Part One: Emperors, Flagellants and Lollards

Central-Eastern Europe in 1382 showing the Ottoman Advance

By the middle of the fourteenth century, quite apart from the Ottoman threat in the Byzantine Empire, the rest of Europe was in a period of crisis. The Black Death, an outbreak of bubonic plague which devastated Europe from 1346 to 1353, killing at least twenty million out of a population of about eighty million. Further outbreaks later in the century prevented new population growth. This helped to exacerbate social and economic tensions: the socio-economic system of the “High Middle Ages” broke down, helping to cause a wave of both rural and urban disorder. There was a sense of crisis in the Church, too: the transfer of the papacy to Avignon (1305-77) and the Great Schism (1378-1417) in western Christendom between areas owing allegiance to rival popes in Rome and Avignon challenged patterns of authority and obedience, contributing to a sense of fragmentation.

Above: The courtyard of the papal palace at Avignon,

built during the ‘Avignon Captivity’ of the popes.

In the course of the fourteenth century all the eschatological hopes which the medieval masses had ever managed to squeeze out of the early Christian apocalyptic prophecies became concentrated in Germany on the future resurrection of Frederick II. Thirty-four years after his death, the Holy Roman Emperor underwent a resurrection very similar to that which had once befallen Baldwin, Count of Flanders and, briefly, Byzantine Emperor. Under the year 1284, a chronicler wrote of a former hermit near Worms who, claiming to be the Emperor, had been escorted into Lübeck amidst great popular enthusiasm. By then, Frederick had taken his place in the line of King Arthur, Charlemagne and Baldwin as a Sleeping Emperor who would one day return as saviour, this time of the German people. The fake Frederick gained some support among the princes who wanted to embarrass Rudolf, the first Habsburg who had been elected German king in 1273. But he was eventually burnt at the stake in the town of Wetzlar.

But the execution served only to increase the reputation of the Emperor as a superhuman and immortal being. It was reported that amongst the ashes at the stake no bones had been found, but only a little bean, which people at once concluded must mean that the Emperor had been rescued from the flames by divine providence, that he was still alive, and that he must one day return. This conviction persisted for generation after generation, so that in the middle of the fourteenth century it was still being claimed that Frederick must return, for such was God’s unalterable decree. It was also claimed that Prester John, the fabulous oriental monarch, had provided the Emperor with an asbestos robe, a magic ring which enabled him to disappear and a magic drink which kept him forever young. The Emperor would often appear to peasants in the guise of a pilgrim, confiding in them that the time would yet come when he would take his rightful place at the head of the Empire. One chronicler recorded how,

In all countries a hard time sets in. A feud flares up between the two heads of Christendom, a fierce struggle begins. Many a mother must mourn her child, men and women alike must suffer. Rapine and arson go hand in hand, everyone is at everyone else’s throat, everyone harms everyone else in his person and his belongings, there is nobody but has cause to lament. But when suffering has reached such a pitch that no-one can allay it, then there appears by God’s will the Emperor Frederick, so noble and so gentle… Full of courage, men and women at once stream together for the journey overseas. The Kingdom of God is promised to them. They come in crowds, each hurrying ahead of the other… peace reigns in all the land, fortresses threaten no longer, there is no need to fear force any more. Nobody opposes the crusade to the withered tree. When the Emperor hangs his shield upon it, the tree puts forth leaf and blossom. The Holy Sepulcre is freed, from now on no sword need be drawn on its behalf. The noble Emperor restores the same law for all men… All heathen realms do homage to the Emperor. He overthrows the power of the Jews, though not by force of arms; their might is broken for ever and they submit without a struggle. Of the domination of the clergy almost nothing remains. The high-born prince dissolves the monasteries altogether, he gives the nuns to be wedded; I tell you, they must grow wine and corn for us!

