The Impact of the Crusades 107
competence over Jews who violated Church law. The inclusion of the papal decretal
‘p er miserabilem’ of Innocent III—originally a letter calling for the Fourth Crusade
and entitled ‘post miserabile’—in the Compilatio tertia confirmed this judgement.
Hence, by the time the Liber extra was published in 1239, Jews were appearing
before canonical courts if they violated ecclesiastical legislation concerning their
status in society; for example, if they held public office in defiance of the decrees of
the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. By the 1230s they were clearly regarded as
subject to ecclesiastical authority.25
pApAL CONtrOL OvEr tHE EFFECtS
OF CrUSAdINg ON JEwS
Among the intellectual élites of Christian Europe, including popes and bishops,
a positive attitude to force prevailed in which violence and persecution were not
intrinsically evil, but deemed morally sustainable by the right intentions of their
perpetrators.26 Yet although such ideas underpinned medieval theories of holy war,
this was not a level of debate which affected ordinary Christians. Ordinary men and
women accepted a cruder belief that god is intimately associated with specific pol-
itical events, that violence in the support of these would positively advance His
intentions for mankind, and—even more importantly—that crusading in particular
was a wonderful way of doing penance. whatever their other financial and political
motives, many crusaders believed that in taking the Cross they were embarking on
campaigns in which their obligations, once completed, would stand as an act of
condign self-punishment and that the penance they undertook by going on crusade
would be so severe that it would be fully ‘satisfactory’: god would be repaid not only
the debts of punishment for their recent sins, for which they had not yet done pen-
ance, but also for any residue left over from earlier insufficient penances.27 Such
ideas were encouraged by popes who in their correspondence called on crusaders
not to travel in state but to dress and behave as penitential pilgrims.28 when in
formal, public ceremonies men and women, rich and poor, priests and laymen
vowed to take part in a crusade, they attached cloth crosses to their clothing as a sign
that they were fully committed to the completion of their vows.29
Christians took the Cross in a fervent atmosphere, if not a fever, inspired by a
heady mix of collective eschatological hope, individual mystical experience, and the
expectation of glory and renown from a papally-blessed military venture. Although
the successes of the First Crusade were never repeated, the continuing hope that
they might be became a major impetus for subsequent crusading. Those ‘signed
25 pakter, Medieval Canon Law and the Jews, pp.60–3.
26 riley-Smith, What were the Crusades?, p.6.
27 Jonathan riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997), pp.67–75.
28 For example, Eugenius III, ‘Quantum praedecessores’ (1 december 1145), in Ottonis et
Rahewina Gesta Friderici I Imperatoris, 3rd edn, Bk 1 (Hanover, Leipzig, 1912), pp.55–7; ‘Quantum
praedecessores’ (1 March 1146), in Neues Archiv der Gesellschaft für altere Deutsche Geschichtskunde 45,
ed. p. rassow (Berlin, 1924), pp.302–5.
29 riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, p.11.