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| (Massacre against the Albigensians by the crusaders. British Library, Royal. Author: Chroniques de Saint-Denis, date 14th Century (after 1332, before 1350). (The Crusades Against Christians: Albigensian Crusade (1235–1241)) |
Contents:
- Background
- Bosnian Crusade (1235–1241)
- Albigensian Crusade (1235–1241)
- Aragonese Crusade (1284–1285)
- Despenser's Crusade (1382–1383)
- Hussite Wars (1419–1434)
(See also The Crusades to the Holy Land)
(See also The Northern Crusades)
Background
Deriving its legitimacy from Roman theories of public war, the examples of Scripture, and the identification of the Christian Church with secular powers, Christian holy war boasted an ancient pedigree. Long familiar with wars against external infidels attracting spiritual privileges, in the eleventh century the Western church extended the images and rituals of holy war to conflicts within Christendom as the church strove to define its legal, liturgical, and theological codes, as well as its relationship with the secular world. Impetus came from the radicals of the papal reform movement, who increasingly equated the universal church with the see of Rome.
Ecclesiastical support for military activity centered on the protection and defense of the church, its clergy, and its property, exemplified by the Peace and Truce of God initiatives. Reforming popes, such as Leo IX in his attack on the Normans in southern Italy (1053), encouraged their troops to believe they were engaged in a holy pursuit, gaining remission of the penalties of sin. Pope Gregory VII (1073-1085), with his militia Sancti Petri (knighthood of St. Peter), insisted that fighting for the papacy was a penitential act, those killed being promised salvation. Such ideas owed less to Augustin- ian theories of just war than to the experience of militant Christianity and wars to defend the church since the eighth century. Both Anselm of Lucca’s Collectio Canonum (c. 1085), which included Augustinian just war texts but received little attention, and the description of the Christian warrior in De vita christiana (c. 1090-1095) by the extreme Gregorian Bonizo of Sutri focused on internal threats to the church by heretics and schismatics rather than wars against infidels.
Legitimate or Perverted Crusades?
That crusading should become involved in wars against Christians was inevitable, given the pre-1095 history of holy wars within Christendom. That such an application only became habitual in the thirteenth century reflected the greater coherence of crusade institutions after the end of the twelfth century, as well as the enhanced bureaucratic and financial efficiency of the system of ecclesiastical taxation upon which such enterprises depended for their operation and appeal to military commanders. The simultaneous consolidation of the theology of indulgences aided recruitment to a cause that offered the greatest remission of sins possible, even though idealism alone cannot explain how armies were raised for these (or for any other) crusades. Holy war against Christians suited prevalent cultural attitudes that demanded formal religious sanction to secular behavior, hence the eccentric phenomenon of crusades against crusaders: in 1240, the imperialist dean ofPassau in Bavaria publicly preached the cross against the papal legate; in 1263-1265, Simon of Montfort explicitly associated his rebellion against King Henry III of England with a crusade; even in 1215 such a conflict occurred, when Robert FitzWal- ter, a leader of the opposition to King John, who had just taken the cross, called himself Marshal of the Army of God.
From the thirteenth century onward, papal wars against Christians attracted controversy. Victims and enemies naturally complained. Crusades against Christians could seem tawdry rackets, distracting from the higher call of the Holy Land. In the thirteenth century, many otherwise sympathetic to crusading opposed papal wars in Italy: clergy resentful at taxation, English and French nobles reluctant to commute their vows in the 1230s and 1240s, citizens of Lille in 1284, and Florentines who refused to allow their crusade legacies to be diverted. The papalist Hostiensis noted that popular opinion in Germany preferred the crusade to the Holy Land. Those eager to see crusading as a means of moral and religious regeneration tended to look to wars against heretics and infidels, not fellow Christians, which, in the fourteenth century, attracted limited international approval.
While popes such as Innocent IV, Clement IV, Boniface VIII, and John XXIII promoted wars against Christians, others, such as Gregory X (1271-1276) and Nicholas IV (1288-1291), pursued peace to achieve a new Eastern expedition. The Curia could recognize the potential unpopularity of crusades against Christians: in 1246 Innocent IV insisted that his order to his legate to stop preaching the Holy Land crusade in order to facilitate the promotion of the crusade against the Staufen should be kept secret. The concurrence of numerous crusade appeals with different objectives caused a degree of confusion, duplication, and contradiction of effort.
