I’ve been working on my PhD for a few months now. My research looks at
the financing of crusades, so I have mainly been reading through the
historiography of crusade finance. It has (perhaps surprisingly!) proved very
interesting. So I thought I’d share an overview of topic here.
*
The earliest works on crusade finance, written in
the first half of the twentieth century, looked at the role of the papacy in
fundraising. Round proved that the Saladin Tithe (1188) was collected in
England and suggested its yield was substantial.[1]
Lunt demonstrated that the tenth granted by Pope Gregory X to the sons of Henry
III in 1274 was inefficiently collected,[2]
and provided useful information on the development of crusade taxation in
England in an article on papal assessments of clerical incomes between 1199 and
1254.[3]
His greatest contribution to scholarship, however, perhaps came in 1939, with
the publication of Financial Relations of the Papacy with England to
1327. This expansive study drew upon a large corpus of papal registers and
looked in detail at how money was raised through taxes, alms, redemptions and
legacies.[4]
Its narrative structure often prevented lengthily analysis, however, and
unfortunately it contained no overarching thesis.
Perhaps surprisingly, Financial Relations
remained the final word on crusade finance for several decades. The subject was
eventually revisited in the 1980s, however, and interest continued thereafter.
Some historians followed Lunt’s lead, writing about how the papacy raised
money. In the superb Anatomy of a Crusade Powell argued that
although ‘the Fifth Crusade did not see dramatic changes in the area of crusade
finance’, it did encourage centralisation of papal fiscal administration, which
led to substantial funds being raised for the expedition through vow
redemptions, church taxation and temporal taxes and subsidies.[5]
Cazel affirmed the existence of the tax of 1185 in aid of the Holy Land.[6]
Evans contended that by the late thirteenth century preaching in England was
principally concerned with getting men and women to commute their vows for
money.[7]
Most historians turned their attention to new
fields of research, however. A few studies were written on how kings funded (or
in some cases failed to fund) the Wars of the Cross and the Crusader States. In
an excellent monograph on Louis IX and the crusade of 1248-1254, Jordan showed
that the king acquired money and supplies for the expedition by taxing towns
and the secular clergy.[8]
Mayer argued that Henry II sent large annual sums of money to the Holy Land
from 1172 onwards, but prevented it from being spent in order to maintain
political capital in Western Europe.[9]
Lloyd highlighted the financial donations of Henry III and Edward I to the Holy
Land.[10]
Carpenter demonstrated that Henry III amassed two gold treasures (1243-1253,
1254-1258) during his reign; he argued that the first hoard was gathered
originally for the new feretory of Edward the Confessor, but from 1247 onwards
for an English crusade, and that the second hoard was collected for the planned
expedition to Sicily.[11]
Other works looked at how individual crusaders
raised and spent money and, to a much lesser extent, the affects of such
transactions on the ‘Home Front’. In a pioneering article Constable argued that
in the twelfth century the majority of crusades were financed privately and
that the chief benefactors of fundraising were religious communities.[12]
By analysing charters of early crusaders Riley-Smith posited that crusading was
an extremely expensive affair, regardless of the social standing of
participants.[13]
Lloyd gave an ‘impression’ of how aristocrats got money for the crusade of the
Lord Edward by describing a few examples of them garnering royal support,
selling timber and leasing and selling property.[14]
Tyerman proposed, albeit without providing detailed evidence, that
crusaders from England secured funds through both public and, to a greater
extent, private sources of finance; in the short-term the crusades benefitted
some groups, such as the Crown, the Church and producers and sellers of
materials needed for war, but harmed others, such as Jews and a substantial
share of landowners.[15]
More recently, he suggested that a substantial portion of soldiers were paid
wages by crusade leaders throughout the entire crusading period.[16]
The themes of budgeting and ‘financial logistics’
were tackled in a few articles. Housley investigated whether fourteenth-century
Europeans had a grasp of how much money they needed to spend on a crusade,
concluding that they could accurately cost both naval and small land
expeditions, although the latter were often dauntingly expensive.[17]
Murray proposed that during the First Crusade and the crusade of Frederick
Barbarossa participants brought money in the form silver coins and ingots, and
in fact became wealthier over the course of the expeditions.[18]
Finally, some works of synthesis have been written.
