3 - Interim Crusade Planning

Summary

Gregory’s own experience in the Holy Land, and the information that he gathered about it from others, made him acutely aware of Outremer’s needs. Once he was aware of them, the choice remained of what to do. It is clear that Gregory knew that the response to those needs had to be swift, although organising a crusade was not a quick affair. Linda Ross has argued that Gregory followed the thirteenth century’s conciliar approach, but added that he did not ‘take the initiative and personally launch a crusade.’ She noted that the disadvantage to this was that ‘the time that elapsed between the summons [to the council] and the assembly inevitably delayed the advent of a new crusade, because, from 1215, encyclicals were drawn up only after conciliar deliberation.’Later in her work, however, she noted that Gregory ‘also organised more immediate, longterm, professional military support.’ The council was only to arrange for the general passage. Gregory’s initial efforts, however, should not be discounted. Indeed, those initial efforts were his way of taking the initiative for the crusade, since the smaller troop movements were made directly for the sake of preserving the Holy Land until the general passage. Unlike the case of St Louis’ second crusade, where a smaller passagium particulare that had been planned earlier by Clement IV was abandoned in favour of a passagium generale when the French king took the cross, Gregory X wanted to do both.

On the issue of using smaller armies versus a general passage, Throop has written that ‘the old idea of a crusader fighting for the cross and then returning home had been undermined by the end of the thirteenth century by the many failures of immense and transitory armies in the Holy Land.’He continued: ‘the Collectio, like many others, had lost all confidence in a “general passage.”’ Finally, he believed that ‘the support of a large body of professional soldiers in the Holy Land would mean in effect the disappearance of the crusades entirely. On this issue, Gatto has also written:

It is necessary first to object that the stationing of a standing army in the Holy Land was already absurd in that it was an army of volunteers. Since it was difficult to collect a sufficient number of mercenaries for a limited period, it would be impossible to find an adequate number of volunteers willing to stay in the East possibly for life.