The Barons' Crusade: A Call to Arms and Its Consequences (review)

The subject of this study is the crusade of 1239–1241, which was commanded by Thibaut IV of Champagne and Richard of Cornwall. It was first dubbed the "Barons' Crusade" in the fourteenth century, with reference to the large number of high-ranking nobles who took part. With the exception of a chapter by Sidney Painter in Kenneth Setton's collaborative history of the crusades, the expedition has until now received little attention. It was a peculiarly fragmented enterprise and its military activities can seem confused and ill-advised, not least because its participants chose to operate in Palestine rather than following the dominant strategy of attacking Muslim power in the Nile delta. In Henry of Bar's raid on Gaza in November, 1239, it produced one of the most foolish episodes in all crusading history. But this neglect of the crusade was unwarranted; overall this was a significant venture and its gestation and course have a good deal to tell us about the condition of crusading in the 1230's. And unlike other crusades that eluded the numbering system that was imposed in the nineteenth century, such as the crusade of 1100–1101, the Barons' Crusade has bequeathed a satisfying volume of sources. Above all there are the registers of Pope Gregory IX, who proclaimed the crusade in 1234 with the intention that a crusading army would arrive in the Holy Land when the truce negotiated by Emperor Frederick II expired in 1239. By studying the pope's letters alongside narrative and documentary evidence for their reception, it becomes possible to gauge how an increasingly articulate lay society responded to the papal Curia's attempts to exert control over the crusade. Hence the subtitle given to this book.

Michael Lower provides a thorough, convincing, and well-documented interpretation of events between 1234 and 1241, clarifying numerous points of detail that previously were either neglected or misunderstood. The most important argument to emerge is that while the response to the preaching of the crusade reveals much enthusiasm, it was localized in nature and those who took the cross pursued their own agendas both in their planning and when in the field. We already knew that a substantial initiative on the part of Gregory IX to switch the crusade's goal from helping the Holy Land to rescuing the Latin empire of Constantinople was defied by its leaders. Lower explains in detail how the pope's initiative was thwarted, but he also demonstrates that the rejection of Gregory's proposals was indicative of a broader autonomy on the part of the crusading nobility. It was most strikingly manifested in Thibaut's presiding over the burning of more than 180 heretics at Monte-Aimé in 1239; Lower argues that this incident powerfully bolstered both the count's finances and his public image. Autonomy was often accompanied by diversity of response, and Lower has interesting things to say about the radically different ways in which the preaching and preparation of the crusade affected the Jews. In Champagne they suffered severe fiscal burdens, in parts of western France they were the victims of violent attacks, in 1240 they were expelled from Brittany, but in England they escaped with little loss. Because of the emotional charge that it carried and the demands that it imposed, it was always likely that the preaching of a crusade would generate hostility towards non-Christians, but like all generalizations this one is subject to exceptions. Lower points out that in Hungary the configuration of royal-papal relations was such that the preaching of the crusade there actually brought about an improvement in the situation of non-Christians. In sum, this concise and admirable study fills an annoying gap in crusading scholarship and deserves to become the standard work of reference for the Barons' Crusade.