By the middle of the fourteenth century, Germany had become what it was to remain down to the sixteenth century; a mass of warring principalities, a perpetual chaos in the midst of which the Emperor was altogether helpless. At the same time, the towns of southern and central Germany had replaced the towns of the Low Countries as the main centres of mercantile capitalism north of the Alps, and the social conflicts within them had reached a fierce intensity. While the prosperous guilds fought the patricians and one another, amongst the poor there smouldered a deadly hatred of all the rich. One chronicler from Magdeburg warned the well-to-do burghers that…

… one must not let the common people have their way too much, as has been done of late. They should be kept firmly under control; for there is an old hatred between rich and poor. The poor hate everyone with any possessions and are more ready to harm the rich than the rich are to harm the poor.

The point of view of the poor now found in German literature an expression as violent as it had found a century earlier in French. The poet Suchenwirt, for instance, described how hungry men, leaving their pale and emaciated wives and children in their hovels, crowd together in the narrow streets, armed with improvised weapons and full of desperate courage:

The coffers of the rich are full, those of the poor are empty. The poor man’s belly is hollow… Hack down the rich man’s door! We’re going to dine with him. It’s better to be cut down, all of us, than die of hunger, we’d rather risk our lives bravely than perish in this way…

It was to be expected that in such a society the future Frederick would take on ever more clearly the aspect of the great social revolutionary, the Messiah and the poor. In 1348, the prophecies of the Swabian preachers of a century before recurred in a still more emphatic form in the popular expectations noted by the monk John of Winterthur:

As soon as he has risen from the dead and stands once more at the height of his power, he will marry poor women and maidens to rich men, and ‘vice versa’… He will see to it that everything that has been stolen from minors and orphans and widows is returned to them, and that full justice is done to everyone… he will persecute the clergy so fiercely that if they have no other means of hiding their tonsures they will cover them with cow-dung…

In his text, John of Winterthur disassociated himself from these disturbing beliefs. It was, he remarked, sheer madness to suppose that the Emperor-heretic could ever return; it was contrary to the Catholic faith that a man who had been burnt at the stake could ever again wield sovereign power. The ‘dogma’ of the Second Coming of Frederick was indeed regarded as a dangerous heresy. As another chronicler wrote in 1434,

From the Emperor Frederick, the heretic, a new heresy arose which some Christians still hold to in secret; they believe absolutely that the Emperor Frederick is still alive and will remain alive until the end of the world, and that there has been and shall be no proper Emperor but he… The Devil invented this folly, so as to mislead these heretics and certain simple folk…

How seriously the clergy took this heresy and how alert they were to detect it is shown by the curious story of a Greek philosopher who ventured to divulge in Rome the conviction which he had derived from a long study of the Greek Sibylline, which was that the Last Emperor would shortly be converting all people to Christianity. In this, as in other Byzantine prophecies, the coming of the Last Emperor in no way implied a massacre of the Jews, the clergy or the rich, but this was so inconceivable to the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome that they imprisoned the Greek and confiscated his belongings.

This period from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century witnessed a considerable decline in the authority of the papacy. At the same time, there was a rise in various dissident religious movements. One such movement which was particularly bizarre was that of the Flagellants, with their practice of whipping themselves. There were other lesser groups which fell outside the lines of orthodoxy, for example, the Brothers of the Free Spirit. 

The two most troublesome movements for wholesale reform from within the Church were those initiated by John Wyclif in England and Jan Hus in Bohemia. They went as far as to attack the very foundations of the medieval hierarchy, including the papacy. However, they did so still, mostly, by using the language of the Church, Latin. The attacks on the Church came not only in the sophisticated writings of theologians, however, but more and more in the vernacular languages. Much of the literature in these languages, written in the later medieval centuries, reveals the popular discontent with the condition of the church and the papacy. Examples occur in the anti-clerical attacks in the writings of Boccaccio, as well as in the condemnation of church wealth by the English poet Langland. His compatriot Geoffrey Chaucer also shows no love for the materialism of the church in fourteenth-century England. Everywhere more and more men began to question the basic tenets of the church.