While popes and their apologists insisted that the anti- Staufen and Italian crusades were necessary prerequisites for any successful campaign in the East, others, such as the Venetian crusade propagandist Marino Sanudo (d. 1343), argued instead that they constituted major impediments to the recovery of the Holy Land. The gradual loss of Outremer coinciding with the intensification of crusading in Italy struck some as reprehensible. However, successive popes managed to find enthusiasts for their campaigns, eager to pursue secular warfare with spiritual benefits and church funding. It is hard to blame the crusades against Christians as single-handedly undermining support for the concept of Wars of the Cross or for papal authority in the West; John Wyclif’s famous attack on Despenser’s Crusade in 1383 formed part of a much wider critique of a church palpably in crisis over the Great Schism. Criticism of papal bureaucracy, corruption, and bellicosity embraced the Italian crusades but was hardly defined by it. There is no such thing as neutral public opinion, but it is hard to detect either majority condemnation or majority approval. Papal crusades against Christians, while producing major successes, such as Charles of Anjou’s victory, failed to secure papal territory. By the early fifteenth century, with papal temporal plenitude of power compromised by the growing assertion of national ecclesiastical autonomy, crusades against Christians, appearing at worst objects of derision and at best irrelevant beyond the regional conflicts to which they were still applied, were abandoned, rather as poor business than as ideologically corrupt.
Bosnian Crusade (1235–1241)
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| (Hungarians fleeing Mongol invaders. (The Mongols in Hungary 1241. Széchényi National Library, Budapest, date 1358, author unknown.)) |
Date: 1235–1241
Location: Bosnia, possibly also Slavonia and Zachlumia
Result: Status quo ante bellum
Territorial changes: Hungarian occupation of peripheral parts of Bosnia reversed after the war
The Bosnian Crusade was fought against unspecified heretics from 1235 until 1241. It was, essentially, a Hungarian war of conquest against the Banate of Bosnia sanctioned as a crusade. Led by the Hungarian prince Coloman, the crusaders only succeeded in conquering peripheral parts of the country. They were followed by Dominicans, who erected a cathedral and put heretics to death by burning. The crusade came to an abrupt end when Hungary itself was invaded by Tatars. The crusaders were forced to withdraw and engage their own invaders, most of them perishing, including Coloman. Later popes called for more crusades against Bosnia, but none ever took place. The failed crusade led to mistrust and hatred for Hungarians among the Bosnian population that lasted for centuries.
Aftermath and legacy
The threat of new religious persecution reappared within a few years of the war. Pope Innocent IV began urging the Hungarians to undertake another crusade in late 1246 and 1247, and they appeared willing. Matthew Ninoslav argued that he only associated with heretics to defend Bosnia against Hungarian invaders. He appears to have convinced Innocent, who suspended the crusade in March 1248. It was preached again in 1337–38 and 1367, by popes Benedict XII and Urban V respectively, but in drastically different political circumstances. Hungary was ruled by a new dynasty, the Capetian Angevins, who supported the Kotromanić rulers of Bosnia. King Charles Robert once declared that any Hungarian who attacked Bosnia, ruled by his friend Stephen II, would be regarded as a traitor. The only significant impact the Bosnian Crusade had was augmenting the anti-Hungarian sentiment among the Bosnians, a major factor in Bosnian politics that contributed to the Ottoman conquest of Bosnia in 1463 and lasted beyond it.
Albigensian Crusade (1235–1241)
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| (Pope Innocentius III excommunicating the Albigensians (left), Massacre against the Albigensians by the crusaders (right). British Library, Royal. Author: Chroniques de Saint-Denis, date 14th Century (after 1332, before 1350) ) |
Date: 1209–1229
Location: Languedoc, France
Result: Crusader victory
Casualties and losses: At least 200,000 to at most 1,000,000 Cathars killed
The Albigensian Crusade or Cathar Crusade (1209–1229) was a 20-year military campaign initiated by Pope Innocent III to eliminate Catharism in Languedoc, in the south of France. The Crusade was prosecuted primarily by the French crown and promptly took on a political flavour, resulting in not only a significant reduction in the number of practising Cathars, but also a realignment of the County of Toulouse, bringing it into the sphere of the French crown and diminishing the distinct regional culture and high level of influence of the Counts of Barcelona.
