The Glory of the Crusades by Weidenkopf Steve

Author:Weidenkopf, Steve [Weidenkopf, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Catholic Answers Press
Published: 2014-10-28T16:00:00+00:00

6

Fiasco of the Fourth Crusade

Our Lord commands and tells us all to go forth and liberate the Sepulchre and the cross. Let him who wishes to be in his fellowship die for his sake, if he would remain alive in paradise, and let him do all in his power to cross the sea.

Raimbaut of Vaqueiras353

You are now engaged on the greatest and most dangerous enterprise that any people up to this day have ever undertaken; it is therefore important for us to act wisely and prudently.

Doge Dandolo of Venice354

The French noble was a man a principle. Like his peers, he had taken the cross in 1199 amidst much fanfare and dreamed of serving Christ in his army. Confident of his mission and desirous of the spiritual benefits promised to the participants, he left his wife and children and marched to Venice to embark the ships bound for the Holy Land. When insufficient men arrived in the city of St. Mark to pay for the contracted transport, the Crusade plans were altered to attack a Christian city once under Venetian control.

Simon de Montfort was livid. He had not left home and family to attack fellow Christians. His objections were rebuffed, though, and the attack commenced. Simon refused to participate in the siege; he stayed away from the Crusader camp and ultimately left the army. Conscious of his vow, however, he traveled to the Holy Land separately and then returned to France while the remaining Crusader army was sidetracked by the promises of a Byzantine political upstart. Simon became a powerful lord with land holdings in France and England and died prosecuting the Albigensian Crusade355 against heretics in southern France.

Simon’s virtue preserved him from partaking in the fourth and most notorious Crusade, which today continues to be a source of scandal and significantly contributes to modernity’s negative impression of the entire movement. Voltaire summarized this flawed and naïve position when he wrote, “The only fruit of the Christians on their barbarous Crusades was to exterminate other Christians.”356

Innocent III and Crusading

Lothar of Segni was made a cardinal at the relatively young age of twenty-nine and pope at a very young thirty-seven. When he was elected at the beginning of 1198, the cardinals knew he was exactly what the Church needed at that moment in history. Lothar’s eighteen-year reign as Pope Innocent III was the most important papacy of the medieval period and one that significantly shaped the Crusading movement. No other pope called as many Crusades as Innocent III or spent as much time focused on the goal of liberating the Holy City. Although he never personally took the cross, Innocent III can rightly be known as the Crusading Pope. A contemporary account of Innocent’s life indicates the intense focus he placed on the Crusades: “In the midst of all his work, he quite fervently longed for the relief and recovery of the Holy Land and anxiously mulled over how he could achieve this more effectively.”357 At the very beginning of his pontificate,

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