ROBERT THE ~1SE OF NAPLES, 1309-43a perversion of crusading ideals, a deviation from the prime
objectives: crusades for the recovery of Jerusalem and for
defence against the Turks. The appeal of a war in Italy, in
defence of the papacy, was naturally less than that of a war
in the Holy Land; yet it was also easier to reach Italy, and
the same spiritual privileges, remission of sins, in particular,
could be achieved at lighter cost. Some of those who fought
Venice in the Ferrara crusade were saved from a journey of
thousands of miles by a journey of perhaps only a few, if
they lived in north-eastern Italy: an easy way to expiate one's
sins. Yet the very fact that the papacy followed these ancient
models in formulating its bulls calling for crusades reveals
some of the tensions between the holy war in the east and
the 'political crusades'. The bulls insisted that the same cru-
sading privileges would be conferred on those fighting the
papal wars in the west as on those who fought in the Holy
Land. From the papal point of view this was not necessarily
a cynical use of the crusade, whatever contemporary critics
may have thought.^16 The theory of the holy war, developed
at the papal court, was argued on an abstract plane and did
not normally isolate the just cause' of fighting the Muslims
from the 'just cause' of fighting groups within Europe, such
as heretics, political foes and pagans on the Baltic frontier.
This problem of 'political crusades' deeply involved the
house of Anjou. For the 'political crusade' was seen, sin-
cerely enough by the papacy, as part of the process of launch-
ing crusades to the east. The Visconti and their allies were
accused of distracting the house of Anjou from the more
urgent task of the redemption of that 'Kingdom ofJerusalem'
whose title Robert bore. The papal-Angevin crusade against
the Visconti almost but never quite broke their power. By
1324 Robert of Anjou's diplomatic intervention secured from
Matteo's son a promise to resist any future imperial adven-
tures in Italy. This success in diplomacy was all the greater
because by 1324 the claimant to the throne of the Holy
Roman Empire, Ludwig of Bavaria, had begun to interfere
- David Abulafia, The Kingdom of Sicily and the origins of the political
crusades', Societd, istituzioni, spiritualitd. Studi in on ore di Cinzio l'iolante,
2 vols (Spoleto, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 65-77; N. Housley, The Italian Cru-
sades against Christian lay powen, 1254-1343 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 15-
24.