Ibid., 18–20, 23.
- 39.
David Abulafia, “The Kingdom of Sicily and the Origins of the Political Crusades,” in Società, istituzioni, spiritualità. Studi in onore di Cinzio Violante, vol. 1 (Spoleto, 1994), 65–77 [reprinted in idem, Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political, 1100–1550 (Aldershot, 2000), no. XI].
- 40.
See, e.g., Hans Eberhard Mayer, The Crusades, trans. J. Gillingham (Oxford, 1972; 2nd ed., 1988), esp. 202–03 and 282–86 in the first edition. In the second edition the latter section was omitted.
- 41.
Christopher Tyerman, “The Holy Land and the Crusades of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries,” in Crusade and Settlement, ed. Edbury, 105–12, at 105.
- 42.
Ibid., 107.
- 43.
See, e.g., Christopher Tyerman, “Some English Evidence of Attitudes to Crusading in the Thirteenth Century,” in Thirteenth-Century England 1: Proceedings of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Conference, ed. Peter R. Coss and Simon D. Lloyd (Woodbridge, 1986), 168–74; Christopher Tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, 1998), esp. 88–98; idem, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 563–605, 894–905, passim; idem, The World of the Crusades: An Illustrated Guide (New Haven, 2019), 334–61. On the historiographical perspective: idem, The Debate on the Crusades (Manchester, 2011), esp. 231–33.
- 44.
Tyerman, God’s War, 894.
- 45.
Rebecca Rist, The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245 (London, 2009).
- 46.
Ibid., 1.
- 47.
Ibid., ix.
- 48.
Ibid., 5–6, 10–13, 220–22, passim.
- 49.
Ibid., 223, 226–27, passim.
- 50.
Ibid., 10–11, 224–25, passim.
- 51.
Ibid., 227–28, passim.
- 52.
Michel Villey, La Croisade. Essai sur la formation d’une théorie juridique (Paris, 1942), 217–42, 259–61 (and 36–40 for pre-crusading “holy wars against Christians”): Villey distinguished between crusades against heretics and crusades against “rebellious Christians” (which included both schismatics and lay opponents of the papacy), and argued that the crusades against pagans and heretics were broadly accepted by the wider public in the thirteenth century, but this was not so with these crusades against other Christians (ibid., 227); idem, “L’idée de la croisade chez les juristes du Moyen-âge,” in Relazioni del X congresso internazionale di scienze storiche, 6 vols. (Rome, 1955), 3:565–94, at 574–77; James A. Brundage, “Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers,” in The Holy War, ed. Thomas Patrick Murphy (Columbus, OH, 1976), 99–140, at 107, 122–24 (Brundage saw the use of the crusade against other Christians as a progressive expansion of the holy war fought against Muslims in the Holy Land). However, in his landmark study, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison, WI, 1969), Brundage did not discuss crusading against Christians in any detail, maintaining a rather traditionalist view of crusading, with a firm focus on the Holy Land, and describing the transformation of the crusades “into an all-purpose holy war, an instrument to serve the politico-religious policy of the papacy in its combats with all sorts of enemies” (ibid., 193; cf. 136–37).
- 53.
Palmer A. Throop, Criticism of the Crusade: A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade Propaganda (Amsterdam, 1940), 26–65; Elisabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095–1274 (Oxford, 1985), 156–89; Martin Aurell, Des Chrétiens contre les croisades (Paris, 2013), 203–96.
- 54.
Maureen Purcell, Papal Crusading Policy: The Chief Instruments of Papal Crusading Policy and Crusade to the Holy Land from the Final Loss of Jerusalem to the Fall of Acre, 1244–1291 (Leiden, 1975), 16–22, 69–88, 94–98, passim.
- 55.
Ibid., 16–17, passim.
- 56.
Ibid., esp. 183–86.
- 57.
Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, 1994), 17–19, 33–34, 37–43, 52–59, 63–67, 72–79, 85–87, passim. Cf. also John B. Freed, The Friars and German Society in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 91–93, 138–161.
- 58.
The most influential proponent of this view was Carl Erdmann, Die Entstehung (see, e.g., his quotation above, at note 14); see also Housley, “Origins”; Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 1–2.
- 59.
For the foundations and early instances of the use of holy war against Christians, see esp. Housley, “Origins”; and Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 1–35, esp, 20–21.
- 60.
For example, Kennan, “Innocent III and the First Political Crusade”; Housley, “Origins,” 17, 31. See also Chap. 3 by Francesco Migliazzo in the present volume. Some scholars have also pointed to Pope Celestine III’s call against Alfonso IX of León, in 1196–1197, for allying with the Almohads, which similarly included the grant of the same remission of sins as for those fighting against Muslims in the East: see, e.g., Joseph F. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia, 2003), 62–63.
- 61.
Norman P. Tanner, ed., The Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London, 1990), 1:233–35.
- 62.
Hostiensis (Henry of Segusio), Summa aurea (Venice, 1574), pp. 1141–42. See Villey, La Croisade, 217–42, 259–61; idem, “L’idée de la croisade chez les juristes,” 574–77; Frederick H. Russell, The Just War in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1975), esp. 72–85, 112–19, 195–97, 201–06, 293–94; Brundage, “Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers,” esp. 122–23; Rist, The Papacy and Crusading, 27–35.
- 63.
For criticism against the crusades, and particularly those against Christians, see the works cited in footnote 53.
- 64.
Recent monographs on the topic give an idea of the expansion of scholarship, but also of its specific focus; some examples, by contributors to this volume, include: Rebecca Rist, The Papacy and Crusading in Europe, 1198–1245 (London, 2009); Nikolaos G. Chrissis, Crusading in Frankish Greece, 1204–1282 (Turnhout, 2012); Anti Selart, Livonia, Rus’ and the Baltic Crusades in the Thirteenth Century, trans. Fiona Robb (Leiden, 2015); and Leardo Mascanzoni, La crociata contro Francesco II Ordelaffi (1356–1359) nello specchio della storiografia (Bologna, 2017).
- 65.
For the contested nature of the term “Cathars,” see Chap. 2 by Rebecca Rist.
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Carr, M., Chrissis, N.G. (2024). Introduction. In: Carr, M., Chrissis, N.G., Raccagni, G. (eds) Crusading Against Christians in the Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-47339-5_1
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