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PART I The Pope, Crusades, and Communities, 1198–1213 As Christoph Maier has observed, the thirteenth was ‘‘arguably the century with the most intense and varied crusading activity of the entire Middle Ages.’’1 Of course the circumstances of earlier crusade activity in northern Europe and Iberia and the changing fortunes of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem in the twelfth century , as well as the powerful Cistercian devotional commitment to the idea of crusade surely suggested the adaptability of the idea of crusade across a broader spectrum of ecclesiastical concern than Jerusalem and the Holy Land alone. But such adaptability played out most dramatically in the years after 1198, when Innocent III and his handpicked, trained assistants created a network of crusade preachers , recruiters, financial managers, and inspired lay warriors to link the crusade to the state of Christian society in many different forms, creating what may be considered a crusade culture. This section illustrates at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century the astonishing versatility of the crusade in the hands of a talented , driven, and frequently frustrated pope whose long view was always on the Holy Land, but whose many other concerns elsewhere and whose conviction that crusade and the need of religious reform in individuals and institutions were intimately connected were crucial to his pontificate. In spite of the troubles in central and southern Italy, the diplomatic and marital problems of Philip II Augustus, the disputed imperial election following the death of Henry VI in September 1197, the turmoil of the city-republics in Tuscany, and the increasing volume of legal matters and the rising costs of administration in the curia, Innocent’s earliest papal letters were full of discussions of the plight of the Holy Land and of the need for a forthcoming crusade. Although Amalric of Jerusalem had signed a treaty with al-Adil of Damascus that was to last until 1203, the treaty did not cover Cairo, and there was some discussion of whether Alexandria was the intended target, an eventual gateway to Jerusalem. In 1198 Innocent began his preparations for a crusade, issuing the eloquent and lengthy letter Post miserabile in August. It rhetorically painted a vivid picture of Muslim taunts against Christian failures in the East, appointed two of his closest advisers, Peter of Capua, cardinal deacon of Santa Maria in Via Lata, and Soffredus, cardinal priest of Santa Prassede, as his legates in western Europe, ‘‘so that by word and example they might invite others to the service of the cross,’’ and 1. Christoph Maier, review of Caroline Smith, Crusading in the Age of Joinville, Speculum 82 (2007), 485–486 at 485. Pope, Crusades, and Communities 25 reminded Christians that the crusade was God’s offering of a means to salvation, but that God’s people had to make themselves morally worthy of that gift.2 On November 5, 1198, Innocent commissioned the preacher Fulk of Neuilly both to preach himself and to help Peter of Capua to select and train other preachers.3 In the same year, at a tournament at Écry a number of princes had voluntarily taken up the cross and begun their preparations for further recruiting and transportation by sea to the Holy Land (below, No. 6). In his letter of 1199 to the Byzantine emperor Alexius III, Multe nobis attulit (below, No. 3), Innocent asked for more Byzantine aid to Christians in the Holy Land as well as for reunion between the divided Greek and Latin churches. Here, too, the crusade was linked to an overarching view of the nature and needs of Christian society. Innocent also sent out letters to the great churches of Europe and their leaders , urging, and then commanding them to contribute a fortieth part of their income to the crusade effort—the first tax on clerical income. Innocent also proposed to contribute substantially out of his own strained finances, and he commanded that special money chests be placed in churches, so that when crusade sermons were preached, contributions of the laity could also be collected and applied to the needs of crusade, although their application caused a number of difficult problems. His letters specifically echoed the privileges laid out by Gregory VIII in Audita tremendi, and they indicate a growing awareness of the size and complexity of mounting such an expedition early in the thirteenth century.4 The problems of finance reflected one great difficulty of a crusade to the...

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