By 1213, Innocent realised that widening the focus of holy war had actually served to weaken the Latin East–distracting the West from the plight of the Holy Land–and thus set about a major rethink of policy. Withdrawing the crusading status of the conflicts in Spain, the Baltic and southern France, he rechannelled the full force of crusading enthusiasm towards the reconquest of Jerusalem, proclaiming a new, grand expedition: the Fifth Crusade. At the same time, he made renewed attempts to assert full papal control over the organisation and prosecution of sanctified violence.

He began by making even more strenuous attempts to regularise the preaching of the Fifth Crusade. Innocent appointed hand-picked bands of clergy to spread the call to arms, and regional administrators to oversee recruitment campaigns. He also encouraged the production of preaching manuals that contained model-sermons, and set out specific guidelines on the conduct of preachers. Although the crusade attracted relatively few recruits from France–the traditional heartland of enthusiasm–elsewhere the response was dramatic. Enraptured by masterful orators like the French cleric James of Vitry or the German preacher Oliver of Paderborn–whose sermons were frequently accompanied by ‘miraculous’ events such as the appearance of shining crosses in the sky–thousands of skilled knights from Hungary, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries and England took the cross.

Innocent’s initiatives in the sphere of crusade finance had more problematic consequences. Until now, he had argued consistently that only trained warriors should be permitted to take the cross, believing that this would create a compact and efficient crusading army. In 1213 he performed what appeared to be a volte-face, declaring that as many people as possible should be encouraged to enlist, regardless of their suitability for the holy war. This opening of the floodgates may have been triggered, in part, by the recent Children’s Crusade, which so patently demonstrated the breadth and depth of western crusade enthusiasm. Nonetheless, Innocent’s scheme had a further twist. Years earlier, when he launched the Fourth Crusade, the pope had suggested that financial donations in aid of the holy war might be rewarded with an indulgence. Now, he refined and extended that notion. Innocent hoped many thousands would enrol in his new campaign, but he announced that anyone taking the cross who proved unable to fight in person could readily redeem their crusading vow by making a cash payment and still receive a religious reward. This extraordinary reform may have been well intentioned–designed to bring the crusade both financial and military resources, and to extend the redemptive power of holy war to a wider audience, but it established an extremely dangerous precedent. The idea that spiritual merit could be bought with money spawned the development of a comprehensive system of indulgences, perhaps the most widely criticised feature of later medieval Latin Catholicism and a key factor in the emergence of the Reformation. These looming long-term consequences were not apparent in 1213, but, even so, Innocent’s innovation elicited scandalised criticism among some contemporaries and, in the course of the thirteenth century, led to grave abuses of the crusade movement.

Nonetheless, the pope would not be turned from his purpose. The call for a new crusade to the Holy Land was broadcast again in 1215 at a massive ecclesiastical council (the Fourth Lateran) convened by Innocent to discuss the state of Christendom. This spectacular assembly–then the largest of its kind–affirmed the elevation of papal power achieved during Innocent’s pontificate. Ever obsessed with the drive to raise funds for the holy war, he renewed the deeply unpopular Church tax, this time at the even more scything rate of one-twentieth for three years, and appointed commissioners to ensure its careful collection.

Less than a year later, on 16 July 1216, Pope Innocent III died of a fever–one probably contracted while preaching the cross in the rain near Perugia (in central Italy)–even before the Fifth Crusade could begin.⁶ Throughout his pontificate he had embraced holy war and, although the campaigns waged at his behest achieved only limited success, Innocent’s willingness to support and amend the crusading movement did much to reinvigorate a cause that might otherwise have faltered. In many respects he shaped crusading into a form it would hold through the coming century and beyond. It is also true, however, that Innocent’s monumental ambitions far outstripped the reality of papal authority and that his attempts to assert direct ecclesiastical control over crusading expeditions were ill conceived and unrealistic.

OUTREMER IN THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

During the early thirteenth century, as the papacy sought to shape and to harness the might of crusading, the balance of power in the Near East underwent a series of convulsive changes. In the wake of the Third Crusade and the death of Saladin, Franks and Muslims alike were weakened and distracted by the eruption of convoluted succession crises in Palestine, Syria and Egypt. The Latin Christians struggling to survive in the Levant–nursing hopes of reconquest and expansion–had to embrace new approaches to Outremer’s defence and to their interaction with Islam.

In the summer of 1216, the French churchman James of Vitry had urgent business to conduct in central Italy. Perhaps in his early fifties, James was an erudite cleric and ardent reformer, with a natural oratorical flair. He had already earned renown as a preacher of the Albigensian campaigns and the Fifth Crusade–his sermons may also have helped to stir into life the so-called Children’s Crusade. James would go on to author an extremely valuable corpus of written material relating to the crusades, ranging from letters and historical accounts to collections of ‘model’ sermons. But in 1216 he had been elected as the new bishop of Acre and, before he could travel to the Levant, needed papal confirmation and consecration. James was expecting to meet with Pope Innocent III, but he arrived at Perugia on 17 July, the day after the pontiff’s death. Entering the church in which Innocent’s body had been laid in state before burial, James discovered that, overnight, looters had stripped the great pope’s corpse of its lavish vestments; all that remained was a half-naked, decomposing cadaver, already stinking in the midsummer heat. ‘How brief and vain is the deceptive glory of this world’, James observed when describing the spectacle.

The next day Pope Honorius III was elected as Innocent’s successor and James eventually received his confirmation. That autumn the bishop took ship from Genoa to the East–a perilous five-week journey, during which he endured severe late autumn storms that left the passengers on board able ‘[neither to] eat nor drink for the fear of death’. He arrived in Acre in early November 1216 and, in the months that followed, carried out an extensive preaching tour of Outremer, hoping to rejuvenate the spiritual fervour of its Christian populace in advance of the Fifth Crusade. The Near Eastern world he encountered was one of chronic political instability, in which old rivalries simmered on, even as new powers were emerging.⁷

The Crusader States in the Early Thirteenth Century

The balance of power in the Frankish East

In territorial terms the crusader states were barely a shadow of their former selves. Jerusalem and the inland regions of Palestine were in Muslim hands, and the Latin kingdom of ‘Jerusalem’ could now more accurately be termed the kingdom of Acre, its lands confined to a narrow coastal strip stretching from Jaffa in the south to Beirut in the north–the latter having been recovered with the aid of a party of German crusaders in 1197. Indeed, by the time James of Vitry arrived in the East, the Jerusalemite monarchy had adopted Acre as their new capital. Up the coast, the county of Tripoli retained a foothold in Lebanon, while a number of Templar and Hospitaller strongholds extended Frankish dominion some way to the north, but because the Muslims continued to control the region around Latakia there was no land connection to the principality of Antioch, and that once formidable polity had been reduced to a tiny parcel of land centred on Antioch itself.