The Impact of the Crusades 103
So Jews often suffered indirectly from papal calls for crusades. Living in Christian
Europe, yet no part of mainstream culture, their peculiarly complex status made
them particularly vulnerable. Indeed papal correspondence suggests that from the
eleventh century onwards, papal attitudes to Jews were themselves significantly
affected by the onset of the crusades, and the papacy’s decision in the thirteenth
century to authorize crusading against heretics and political enemies only helped
change attitudes further.
Thus, in letters appealing for military aid or commenting on specific issues
arising in the course of a crusade, popes from time to time made specific pro-
nouncements concerning Jews.9 These often concerned their special status as an
‘internal’ minority and were designed to deal with crusader hostility—including
forced baptisms—or to restore property seized by crusaders.10 Yet despite such
attempts, violence against Jews continued sporadically throughout the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries by those who took the Cross and embarked on
crusades. Many crusaders believed that as Muslims should be punished for threat-
ening the Holy Land—the place of Christ’s life and passion—so Jews must be
punished for their complicity in Christ’s crucifixion. Such sentiments were en-
hanced by the fact that they believed strongly that a crusade was an expedition
organized on god’s behalf; that was part of a wider agreement that force could be
justly employed for religious purposes. Theologians, influenced by works of
St Augustine, proposed sophisticated theories of just war and in particular the
premise that, although violence was evil, in intolerable conditions, subject to strin-
gent rules, and with the proviso that its goals were limited to the restoration of
order and the status quo, god might condone war as the lesser evil.11 Isidore of
Seville (c.560–636) had summarized this by stating that war was lawful when
waged upon command to recover property or repel attack.12 From such premises
canon lawyers argued that war must have a just cause—which usually stemmed
from some aggressive or injurious action—that it must be proclaimed by a legit-
imate authority, and that it must be based on right intention—in other words that
its participants ought to have honourable motives.
CrUSAdINg, CANON LAw, ANd tHE JEwS
during the eleventh and twelfth centuries collections of legal texts and commen-
taries discussing these ideas were multiplying across Europe. They included material
concerned with the authorization of military campaigns and greatly influenced
popes, some of whom were themselves trained in canon law. In particular the
9 There are no extant letters of Celestine Iv (1241) concerned with crusading and the treatment
of Jews. From what survives we can roughly estimate that the total number of papal letters concerned
with Jews in the twelfth and thirteenth century was approximately 240; 237 letters are recorded in
Simonsohn.
10 Simonsohn, passim; Grayzel, Vol. 1, passim; Grayzel, Vol. 2, passim.
11 Jonathan riley-Smith, What were the Crusades? 4th edn (Basingstoke, 2009), p.6.
12 riley-Smith, What were the Crusades?, p.6.