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| (Map of Languedoc on the eve of the Albigensian Crusade. AD 1209.) |
The medieval Christian radical sect of the Cathars, against whom the crusade was directed, originated from an anti-materialist reform movement within the Bogomil churches of Dalmatia and Bulgaria calling for a return to the Christian message of perfection, poverty and preaching, combined with a rejection of the physical to the point of starvation. The reforms were a reaction against the often scandalous and dissolute lifestyles of the Catholic clergy in southern France. Their theology was basically dualist. Several of their practices, especially their belief in the inherent evil of the physical world, which conflicted with the doctrines of the Incarnation of Christ and transubstantiation, brought them the ire of the Catholic establishment. They became known as the Albigensians, because there were many adherents in the city of Albi and the surrounding area in the 12th and 13th centuries.
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| (Expulsion of the inhabitants from Carcassone in 1209. Author: "Workshop of Master of Boucicaut", date circa 1415. Image taken from Grandes Chroniques de France. ) |
Between 1022 and 1163, they were condemned by eight local church councils, the last of which, held at Tours, declared that all Albigenses "should be imprisoned and their property confiscated," and by the Third Lateran Council of 1179. Innocent III's diplomatic attempts to roll back Catharism met with little success. After the murder of his legate, Pierre de Castelnau, in 1208, Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars. He offered the lands of the Cathar heretics to any French nobleman willing to take up arms. After initial successes, the French barons faced a general uprising in Languedoc which led to the intervention of the French royal army.
The Albigensian Crusade also had a role in the creation and institutionalization of both the Dominican Order and the medieval inquisition.
Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term genocide, referred to the Albigensian Crusade as "one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history".
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| (Crusader Francs besieging Nicea. They are catapulting the heads of captured enemies over the city walls to terrorise the citizens. Guillaume de Tyr. Many of the Crusaders against the Cathar came from traditional crusader families. (Miniature from Les Estoires) ) |
After 1229
The Inquisition was established in 1234 to uproot the remaining Cathars. Operating in the south at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other towns during the whole of the 13th century, and a great part of the 14th, it succeeded in crushing Catharism as a popular movement and driving its remaining adherents underground. Punishments for Cathars who refused to recant ranged from cross wearing and pilgrimage to imprisonment and burning.
From May 1243 to March 1244, the Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the troops of the seneschal of Carcassonne and the archbishop of Narbonne. On 16 March 1244, a large and symbolically important massacre took place, where over 200 Cathar Perfects were burnt in an enormous pyre at the prat dels cremats ("field of the burned") near the foot of the castle.
Aragonese Crusade (1284–1285)
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| (Peter III (1240-1285) at Col de Panissars by Mariano Barbasán (1889)) |
Date: 1284–1285
Location: Principality of Catalonia
Result: Aragonese victory, death of Philip III of France, death of Peter III the Great
The Aragonese Crusade or Crusade of Aragon, a part of the larger War of the Sicilian Vespers, was declared by Pope Martin IV against the King of Aragon, Peter III the Great, in 1284 and 1285. Because of the recent conquest of Sicily by Peter, the Pope declared a crusade against him and officially deposed him as king, on the grounds that Sicily was a papal fief: Peter's grandfather and namesake, Peter II, had surrendered the kingdom as a fief to the Holy See. Martin bestowed Aragon on Charles, Count of Valois, son of the French king, Philip III, and nephew of Peter III.
The crusade soon caused civil war within Aragon, as Peter's brother, King James II of Majorca, joined the French. James had also inherited the County of Roussillon and thus stood between the dominions of the French and Aragonese monarchs. Peter had opposed James' inheritance as a younger son and reaped the consequence of such rivalry in the crusade.
