Popes!

Rewrite

So, i'm rewriting my crusades paper for Dr. M. He told me he didn't care about the word count; i should include as much as possible.

My word count is now over 4800 (the assignment was 3500), and i'm not finished. A Masters dissertation is only 12,000 words.

I have written over a third of a dissertation. And i have written it with only a month of research and a week of writing.

Done, sort of

The draft of my final paper is finished, and i have emailed it to Dr M. We are meeting on Monday to discuss it.

The word count needed to be 3500 (give or take 10%), and it came in at 3400 without counting footnotes & bibliography. If i counted those, which one is allowed to do, the count was something like 3900.

Phew.

Now i can have a weekend without even looking at anything having to do with popes or crusades. Thank goodness.

Focus, focus

I'm starting to feel a little unfocussed here; need to get my head back in the game.

There are too many sources and yet not enough. Every book or article i read has a tiny piece of information i can use, so i need a ton of tiny pieces...

Annnnd, let's go!

So, everyone knows Urban II called for the very first crusade (in the strict sense of the word) in 1095 at the Council of Clermont. Dana Munro analyzed the differing versions of Urban's speech and came up with the following outline:

[Praise of the valor of the Franks]; necessity of aiding the brethren in the East; appeals for aid from the East; victorious advance of the Turks; [reference to Spain]; sufferings of the Christians in the East; (sufferings of the pilgrims); desecration of the churches and holy places; [expressions of contempt regarding the Turks]; special sanctity of Jerusalem; this is God's work; (rich and poor go); grant of plenary indulgence; fight righteous wars instead of iniquitous combats; (evil conditions at home); promise of eternal and temporal rewards; let nothing hinder you; God will be your leader.

Munro, Dana Carleton, 'The Speech of Pope Urban II at Clermont, 1095', American Historical Review, 11 (1906), 231-42, p. 242.
Items in parentheses were probably mentioned; items in square brackets might have been mentioned

The crusades grew out of the Peace & Truce of God, which at first seems like a contradictory notion. The Peace of God protected clerics, peasants, and women from violence while the Truce of God prohibited bloodshed against everyone on certain days. Both of these were instigated by bishops, thus placing the Church directly 'involved in organizing and directing military campaigns' against those who breached the peace [Mayer, Hans Eberhard, The Crusades, trans. by Gillingham, J. (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p.17]. Not only did the Peace & Truce involve the Church in military campaigns, but it made war against heathens a good alternative for all these marauding knights with nothing but time on their hands. In addition, the preaching of the Peace & Truce made men 'accustomed... to hear the preaching of a renewal of Christian life', thus leaving them open to the later preaching of the Crusade as a way to higher spirituality in their own lives [Cowdrey, H. E. J., 'The Peace and the Truce of God in the Eleventh Century', Past and Present, (1970), 42-67, p. 46].

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Another precedent:

The register of Gregory VII contains four letters that deal specifically with a proto-crusade he wanted to lead to Constantinople and then on to Jerusalem in order to protect eastern Christians and effect a reunion with Greek Christendom:

Already more than 50,000 are making themselves ready so that, if they can have myself as leader and as pontiff on a campaign, they are prepared to rise up in armed force against the enemies of God and to go as far as the sepulchre of the Lord under his leadership.

Cowdrey, H. E. J., The Register of Pope Gregory VII 1073-1085: An English Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.123 (Letter 31, Book 2 to Henry IV on 7 December 1074).

Precedents, etc.

What was Byzantium doing? According to Geoffrey Hindley, Emperor Alexius needed reinforcements to accomplish a final push against the Seljuk Turks, and he went to the Franks for this. Before seeing the Franks, however, he wanted to get papal support, so his envoys went to Piacenza and met with Urban II. Urban asked the envoys to make a speech to the bishops and clerics who were there, and in this speech they played up the horrors of the Infidel. [Hindley, Geoffrey, A Brief History of the Crusades: Islam and Christianity in the Struggle for World Supremacy, Rev. pbk edn (London: Robinson, 2004), pp. 10-11.]

What about papal precedents? According to I.S. Robinson, Gregory VII 'recruited the "vassals of St Peter" by promising them absolution from their sins in return for their military service.' [Robinson, I. S., 'Gregory VII and the Soldiers of Christ', History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 58 (1973), 169-92, p. 180.]

Also, as i noted in my paper on the popes leading up to Gregory VII, Leo IX is quoted by his biographer as saying,

I considered it necessary to raise a defensive force from wherever men could be recruited to bear witness to [the Normans’] iniquity and, if it was expedient, to curb their arrogance…. Those who do not dread the judgements of heaven might at least come to their senses through the fear of men. [Anonymous, 'The Life of Pope Leo IX', in The Papal Reform of the Eleventh Century: Lives of Pope Leo IX and Pope Gregory VII, trans. by Robinson, I. S., ed. by Robinson, I. S. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 149-50.]

