From the eleventh century onwards popes authorized crusades against Muslims in
the Near East and pagans in the Baltic, and, from the thirteenth century, against
heretics and political enemies of the Church through the promulgation of general
letters to the Christian faithful throughout Europe. The notaries who formulated
and drew up these letters used stock words and phrases to signal to the faithful that
a crusade was being preached; the faithful were called on to take the Cross, and to
make a vow to join a military expedition with defined aims.
Contemporary chroniclers, annalists, canon lawyers, and preachers leave us in no
doubt that the authorization of such crusades had a profound effect on the Christian
community: religiously, socially, and politically. From Urban II’s call at Clermont in
1095 for the First Crusade to the fall of Acre—the last bastion of crusader power in
the Holy Land—in 1291, they not only changed the politics of the Near East and of
Europe itself, but helped to mould and foster Christian society. Some crusades were
large, elaborately organized affairs with vast numbers of professional soldiers, money
put aside to buy mercenaries, and accompanied by many hangers-on and camp-
followers. Others were small—no more than scattered bands of men known as pil-
grims or ‘crucesignati’—those ‘signed with the Cross’—who answered the papal call
and departed on a croiserie, iter, peregrinatio, bellum sacrum, guerre sainte, passagium
generale, expeditio crucis or negotium Jhesu Christi—a holy journey, pilgrimage, or the
‘business of the faith’ as it was termed by chroniclers and annalists.1
CrUSAdINg ANd tHE dEvELOpMENt OF tHE
IdEA OF JEwS AS ‘INtErNAL’ ENEMIES
Although the Jews were a minority group who rejected Christianity, popes never
authorized crusades against them as they did against Muslim infidels.2 rather, as we
have seen, they continued to proclaim and endorse the traditional theology which
insisted that Jews be allowed to live unharmed, albeit with limited rights, in
Christian society. In The Formation of a Persecuting Society robert Moore argued for
the inter-changeability, as far as society’s élites were concerned, of different outcast
1 Christopher tyerman, The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, 1988), pp.49–55.
2 Much has been written on the effect of crusading on Jews in the twelfth century, but significantly
less about Jewish–Christian relations in the context of those of the thirteenth century. There has been
surprisingly little investigation of papal letters concerning Jews despatched from the curia after papal
authorization of crusades both to the Near East and in Europe.
3
The Impact of the Crusades