58 Chrissis
stage, the Turkish threat did not rate high enough to be promoted to the front-
line of Christendom’s concerns. The first time that the full crusade indulgence
“as for the Holy Land” was granted against the Turks was for the Crusade of
Smyrna;108 this confirmed the growing importance of the Turkish threat in the
eyes of the papacy and of western Christendom in general, while it was also an
indication that the naval leagues were becoming an established and recogni-
sable form of crusading by the mid-14th century.109
A crucial aspect of crusading, which could often make or break a campaign,
was funding. Warfare has always been an expensive affair, but the crusades in
particular posed extraordinary financial and logistical challenges in the Middle
Ages. This was especially the case for the major expeditions. Large armies were
expected to travel long distances and stay for protracted periods away from
their place of origin. Individual crusaders could be expected to raise their own
funds, often by taking out loans and mortgaging their properties, but this was
hardly adequate: some were unable to come up with the needed money, while
many participants in these expeditions were salaried soldiers or mercenaries
anyway; and that was aside from the additional costs of organising and con-
ducting the campaign. The cost of equipment and transportation alone could
ruin a great noble or deplete a state’s resources. Launching the crusade which
Louis ix of France led to Egypt in 1248 had cost the equivalent of approxi-
mately six years of the Crown’s revenue.110 After the sack of Constantinople by
the Fourth Crusade, in 1204, the share allotted to the Venetians to pay off the
debt of the army’s transportation amounted to half of the total booty.111
The Church, therefore, played an essential role in financing the crusades
and, in the period under examination, most expeditions expected to receive
support from that direction. The most important weapon in the papacy’s fis-
cal arsenal came in the form of taxation of ecclesiastical revenues, a practice
which was standardised in the 13th century and was widely used for the Holy
Land.112 However, in the case of Romania the papacy proved rather reticent in
108 Theiner, Vetera Monumenta, nos. 985–86; Eugène Déprez, Jean Glenisson and Guillaume
Mollat, eds., Clément vi: Lettres closes, patentes et curiales se rapportant à la France, 4 vols.
(Paris 1901–61), nos. 1855–56.
109 See Housley, Avignon Papacy, pp. 120–22.
110 Housley, Avignon Papacy, p. 163.
111 See Phillips, Fourth Crusade, pp. 239, 269.
112 For crusade funding and the financial organisation of the papal camera in general, see
William E. Lunt, Papal Revenues in the Middle Ages, 2 vols. (New York, 1934); Adolf Gottlob,
Die päpstlichen Kreuzzugssteuern im xiii Jahrhundert: Ihre rechtliche Grundlage, politische
Geschichte und technische Verwaltung (Heiligenstadt, 1892); Housley, Avignon Papacy,
pp. 159–98; idem, Italian Crusades, pp. 173–206.