Unfortunately for the pope, not only were the Normans not afraid of ‘the judgements of heaven’, they were also not afraid of Leo’s army. His men were quickly beaten, and Leo was taken prisoner. Leo’s biographer notes, however, that the souls of Leo’s knights killed in battle were ‘united in heavenly glory with the holy martyrs’[Anonymous, 'The Life of Pope Leo IX', p. 151], a precursor to the indulgences allowed knights on crusade. This is the important precedent here: By calling together an army of men from wherever he could find them and sending them on a mission to save Christian souls, Leo created a prototypical crusade that could serve as the foundation for Urban II’s appeals in 1095.

On Consideration

The paper i need to write over the next month is on all four crusades. Here are the basic points i need to cover:

• Intro - precendents (Byzantium, etc.)


• Urban's kick-off and the Peace of God


• Preparation for crusading - how do the popes figure in this?


• Crusade narratives


• Aftermath of each crusade - the end result for the papacy; does criticism affect the popes?


• Looking forward to the Albigensian Crusade

Think about:

• Why don't crusade calls always get answered?


• What are the popes' purposes in calling crusades?

Finished with Innocent?

I turned in my paper on Innocent yesterday (a day early!), because i surprised myself by actually finishing it. The weird thing that happened was i actually ran out of space when writing it. This has never happened to me before. My papers always slide in right under the minimum length (sometimes not even in the ballpark, i must admit), so to actually have to stop myself from writing an entire section is very strange.

This got me thinking. I had been leaning towards studying Leo IX for my dissertation, because he's interesting, and i haven't studied him very much. Some of the research on Innocent was hard to do because i already sort of knew it (it was very easy to skim, which can be dangerous). I wasn't sure i wanted to spend even more time thinking and writing about this guy. But. Then when it came to writing, the experience was so different. The paper was really easy to write, and, like i said, it could have been longer. Is this what happens when you actually know your subject? Have i been basically screwing myself for years because i always wanted to look at something different? I think the answer to both questions is 'yes'.

This bears more reflection.

What was new about Innocent III?

That's the question i'm supposed to answer with my next paper. I haven't put up the reading list yet, because i'm lazy.  It will be there in the next day or so.

• The use of ratione peccati (by reason of sin) to rule in temporal matters brought to him on appeal.  Tillman says that Innocent only used ratione peccati in extraordinary cases 'when secular law failed and at least one of the parties concerned had appealed', but he was not immune to abusing his power once the appeal had been made (p. 26).
• Codification of the translation and deposition of bishops.  See decretal Quanto personam. (PL vols 214-217 contain Innocent's stuff; vol 214 has Quanto)
• According to Pennington (p. 39),

Before Christ left his earthly ministry, he established the right order of ecclesiastical government for the third stage. Innocent understood papal prerogatives and authority in relation to the pope's divine ministry. The pope acted on divine authority, not on the transient, ephemeral authority of a papal decretal or a conciliar canon.... Innocent conceived of the constitution of the church as static.

• Innocent's emphasis of the pope's plenitudo potestatis, a term that described 'the vastness of papal power and the pope's supreme position in the church' (Pennington, p. 43).

That's enough for now (not much to show for 2.5 hours of research) :-(

These are the things i was supposed to think about and do this week

The shift from local to national perspectives (read R.I. Moore's The First European Revolution, which, of course, i keep forgetting to get out of the library).

Cowdrey's & Robinson's discussion of the militia christi. Um, i read Robinson's article, but i couldn't find Cowdrey's. From Robinson:

When Gregory VII preached a 'Christian warfare' not of the cloister but of secular warriors in the world, he challenged the traditional values of eleventh-century spirituality.... [He] forbade secular magnates to seek absolution in the traditional manner, by retreat from the world: laymen must remain in the world, seeking absolution through the service of St. Peter -- service which was political and military in character. (p. 190)

Read about the Investiture Conflict. I did that. Henry V and Paschal II. The 'pravilige' pun. Blah blah blah.

Okay, this is where my impetus started to wane, and i dabbled around in way too many sources way too superficially:

The first three crusades: How important is the papacy to their inception? How important is the papacy once they get going? What role does the papacy play? To what extent do the crusaders do what they are supposed to? Do these things change from crusade to crusade? Think about papal-Byzantine relations during this period. What about St Bernard's justification of the second crusade that he wrote for Eugenius III (De Considerate)?

Read Boso's Life of Alexander III.

Check out the biography of Calixtus II; he was the first pope to really embrace pomp and circumstance along with its implications of power. What about Anaclet, the Jewish pope?

Imperial background: B. Arnold's chapter in New Cambridge Medieval History; a biography of Barbarossa (by Munz); the Letter of Besancon.

Argh! Overwhelmed, stymied, and shut down.

Ramping up

Met with Dr M again today. We are blowing by the Investiture Conflict and moving on to the crusades. I have solemnly sworn to have read the major works on the Investiture Conflict by the next time we meet in order to avoid actually spending a whole boring week on it.

We are going to meet each week until the Christmas break, and i will have no major writing assignments due until i turn in my big term paper after break.

That said, i have a heck of a lot of stuff to get through on the first three crusades this week. My reading list is supposed to be the beginnings of a bibliography for my term paper, so i won't actually be reading everything on it for next week (thank goodness). My assignment for next Monday is to prepare this preliminary bibliography and start reading the stuff on it.

Silly me, i checked a Nabokov novel out of the library this morning...