Norman Housley

The Avignon Papacy and the Crusades, 1305-1378

While focusing on the relationship between the papacy and the 14th-century crusades, this study also illuminates other fields of activity in Avignon, such as papal taxation and interaction with Byzantium. Using recent research, Housley covers all areas where crusading occurred--including the eastern Mediterranean, Spain, eastern Europe, and Italy--and analyzes the Curias approach to related issues such as peacemaking between warring Christian powers, the work of Military Orders, and western attempts to maintain a trade embargo on Mamluk, Egypt. Placing the papal policies of Avignon firmly in context, the author demonstrates that the period witnessed the relentless erosion of papal control over the crusades.

The Crusades and Islam

Although crusading was not solely responsible for the deterioration of relations between Christianity and Islam in the central Middle Ages, it made a substantial and distinctive contribution toward it. Th e military needs of the crusader states placed the papacy in a situation of normative antagonism toward the Islamic powers of the Middle East. And while the primary motor of crusading was devotional and individual, the need to arouse people to take the Cross, as well as the creation of an “image of the enemy,” shaped a dominant picture of Islam, its founder, and adherents that was inaccurate, stereotypical, and lacking in humanity. Th e twin processes of soul searching and information gathering that were stimulated by repeated defeat in the East had little effect on the negativity of this picture, because their purpose was not to mend relations between the faiths, but to revitalize the Christian cause in order to achieve the recovery of Jerusalem. After the fall of the crusader states in 1291, the image of the enemy was transferred to the northern Turks; although it became much more complex and rounded, it retained a function that was overwhelmingly Euro-centric.

Documents on the later Crusades, 1274-1580

Introduction - Crusades to the Holy Land - The Problem of the Turks - The Spanish Reconquista and Beyond - The Crusades along the Baltic - Crusades against Christians - The Developing Theory of the Crusade - Key Institutional Features - The Military Order - Criticism and Disillusionment - Continuing Popularity and Appeal - Reading List

One man and his wars: the depiction of warfare by Marshal Boucicaut’s biographer

The career of Jean II le Maingre, Marshal Boucicaut, was characterised by constant bellicosity: in the wars of his king, as commander of a French expeditionary corps to Constantinople, as governor of the city of Genoa on behalf of the crown, and as a willing volunteer in conflicts against Muslims and pagan Lithuanians. Not surprisingly therefore, the practice of war plays a large role in the marshal’s famous biography, the ‘Livre des fais’. This essay examines the treatment of warfare in the ‘Livre des fais’ in the light of the wide range of issues about the conduct of war and chivalry recently highlighted by such scholars as Christopher Allmand, Philippe Contamine and Maurice Keen. Boucicaut’s career shows that around 1400 it was still possible to reconcile professional duties, the laws of war, the demonstration of prouesse, and combat against ‘Saracens’, although it was becoming increasingly hard to do so. ☆ This paper is offered to Professor Tony Goodman, biographer and student of medieval warfare, on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Edinburgh.

Politics and Heresy in Italy: Anti-Heretical Crusades, Orders and Confraternities, 1200–1500

One of the most important weapons in the armoury of the Church during its struggle with heresy in the later Middle Ages was the militant and outward-looking piety of the lay faithful. There were two main ways in which the Church could employ the religious zeal of the laity in the defence of the faith, especially during the critical battle with catharism in the thirteenth century. One was the issue of crusade indulgences and privileges to all who took up arms in, or otherwise contributed to, the struggle against the heretics and their protectors (in technical terms, their fautors). The crusading army which such a move could create was a powerful and relatively inexpensive instrument, but it had its disadvantages. The crusade against the Albigensians showed that it was very difficult to control in the field, while that against the Hussites demonstrated that its failure had serious effects on the enthusiasm of the faithful. The second way of employing lay piety was the establishment of permanent religious organisations, orders and confraternities, which would be at the service of the papal inquisition against heresy. In contrast to the temporary legal obligation of the crucesignatus , membership of such an organisation expressed a permanent commitment to the defence of the faith, a commitment rewarded only in articulo mortis by the grant of the plenary indulgence. My intention here is to examine some political aspects of both the use of the crusade indulgence, together with its associated privileges, and the functioning of anti-heretical orders and confraternities in Italy, mainly in the thirteenth century. Events in Italy deserve study for two reasons.

