Crusades and Crusaders in Medieval Greece 61
Who were the Crusaders in Medieval Greece?
But what about the people who made up these crusade armies? Who were
they, where did they come from, what was their background? Trying to identify
those who took the cross unavoidably brings up the question of motivation.
This has been one of the most contested topics in crusade historiography. Older
views that emphasised material factors, like the pursuit of wealth and land for
the younger sons of the nobility, have for the most part been superseded by a
more nuanced appreciation of the religious and socio-psychological sensitivi-
ties of the contemporaries. The consensus among a large number of scholars
now is that the primary incentive for setting out on crusade was the promised
remission of sins, along with the great pull of Jerusalem and the land where
the Saviour had trodden. Crusading was first and foremost an act of penance, a
special kind of armed pilgrimage. It appealed particularly to the arms-bearing
elites of the West, as it offered the opportunity to release their souls from the
mortal burden of sin without having to renounce their way of life and the
martial skills that defined them as a class, but rather by embracing them and
putting them in the service of the Church. But that is not to deny that a nexus
of other material and social motivations came into play: ambition, political
allegiance, kinship and other personal ties, family traditions of crusading,
expectations of status, chivalry and adventurism; as we will see, all those fac-
tors played a role for crusaders to sign up for an expedition in Romania. The
interplay between ideological and material factors for crusading was dynamic,
and it is important to understand that they were not mutually exclusive.131
Another group of factors which affected the shape and composition of
crusade armies had to do with the development of warfare in general and of
crusading warfare in particular, as well as with the geopolitical realities of the
time. In the 13th century, crusades for Frankish Greece were conceived as land-
based campaigns organised around the crusading nobility, their retinues and
feudal armies, strengthened with numbers of volunteer crusaders. In the early
14th-century, the emphasis shifted to naval warfare: the anti-Turkish leagues
were aimed at curbing the power and the raids of Turkish emirs in the Aegean.
The engagements depended, naturally, on the organised fleets of the Christian
maritime powers, primarily Venice, along with specially commissioned vessels
for those participants who did not have a standing fleet, such as the papacy.
131 Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65 (1980), 177–92; idem, What
Were the Crusades?, 3rd ed. (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 53–73; Norman Housley, “Frontier
Societies and Crusading in the Late Middle Ages,” Mediterranean Historical Review 10
(1995), 104–19; idem, Contesting, pp. 75–98.