The Rhetoric of the Crusades and Domestic Politics

When preachers urged a crusade upon Europeans, they invoked several potentially explosive themes: they conjured the language of Christian brotherhood to appeal for penitential self-sacrifice and a rejection of excess; they demanded in similar terms that the rich should help the poor; and, perhaps most dangerously, they claimed that these measures were God’s will and the success or failure of the crusade would show how well people had answered these instructions.  In this paper, I will look at the specific example of the affects of the Third Crusade on England.  The Third Crusade was accompanied by an extraordinary sense of expectation, because it was preceded by the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin and because it was led by the three greatest kings of Europe. It ended up sparking controversy in many ways, not least because of disagreement among participants and between them and the people at home as to whether the whole enterprise could be deemed a success. In London, in particular, the Order of St Thomas of Acre, founded to celebrate the suffering and success of English crusaders outside Acre, came to play a prominent role in the politics of the city. William FitzOsbert, alias Longbeard, evoked the rhetoric of the crusades and used the personal connections formed by the crusade to lead social protest and even rebellion. Finally, systematic efforts to ensure that crusading vows had been honoured and taxation to pay for King Richard’s ransom kept the crusade in everyone’s mind and contributed to the crisis of Angevin England. This paper will therefore ask what impact the explosive rhetoric of the crusades had on domestic politics in England.