In the ‘Wisconsin History of the Crusades’ Cazel gave an account of both
private and public sources of cash between the eleventh and late
thirteenth-centuries.[19]
Most recently, Tyerman provided an overview of how money was raised for and
spent on campaigns in a pair of chapters in his book on the planning of
crusades.[20]
[2] William E. Lunt, “Papal Taxation in England in the
Reign of Edward I,” English Historical Review 122 (1915): 398-417.
[3] William E. Lunt, “Early Assessments for Papal
Taxation of English Clerical Incomes,” in Annual Report of the American
Historical Association for the Year 1917 (Washington:
The American Historical Association, 1920), 267-280.
[4] William E. Lunt, Financial Relations of the
Papacy and England to 1327 (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America,
1939), 240-365, 419-460.
[5] James Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213-1221 (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 89-106.
[7] Michael R. Evans, “Commutation of Crusade Vows:
Some Examples from the English Midlands,” in From Clermont to Jerusalem: The
Crusades and Crusader Societies, 1095-1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Turnhout:
Brepols, 1998), 219-228.
[8] William Chester Jordan, Louis IX and the
Challenge of Crusade: A Study in Rulership (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1979), 65-104.
[9] H. E. Mayer, “Henry II of England and the Holy
Land,” English Historical Review 385 (1982): 721-739.
[10] Simon Lloyd, English Society and the Crusade,
1216-1307 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 239-243.
[11] David Carpenter, “The Gold Treasure of King Henry
III,” in The Reign of Henry III, ed. D. A. Carpenter (London: The
Hambledon Press, 1996), 107-136.
[12] Giles Constable, “The Financing of the Crusades,”
in Crusaders and Crusading in the Twelfth Century, ed. Giles Constable
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 117-142.
[13] Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Early Crusaders to the East
and the Costs of Crusading, 1095-1130,” in The Crusades: The Essential
Readings, ed. Thomas F. Madden (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 155-171; Jonathan
Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095-1131 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 109-135.
[14] Lloyd, English Society, 6, 175-197,
239-243; Simon Lloyd, “Crusader Knights and the Land Market in the Thirteenth
Century,” in Thirteenth Century England II: Proceedings of the Newcastle
Upon Tyne Conference 1987, ed. P. R. Cross and S. D. Lloyd (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 1988), 119-136.
[15] Christopher Tyerman, England and the Crusades,
1095-1588 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 188-201.
[16] Christopher Tyerman, “Paid Crusaders: ‘Pro
honoris vel pecunie’; ‘stipendiarii contra paganos’; Money
and Incentives of Crusade,” in The Practice of Crusades: Image and Action
from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries, ed. Christopher
Tyerman (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 1-40.
[17] Norman Housley, “Costing the Crusade: Budgeting
for Crusading Activity in the Fourteenth Century,” in The Experience of
Crusading, 1, Western Approaches, ed. Marcus Bull and Norman Housley
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 45-59.
[18] Alan V. Murray, “Money and Logistics in the Forces
of the First Crusade: Coinage, Bullion, Service, and Supply, 1096-99,” in Logistics
and Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. John H. Pryor (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2006), 229-249; Alan V. Murray, “Finance and Logistics of the Crusade
of Frederick Barbarossa”, in In Laudem Hierosolymitani: Studies in Crusades
and Medieval Culture in Honour of Benjamin Z. Kedar, ed. Iris Shagrir,
Ronnie Ellunblum and Jonathan Riley-Smith (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 357-368.
[19] Fred. A. Cazel, “Financing the Crusades,” in A
History of the Crusades: The Impact of the Crusades on Europe, ed.
Kenneth M. Setton, Harry W. Hazard, Norman P. Zacour (Wisconsin: The University
of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 116-149.
[20] Christopher Tyerman, How to Plan a Crusade:
Reason and Religious War in the Middle Ages (London: Penguin, 2015),
181-227.