The revolutionary flagellant movement of the mid-fourteenth century also spread to most areas of the Low Countries and all over Germany, and ended as a militant and bloodthirsty pursuit of the Millennium. As it turned into a messianic mass movement, its behaviour came to resemble that of its forerunner, the People’s Crusades. The German flagellants, in particular, ended as uncompromising enemies of the Church who not only condemned the clergy but utterly repudiated the clergy’s claim to supernatural authority. They denied that the sacrament of the Eucharist had any meaning, and when the host was elevated they refused to show it reverence. They interrupted church services, setting themselves above not only the clergy but also the Pope. They argued that while clerics could only point to the Bible and to tradition as sources of authority, they themselves had been taught directly by the Holy Spirit which had sent them out across the world. They refused to accept criticism from any cleric, but like the ‘Master of Hungary’, they declared that any priest who contradicted them should be dragged from his pulpit and burnt at the stake. At times, the flagellants would urge the populace on to stone the clergy. A French chronicler wrote that the movement aimed at utterly destroying the Church, expropriating its wealth and killing all the clergy.

As usual, the Jews suffered along with the clergy, and on a far greater scale. Following the massacres of the First Crusade (1096-99), the Jews were banished from England in 1290, from France in 1306, 1322 and finally in 1394. Increasingly, the Jews were given the choice of accepting Christianity, banishment or massacre. In the great massacre of European Jewry which accompanied the Black Death, the greatest before the twentieth century, the flagellants played important roles. The first killings were carried out spontaneously by a populace convinced that the Jews had caused the plague by poisoning the wells. they had come to an end by March 1349, perhaps because by that time people had recognised that among the Jews there were just as many victims of the plague as there were among Christians and that neither were the areas spared where all the Jews had been killed. Four months later the second wave of massacres was launched by the propaganda of the flagellants. Wherever the authorities had so far protected the Jews, these hordes now demanded their massacre. When, in July 1349, flagellants entered Frankfurt, they rushed straight to the Jewish quarter, where the townsfolk joined them in exterminating the whole community. The town authorities were so perturbed by the incident that they drove the penitents from the town and reinforced the gates to prevent their return.

A month later massacres took place simultaneously at Mainz and Cologne. During a flagellant ceremony at Mainz, the crowd of spectators suddenly ran amok and fell upon the Jews, with the result that the largest Jewish community in Germany was annihilated. At Cologne, a flagellant band which had for some time been encamped outside the city entered its gates and collected a great crowd of ‘those who had nothing to lose.’ They ignored the town councillors and the rich burghers and attacked the Jews, killing many of them. In Brussels too it was the combination of the rumours of well-poisoning and the role of the flagellants which launched the massacre of the whole community of six hundred Jews, despite the efforts of the Duke of Brabant to stop the slaughter. Through large areas of the Low Countries the flagellants, aided by the poor, burnt and drowned all the Jews they could find because they thought to please God in that way.

The sources are few and it is impossible to say how many massacres were led or instigated by the flagellants during the second half of 1349, but they must have been numerous. The Jews themselves came to regard the flagellants as their worst enemies. The Pope gave as one of his chief complaints against them that…

… most of them or their followers, beneath an appearance of piety, set their hands to cruel and impious works, shedding the blood of the Jews, whom Christian piety accepts and sustains…

By the time the flagellants had finished their ‘works’, which the panic of 1348 had begun, there were very few Jews left in Germany or the Low Countries. The 1348-49 massacres completed the deterioration in the position of European Jewry which had begun in 1096. Throughout the remainder of the Middle Ages the Jewish communities in Germany remained small, poor and, of course, condemned to the segregation of the ghetto. In Spain, the massacres of 1391 led many Marranos to accept Christianity, though often only nominally. The Inquisition investigated with its horrors the genuineness of their faith.

Above: An illustration of the Eve of Passover service at a Jewish synagogue in

fourteenth-century Spain.