In 1284, the first French armies under Philip and Charles entered Roussillon. They included 16,000 cavalry, 17,000 crossbowmen, and 100,000 infantry, along with 100 ships in south French ports. Though they had James' support, the local populace rose against them. The city of Elne was valiantly defended by the so-called Bâtard de Roussillon (Bastard of Roussillon), the illegitimate son of Nuño Sánchez, late count of Roussillon (1212–1242). Eventually he was overcome and the cathedral was burned, despite the presence of papal legates, while the population was massacred, all save the Bâtard. He succeeded in negotiating his surrender and accompanied the advancing royal forces as a prisoner.
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| (Map: Progress of the Aragonese Crusaders (1285)) |
In 1285, Philip the Bold entrenched himself before Girona in an attempt to besiege it. The resistance was strong, but the city was taken. Charles was crowned there, but without an actual crown. On 28 April, Cardinal Jean Cholet placed his own hat on the count's head. For this, Charles was derisively but not unaffectionately nicknamed roi du chapeau ("king of the hat").
The French soon experienced a reversal, however, at the hands of Peter III's admiral, Roger de Lauria. The French fleet was defeated and destroyed at the Battle of Les Formigues. As well, the French camp was hit hard by an epidemic of dysentery. Philip himself was afflicted. The heir to the French throne, Philip, opened negotiations with Peter for free passage for the royal family through the Pyrenees. But the troops were not offered such passage and were decimated at the Battle of the Col de Panissars. The king of France himself died at Perpignan, the capital of James of Majorca, and was buried in Narbonne. Peter did not long survive him.
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| (James I of Aragon conquers Valencia and founds the Kingdom of Valencia. Author unknown, date XIV.) |
Historian H. J. Chaytor described the Aragonese Crusade as "perhaps the most unjust, unnecessary and calamitous enterprise ever undertaken by the Capetian monarchy." W. C. Jordan has blamed it for the young Philip's opposition to papal interference in French foreign policy upon his succession, which had long-reaching consequences for Europe. The crusade's legacy to France was slight, but Majorca was devastated as an independent polity. Peter's son Alfonso III annexed Majorca, Ibiza, and Minorca in the following years. In 1295, the Treaty of Anagni returned the islands to James and the Treaty of Tarascon of 1291 officially restored Aragon to Alfonso and lifted the ban of the church.
Despenser's Crusade (1382–1383)
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| (Map of France in 1382, showing English conquests in pink and Flanders (top) in yellow) |
Date: December 1382 – September 1383
Location: Western Flanders
Result: English withdrawal
Despenser's Crusade (or the Bishop of Norwich's Crusade, sometimes just Norwich Crusade) of 1383 was a military expedition led by Henry le Despenser that aimed to assist the city of Ghent in its struggle against the supporters of Antipope Clement VII. It took place during the great Papal schism and the Hundred Years' War between England and France. While France supported Clement, whose court was based in Avignon, the English supported Pope Urban VI in Rome.
Popular at the time among the lower and middle classes, Despenser's Crusade "was only widely criticised in hindsight", and "for all its canonical propriety, [it] was the Hundred Years' War thinly disguised". Among contemporary critics of the crusade were John Wyclif and the French chronicler Jean Froissart, who charged its leaders with hypocrisy.
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| (Coat-of-arms of John of Gaunt, demonstrating his claim to rule Castile and León. He championed a crusade to Spain in opposition to Despenser's crusade.) |
A member of a powerful aristocratic family of the Marches and South Wales, Henry Despenser was consecrated bishop of Norwich in 1369. He first showed martial abilities in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, when he was responsible for suppressing the rising in East Anglia. Despenser’s crusade was a response to a revolt of the citizens of Ghent (mod. Gent, Belgium) in the county of Flanders against their pro-French count, Louis of Male, and their overlord, King Charles VI of France. Money-raising measures attached to this “crusade,” notably the sale of indulgences that went with it, attracted critical comment from contemporaries, especially the reformer John Wyclif, but were in all probability no more outrageous than those that accompanied any crusade.
