Crusades and Crusaders in Medieval Greece 69
of western Christendom. Rulers took up the cause, at least nominally, as a way
to enhance their status. In the 13th century, James i of Aragon and Alfonso X of
Castile, both aspiring at international renown and prestige, announced their
intentions to assist the Latin Empire. Emperor Frederick ii and his illegitimate
son, Manfred of Sicily, both used a crusade promise for Frankish Greece as a
bargaining chip to mend their relations with the papacy.149 After the Holy Land
was lost, and as its recovery started to look less and less likely, the fight against
the Turks took the place of Christendom’s main concern in the East, and was
invested with all the relevant rhetoric and expectations. Over more than 200
years, sovereigns who had an eye on the international stage were conscious
of the potential benefits of invoking the crusade in Greece and the Aegean
or the risks of entirely ignoring it. Philip the Good of Burgundy saw the war
against the Turks as a way of promoting the duchy’s standing in the 15th cen-
tury. Alfonso v of Aragon, in the process of building a Mediterranean empire,
kept promising action against the Ottomans, even though his deeds belied his
proclamations.150
But arguably the most important impact of crusading in Greece is the way it
affected Greco-Latin relations and attitudes; this was a legacy of mistrust and
uneasy cooperation. When the full force of the crusade was deployed against
the Byzantines in the 13th century, it resulted in an important change in the
way Latins viewed the Orthodox. The “schismatic Greeks” were listed alongside
Muslims, pagans, heretics and other such “enemies of the faith” as Holy War
was proclaimed against all these groups and similar arguments and language
were employed in promoting the expeditions against them.151 In one exam-
ple from the early 14th century, the crusade propagandist William of Adam
expressed the opinion that the Greeks should be brought back to Church unity
by force if necessary and noted that they should be treated as heretics since
they are behaving as such. He then went on to say that he made no distinc-
tion between them and the Saracens, and that the Greeks should actually be
attacked more urgently than the Saracens on account of their errors.152 The
religious “otherness” of the Byzantines was emphasised in the 13th and early
14th century in a way that it had not been in the past;153 this development was
149 Chrissis, Crusading, pp. 156, 161–62, 183, 194, 263.
150 Alan Ryder, “The Eastern Policy of Alfonso the Magnanimous,” Atti della Accademia
Pontaniana 28 (1979), 7–25, esp. 19–24.
151 Chrissis, Crusading, pp. 32–44, 74–75, 255–59, 264–73, passim.
152 William of Adam, How to Defeat the Saracens, pp. 62–63, 84–97.
153 Two recent examinations of western views of Byzantium have independently confirmed
that the emphasis on the schismatic status of the Byzantines became prominent only