Crusading Fervor
For Discussion
Mayer, Chapters 10, 11 and 12
The Children's Crusade
The Crusade of Frederick II, 1228-29
Frederick II's Crusade: Letters, 1229
The Capture of Jerusalem, 1244
Madden, Houseley, "Crusades against Christians"
Houseley is the leading historian on the "non-traditional" crusades, such as crusades against heretics and the so-called political or Italian crusades.
What are the elements he identifies as key to an expedition being considered a crusade? Why are these elements important? What do your other authors have to say on this?
We usually deplore political crusades, but mainly on vague moralistic grounds. Houseley identifies some specific consequences of the political crusades. What are they?
Houseley, like several other authors, drops into Latin, German, French, or whatever freely. Don't hesitate to ask about these phrases. Or about phrases in English that seem obscure to you.
Madden, Constable, "Medieval Charters"
Constable makes very good use of the charters to identify what sort of people went on crusade. In what ways is his picture richer than that you get from Mayer or from my own essays?
By his own admission, the charters cannot capture much information about the poor who went on "popular" crusades such as the People's Crusade or the Children's Crusade.
His point about neighbors and groups is important and worth remembering. The crusades were not comprised of individuals, but of groups and coalitions. Marcus Bull made the same point, in a different way.
The section on finance is very good, too, especially the point about the institutionalization of crusade financing. Why?
With regard to his first point, I disagree somewhat. It's not surprising to see a new act (crusading) couched in traditional language (pilgrimage), especially when it wasn't the layman writing these charters, it was the clergy. Nowhere does Constable consider how well or poorly a charter reflects the subtleties of thought of the donor. He talks as if it were a perfect reflection.
The quote from the Annals of Würzburg (not Wúrzburg—this book is riddled with typographic errors) is good. It shows how contemporaries recognized ignoble secular motives. You will often read modern commentators speculating on these motives, but this source says what the people of the time saw. That's invaluable to a historian.