32 Chrissis
Europe were not propitious. England was embroiled in an uprising of the bar-
ons against Henry iii, while King Béla’s priority was to solidify his control over
the Hungarian nobility rather than to undertake a risky venture in the Balkans.
At the same time, a parallel crusade to the Holy Land (the “Barons’ Crusade”,
1234–41), was being prepared, and many nobles and knights were keener to
join it rather than the Constantinopolitan campaign. Those who resisted papal
pressure and opted for the former included even the projected leader, Peter of
Dreux. The final blow seemed to be the irreversible deterioration of relations
between Gregory and Frederick ii and the outbreak of hostilities between the
pope and the emperor in 1239, which became the papacy’s main concern for
more than a decade, overshadowing all other activities. Nevertheless, it is a tes-
tament to Gregory’s tenacity that he managed to get a crusade off the ground,
eventually under the leadership of the Latin Emperor, Baldwin ii. The army
made its way from the West to the Latin Empire, where it achieved modest
success by recovering the strategically important town of Tzurulum in Thrace.
While this achievement was hardly proportionate to the efforts expended in
organising the crusade, it could serve as an example that, circumstances per-
mitting, such undertakings could indeed bring about tangible results.19
As an indication of its growing status, crusading in Greece was now included
among the priorities of the Church Universal. At the First Council of Lyon, in
1245, the defence of the Latin Empire was proclaimed as a duty for all the faith-
ful, and a Europe-wide call for military and monetary assistance was launched,
reaching as far as Portugal, Scotland and Poland.20 However, Pope Innocent iv
(1243–54) lacked his predecessor’s persistence on the issue, while papal policy
and resources were more and more forcefully drawn into the whirlpool of the
struggle with Frederick ii. This was compounded by the fact that Louis ix’s
planned expedition to the Holy Land (1248–50) topped the list of crusading
priorities at the time, at least in France. The calls for Frankish Greece quickly
fizzled out with little apparent response. After 1247, the papacy gave up on
active efforts to prop up the Latin Empire through crusading action and turned
19 Chrissis, Crusading, pp. 83–133; Nikolaos G. Chrissis, “A Diversion that Never Was:
Thibaut iv of Champagne, Richard of Cornwall and Pope Gregory ix’s Crusading Plans
for Constantinople, 1235–1239,” Crusades 9 (2010), 123–45; Michael Lower, The Barons’
Crusade: A Call to Arms and its Consequences (Philadelphia, 2005), esp. pp. 58–157;
Richard T. Spence, “Gregory ix’s Attempted Expeditions to the Latin Empire of
Constantinople: The Crusade for the Union of the Latin and Greek Churches,” Journal of
Medieval History 5 (1979), 163–76.
20 Relatio de concilio Lugdunensi, in mgh Const., 2:513–16, at 514; Norman P. Tanner,
ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London, 1990), 1:295–96; Ferdinand M.
Delorme, “Bulle d’Innocent iv en faveur de l’empire latin de Constantinople,” Archivum
Franciscanum Historicum 8 (1915), 307–10; Chrissis, Crusading, pp. 146–59.