The Practical Theology of Holy War: The English Clergy and the Third Crusade

Between the triumph of the First Crusade in 1099 and the calling of the Third Crusade in 1187, the clergy of western Europe gradually transformed itself into a scholastically-educated literate elite that played a major role in the administration of both church and state. Thus, when Pope Gregory VIII exhorted Christians to fight Muslims in the Holy Land, his clerical audience had an increasingly sophisticated, but still incomplete, intellectual framework for understanding its role in the world.

The English higher clergy, many of whom had parlayed their education in the cathedral schools of France into positions in English royal courts, responded with a combination of enthusiasm and caution. The cleric Giraldus Cambrensis led Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury through Wales to recruit soldiers for Christ, while Peter of Blois told Henry II that a crusade was the ideal solution to spiritual and political problems alike. Ralph Niger, on the other hand, questioned the wisdom of the enterprise as inconsistent with the obligations of the ordained clergy, who would be better served doing penance (and imposing it) at home. All the clergy, including those like Archbishop Baldwin who died in the Levant, saw the crusade in terms of a clergy who could not avoid confronting the dilemmas of the secular world.

This paper will examine the English clergy’s response to the Third Crusade and its aftermath by reading the exhortations to and criticisms of the Crusade, as well as laments over its failure, in light of prosopographical information about the clergy who did go on crusade. How was the learning of the schools, and clerical experience in government, deployed to confront the perceived threat of Islam? Study of the chronicles and treatises reveals a clergy increasingly willing to confront the contradictions of the Crusading movement as it entered its period of decline.