Crusade and Conversion after the Fourth Lateran Council (1215): Oliver of Paderborn's and James of Vitry's Missions to Muslims Reconsidered

As part of a conference devoted to exploring boundaries, this paper will probe the convenient historiographical divides often drawn between crusade and conversion, various missionary and crusading theaters, and pre- and post-mendicant proselytization efforts. For although much has been made of the supposed rift between pre-mendicant and mendicant anti-Islamic polemic and missions, I would like to counter the assertion that pre-mendicant authors worked in isolation to compose works which presented a "wretched tissue of fables," that interest in the reality of Islam would have to await the coming of the friars.² In fact, there is considerable evidence for continuity between the missionary approaches of monastic writers and Paris masters who worked in networks and the efforts of their mendicant successors. Moreover, many individuals who attempted to convert Jews, pagans, heretics or Muslims also became involved in the promotion of various crusades, while polemical techniques and missionizing tactics were often transferred from region to region, campaign to campaign, via personal networking, written letters, or treatises. Influences could stretch over time as well as space. Many writers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn, drew on Byzantine, eastern Christian, and patristic polemics and prophecies when formulating their perceptions of Islam. Similarly, genres and arguments from the "Middle Ages" persisted well into the "Age of Discovery"; the works of medieval writers including James of Vitry would influence the image of Islam and eastern Christianity presented by missionary and crusading treatises well into the early modern period.³

Conducted in preparation for and contemporaneous with the military campaigns of the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221), James's and Oliver's missionary work and writings were informed by their education in Paris and prior work as crusade recruiters and reformers. For during the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Paris-educated members of Peter the Chanter's circle and their colleagues in various religious orders joined other crusade recruiters, prelates, regular religious, secular clergymen, and the representatives of secular rulers in defining and addressing the challenges facing western Christendom. Many of these men had previously collaborated in multifarious reforming and crusading projects and were convinced that the threats menacing Christendom—internecine war, heretics, Greek schismatics, pagans in the Baltic, and Muslims in Spain and the East—were symptoms of a deeper malaise, the sinfulness of the West. In order to counteract these menaces, a thoroughgoing reform of the church had to be combined with pastoral outreach to re-win wavering Christians and earn divine favor for the crusading movement.⁴

Part of the urgency which impelled the various measures taken before, during, and after the Fourth Lateran Council stemmed from the concept that the military reconquest of the Holy Land and conversion of eastern Christians, Muslims, pagans and Jews to Latin Christianity would play an essential role in the end-times which were rapidly approaching. Although Benjamin Kedar has asserted that Joachim of Fiore's views did not influence missionary efforts in the later twelfth and early thirteenth century,⁵ his apocalyptic vision of world history was in fact well-known to Innocent III and reformers from Peter the Chanter's circle, including James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderborn.⁶ Joachim's prophecies had been widely publicized in France and England during the Third Crusade and would have been freshly brought to mind by the condemnation of his Trinitarian theory at the Fourth Lateran during preparations for the Fifth Crusade. James and Oliver appear to have adhered to Joachim's theory that only a combination of crusade and conversion could counteract Islam, viewed as the latest in a series of persecutions of the church by Jews, pagans, heretics, and Muslims.⁷ Their convictions were bolstered during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade, when eastern Christians revealed pseudo-Clementine and other prophecies which promised the collusion of eastern Christian kings in the extirpation of Islam. These prophecies profoundly affected the course of this expedition and, confirmed in part by the spread of a similar...