52 Chrissis
of the story, if only to indicate the importance of the crusade in the diplo-
matic language of the time.80 Another question is whether the 14th-century
naval leagues against the Turks were indeed crusades. For the most part, those
leagues were alliances of secular powers with vested interests in the Aegean,
such as Venice, the Hospitallers of Rhodes, and other Latin lords of the islands,
and it was they who took the initiative and shouldered the burden of the oper-
ations. With the exception of the Crusade of Smyrna there was practically no
effort to raise recruits through preaching in the West.81 However, to the extent
that those campaigns were sanctioned by the papacy with the grant of indul-
gences to their participants, it is appropriate to consider them as a particular
manifestation of crusading activity in the region.
Rhetoric and Legitimisation
In order to turn Romania into a crusading front after 1204, the papacy and the
Latin Emperors seeking reinforcements from the West resorted to two main
arguments: first, that Latin control of the area would be helpful to the affair of
the Holy Land, as it would offer a convenient link to Outremer and it would also
add the resources of the empire to the effort; secondly, that the control over the
patriarchate of Constantinople (and the consequent replacement of the Greek
hierarchy with a Latin one) brought the Greek Schism to an end. These argu-
ments were invoked already in the early days of the conquest, both by the first
Latin Emperor, Baldwin I, and by Pope Innocent iii; they were then repeated
in nearly all 13th-century crusade calls.82 The former of these two arguments
originated from crusader complaints against the Byzantine Empire in the 12th
century that it had been unhelpful towards the crusade movement. The latter
became prominent mostly in the context of the Fourth Crusade, in an effort to
justify the expedition’s diversion. Such legitimisation was essential: the use of
the crusade against fellow Christians was open to accusations of perverting a
sacred cause, as the pope himself had noted.83 The aforementioned arguments
served to counter these accusations, by stressing both the commendable objec-
tives of these expeditions and the schismatic status of their opponents.
80 Chrissis, Crusading, pp. 201–49.
81 See Demurger, “Le pape Clément vi et l’Orient”; Housley, Avignon Papacy, pp. 32–36,
117–22.
82 Die Register Innocenz’ iii, 7: nos. 152–53; Nikolaos G. Chrissis, “The City and the Cross: The
Image of Constantinople and the Latin Empire in Thirteenth-Century Papal Crusading
Rhetoric,” Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 36 (2012), 20–37, at 22–25.
83 Die Register Innocenz’ iii, 8: no. 134 (135).