This critical reaction was due rather to the prevailing anticlerical atmosphere of the time, and the fact that the expedition proved to be a failure. The campaign arguably made good strategic and economic sense, as it would have reopened England’s wool trade with Flanders, as well as exposing France to attack from the north. Despenser’s intervention became more urgent when a French army defeated the rebel Flemish townsmen and killed their leader, Philip van Artevelde, at Roosebeke in November 1382. This army was led by Philip, duke of Burgundy, who was married to the count of Flanders’s daughter and stood to inherit the county. The French occupied Ypres (mod. Ieper, Belgium) and Bruges (mod. Brugge, Belgium), cutting off the valuable English wool trade from the Flemish cloth-producing towns.
The crusade enjoyed early success; landing at Calais in May 1383, Despenser captured Dunkirk (mod. Dunkerque, France) and the Flemish coast, and joined forces with the Ghent rebels in early June. They persuaded the bishop to march on Ypres, although his army was ill-equipped to besiege a major town. The siege was abandoned in August, when news arrived that Philip of Burgundy’s army was approaching. At this point the men of Ghent abandoned Despenser in disgust. The English had no choice but to retreat to the coast, sacking the port of Gravelines as they did so. Despenser returned from this ignominious failure to face impeachment and the confiscation of his temporalities for two years. He was never as significant a political figure after this event, although he defended King Richard II at the time of Henry IV’s usurpation, a stance that earned him two spells of imprisonment under the new regime.
Hussite Wars (1419–1434)
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| (Battle of Vítkov Hill, Date 12 June – 14 July 1420. Author Adolf Liebscher.) |
Date: July 30, 1419 – May 30, 1434
Location: Central Europe, mostly in the Crown of Bohemia
Result: Hussite victory
Hussite church becomes free from the Papacy
Compromise between the Utraquist Hussites and the Council
Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor becomes King of Bohemia
The Hussite Wars, also called the Bohemian Wars or the Hussite Revolution, were fought between the Hussites and various European monarchs who sought to enforce the authority of the Roman Catholic Church on them; various Hussite factions also confronted each other, especially the Utraquists who opposed remaining Hussite spinoffs alongside Roman Catholics. These wars lasted from 1419 to approximately 1434.
The Hussite community included most of the Czech population of the Kingdom of Bohemia, and formed a major military power. They defeated five crusades proclaimed against them by the Pope (1420, 1421, 1422, 1427 and in 1431), and intervened in the wars of neighboring countries. The Hussite Wars were notable for the extensive use of early hand-held firearms such as hand cannons.
The fighting ended after 1434, when the moderate Utraquist faction of the Hussites defeated the radical Taborite faction. The Hussites agreed to submit to the authority of the King of Bohemia and the Church, and were allowed to practice their somewhat variant rite.
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| (Map of the Hussite wars: 1420-1436) |
Aftermath
The Utraquist creed, frequently varying in its details, continued to be that of the established church of Bohemia until all non-Catholic religious services were prohibited shortly after the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620. The Taborite party never recovered from its defeat at Lipany, and after the town of Tábor had been captured by George of Poděbrady in 1452, Utraquist religious worship was established there. The Bohemian Brethren (Unitas Fratrum), whose intellectual originator was Petr Chelčický but whose actual founders were Brother Gregory, a nephew of Archbishop Rokycany, and Michael, curate of Žamberk, to a certain extent continued the Taborite traditions, and in the 15th and 16th centuries included most of the strongest opponents of Rome in Bohemia.
J. A. Komenský (Comenius), a member of the Brethren, claimed for the members of his church that they were the genuine inheritors of the doctrines of Hus. After the beginning of the German Reformation, many Utraquists adopted to a large extent the doctrines of Martin Luther and of John Calvin and, in 1567, obtained the repeal of the Compacts which no longer seemed sufficiently far-reaching. From the end of the 16th century the inheritors of the Hussite tradition in Bohemia were included in the more general name of "Protestants" borne by the adherents of the Reformation.
At the end of the Hussite Wars in 1431, the lands of Bohemia had been totally ravaged. The adjacent Bishopric of Würzburg in Germany was left in such bad shape after the Hussite Wars, that the impoverishment of the people was still evident in 1476. The poor conditions contributed directly to the peasant conspiracy that broke out that same year in Würzburg.