Crusading and the Ottoman threat, 1453-1505

1. Introduction 2. Underpinnings: antagonisms and allegiances 3. Strategy, mobilization, and control 4. Recruitment and finance 5. Communication 6. Indulgences and the crusade against the Turks 7. Conclusion Bibliography Index

The Mercenary Companies, the Papacy, and the Crusades, 1356–1378

During the second half of the fourteenth century most of France and many parts of Italy faced a social problem of massive proportions in the activities of the routiers , unemployed and rampaging mercenary soldiers. The popes of the period, Innocent VI, Urban V, and Gregory XI, took a leading role in attempts to deal with this daunting problem, and the purpose of this article is to examine one of the chief instruments which they employed, the crusade. The place of the mercenary companies in the crusading movement was paradoxical. On several occasions from 1357 onwards the popes issued crusading indulgences to those who fought against the routiers on the grounds that they presented a serious threat to the well-being of the Christian community, the populus christianus. But the popes also hoped to use the companies in the service of Christian Holy War by persuading them to travel to the eastern Mediterranean, to Hungary or to Granada, to fight the Muslims. Both approaches sprang from long-established papal policy towards those considered as Christendoms internal foes. When the curia tried to bring about the destruction of the routiers by offering spiritual rewards to their opponents it placed the mercenaries in the roll-call of Christian rebels and excommunicates combatted by means of the crusade, alongside the emperor Frederick II, Peter II of Aragon, the Visconti, and others. And when it attempted to send the companies beyond the frontiers of Christendom, it was adopting a strategy which dated back at least as far as the First Crusade. So both aspects of papal policy towards the routiers were highly traditional. They were also unsuccessful, which raises important questions about the way the later Avignon popes thought about and exercised their power. In the mid-thirteenth century the popes successfully resisted the ambitions of the Staufen and destroyed their might; a century later they proved unable to contain the companies. Was this because the Avignon papacy was out-of-date in its policies, because it failed to appreciate and adjust to the profound changes which had occurred in society and government? In broader terms, does traditionalism in this instance betoken the ideological bankruptcy which some scholars have seen as a leading characteristic of the papacy in the fourteenth century? In order to answer these questions I shall first examine the nature of the threat which was posed by the companies, then look in detail at the two aspects of the policy adopted by the curia in response to it.

Perceptions of Crusading in the Mid-Fourteenth Century: The Evidence of Three Texts

Assessing the popularity of crusading becomes more difficult from the mid-thirteenth century, when the age of the great passagia drew to a close. In the Europe of the 1340s and 1350s, embattled by warfare, plague, and economic collapse, it would seem logical to assume that the call to crusade had lost any appeal; yet we know that at the end of the century a significant revival of enthusiasm occurred. Part of the problem is that we possess few sources that reflect reactions to crusading in the 1340s and 1350s. The author examines three texts written during these decades that comment on crusading from very different perspectives: Geoffroi de Charny’s Livre de chevalerie (ca. 1352), Jean de Roquetaillade’s Liber secretorum eventuum (1349), and John Mandeville’s Travels (ca. 1356). He concludes that they reveal a remarkably similar approach. The activity of crusading was viewed in a wholly positive light, but it was seen as the outcome of a process of upheaval, one that would involve at best thoroughgoing ref...

Giovanni da Capistrano and the Crusade of 1456

Few events in the history of the crusades were as remarkable as the relief of Belgrade in the summer of 1456. It was extraordinary primarily because a Turkish army commanded by the sultan in person and equipped with formidable siege guns was repelled by an ad hoc force made up of John Hunyadi’s soldiers, Belgrade’s garrison and inhabitants, and above all the crusaders recruited and led by Giovanni da Capistrano. More broadly, both Capistrano’s success in recruiting an army of crusaders, and that army’s heterogeneous but predominantly non-noble nature, fly in the face of trends in crusading in the fifteenth century. Debate has raged about what happened in July 1456: was Belgrade saved by Hunyadi or Capistrano?1 Whether or not he saved Belgrade, however, the achievement of this 70-year-old friar in mobilizing enthusiasm for a crusade against the Turks was in itself daunting. Does the explanation lie in the crisis which Hungary faced in 1456, or in Capistrano’s own personality, experience and skill as a preacher? To place these issues in context I shall first establish the framework of Capistrano’s preaching and his own itinerary. I shall then analyse, in so far as the sources permit, the themes of his preaching and the devotional atmosphere which it generated in the crusading host. Finally, I shall explore some of the later echoes of the 1456 campaign.

Crusade and Reform, 1414–1449: Allies or Rivals?

Since at least the late twelfth century, the advocacy of a crusade to the Holy Land was closely related to the reform of the Church and more broadly of Christian society. In the fifteenth century, reform and crusade—the latter now principally directed against the Ottoman Turks—still coexisted in the minds of many, but the link had become complicated by the emergence of conciliarism. There was general agreement that the Church stood in need for far-reaching reform, indeed of renewal. But could, and should, crusade form part of that renewal? This chapter examines the tensions and synergies between the advocacy of crusade and reform, focusing on the Councils of Constance (1414–1418) and Basel (1431–1449).