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PART III The Fifth Crusade, 1213–1221 The Fifth Crusade was the campaign envisioned in Vineam Domini in 1213, announced to the faithful and to crusade preachers in Quia maior and Pium et sanctum, also in 1213, and formally announced in Ad liberandam in 1215. A pope, not individual nobles and their willful and underfunded followers, as in the Fourth Crusade, nor an emperor, as in the crusade of 1197–1198, was to direct the vast enterprise. The crusade was also far more carefully planned and financed than earlier crusades. It revealed a greater degree of commitment on the part of participants, most from Italy but others from other parts of Europe, notably the lower Rhineland. In all, more than eight hundred individuals from all over Europe have been identified as having taken part. In July 1215 and again in 1220 the king-emperor Frederick II himself took the cross and promised extensive support from German lands and the kingdom of Sicily. It also reflects a new degree of lay spirituality on the part of its warriors, many of whom took to heart the idea of imitatio Christi, an ‘‘imitation of Christ,’’ as a component of crusader identity. The crusade also emphasized the recent concept of Christian mission, the idea that Muslims might be converted if God so willed—during the course of the expedition, Saint Francis of Assisi preached to the sultan at Mansura, as dramatic an instance of mission as is conceivable.1 The Fifth Crusade took place in the immediate wake of several crusading disasters—the failed crusade of the emperor Henry VI, the Fourth Crusade, the Children’s Crusade, and the still-controversial Albigensian Crusade. But it also reminded Christians of crusading triumphs—Las Navas de Tolosa and other successes in the Iberian Peninsula, the initial triumph of 1099, now familiarized in chronicles and histories like that of William of Tyre, the exploits of Godfrey of Bouillon and Richard I in vernacular verse narratives, and the visible survival of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in coastal fortified, prosperous cities like Acre and in the kingdom of Cyprus. The explanation of failure—God’s anger at the sins of Christian society—supported Innocent III’s argument for universal Christian moral reform, a theme that ran through the Fifth and all other crusades of the thirteenth century, giving the crusade a central role in the life of the church. It also held out the idea of success if moral reform was carried through. And men could look to the heavens for signs if these could be read accurately predicting success or failure, 1. On this famous episode and its long history of interpretation, see John V. Tolan, St. Francis and the Sultan: The Curious History of a Christian-Muslim Encounter (Oxford, 2009). On the problem of conversion, see Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches Toward the Muslims (Princeton NJ, 1984); John V. Tolan, Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination (New York, 2002); John V. Tolan, Sons of Ishmael: Muslims Through European Eyes in the Middle Ages (Gainesville FL, 2008). Roger Wendover on Signs and Portents 131 as in the signs and portents collected by Roger Wendover at Saint Albans (below, No. 17) and Oliver of Paderborn in Damietta (below, No. 21). The communications network among bishops in place across Europe, papal legates moving from diocese to diocese on clearly defined routes, crusade preachers like James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn in geographically defined preaching tours, and the attention paid to all of these by Innocent III and his successors underlay crusade preparations in the years between 1215 and 1218. Their effectiveness is illustrated by the letters that some of them wrote to the popes and the papal responses. Examples are the letters of Gervase of Prémontré (below, No. 18), which reveal an astute awareness of the practical difficulties faced by crusade recruiters. In several instances, local chronicles narrated the experience of crusaders from particular regions, like the Rhineland crusaders (No. 20). But the Fifth Crusade also found its own historian in Oliver of Paderborn, schoolmaster of the cathedral of Cologne and one of those most closely associated with the preaching and recruitment of the crusade even before 1213. Oliver’s Historia Damiatina (The Capture of Damietta, No. 21) is an account written on the scene by an able and observant participant. Others on the Fifth Crusade also wrote letters back to Europe that further illuminate Oliver’s...

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