It was in the turbulent years around 1380 that the new social myth of a ‘Golden Age’ came into being in Europe. People ceased to think of a society without distinctions of status as being irrecoverably lost in the dim and distant mists of past time and began to think of it instead as preordained for the future, even the near or immediate future. Perhaps it first took place in the towns of Flanders and northern France, which had been swept up throughout the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century in waves of insurrectionary violence. Yet when we examine the chronicles dealing with the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the preaching attributed to John Ball, the myth is found, unmistakably, bubbling away just below the surface. In a celebrated passage, Froissart gives us what is supposed to be a typical sermon of the leader:

And if we are all descended from one father and one mother, Adam and Eve, how can the lords say or prove that they are more lords than we are, save that they make us dig and till the ground so that they can squander what we produce? They are clad in velvet and satin, set off with squirrel fur, while we are dressed in poor cloth. They have wines and spices and fine bread, and we have only rye and spoilt flour and straw, and only water to drink. They have beautiful residences and manors, while we have the trouble and the work, always in the fields under rain and snow. But it is from us and our labour that everything comes with which they maintain their pomp.

For this unequal state of affairs, the preacher prescribes a drastic remedy:

Good folk, things cannot go well in England nor ever shall until all things are in common and there is neither villein nor noble, but all of us are of one condition

The villeins’ determination to be free men was the main cause of the the revolt. Since the twelfth century they had been able to gain their freedom by paying money to the lord instead of giving personal service. In some counties, like Suffolk, perhaps as many as half the peasants were free men by the mid-fourteenth century. The landlords, sitting in Parliament had agreed to the Statute of Labourers in 1351, reducing wages which had increased since the Black Death had wiped out a third of the population between 1348 and 1349, which in turn had led to a great shortage of labour. As both landlords and labourers broke the new law, however, it was difficult to force wages down, so the landlords began to refuse to make more villeins in order to ‘tie’ more of the peasants to their land. The landlords also began to let more of their land to their tenants, increasing the money rents for it. In some places they also found it more profitable to change arable land into sheep pasture, requiring fewer labourers and producing greater profits from the sale of wool. Many peasants were forced to give up their land and became labourers.

Peasant risings also broke out in France, but resulted in few changes to the feudal system, since most of them were local in character, based on abuses of the system by landlords. The Revolt in England was regional in character, but national in focus with the aim of radical reform of the system. In fact, by the middle of the fifteenth century in England, villeinage was fast disappearing in England as landlords were ready to exchange service for a payment and set the villeins free. Nevertheless, the immediate cause or catalyst of the 1381 Revolt was the imposition of an unfair tax, the poll tax, which resulted from the mismanagement of the wars with France. The Revolt was put down with great severity, and the peasants failed to get any of their demands. When the rebels had dispersed, Ball was taken prisoner at Coventry, given a trial in which, unlike most, he was permitted to speak. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at St Alban’s in the presence of King Richard II on 15 July 1381. His head was displayed stuck on a pike on London Bridge, and the quarters of his body were displayed in four different towns. The English chronicler Thomas Walsingham, the monk of St Alban’s, also gave a report of the sermon which Ball is said to have preached to the rebel host at Blackheath on a text which has remained famous to this day and was already, then, a well-known proverb:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

Who was then the gentleman?

From the beginning all men by nature were created alike, and our bondage or servitude came in by the unjust oppression of naughty men. For if God would have had any bondmen from the beginning, he would have appointed who should be bond, and who free. And therefore I exhort you to consider that now the time is come, appointed to us by God, in which ye may (if ye will) cast off the yoke of bondage, and recover liberty.

Above: Medieval drawing of John Ball preaching to the rebels at Blackheath.

According to Walsingham, Ball’s argument was that in the beginning all human beings had been created free and equal. It was evil men who, by unjust oppression, had first introduced serfdom, against the will of God. The common people could cast off the yoke they had borne so long and thereby win the freedom they had always yearned for. Therefore they should be of good heart and conduct themselves like the wise husbandman in the Scriptures who gathered the wheat into the barn, but uprooted and burnt the tares which had almost choked the good grain; for harvest-time had come. The tares were the great lords, the judges and the lawyers, all of whom must be exterminated, and so must everyone else who might be dangerous to the community in the future. Once they had been dealt with, all remaining men would enjoy equal freedom, rank and power.

Above: From William Morris’ Dream of John Ball (1888).

In more academic guise, this doctrine of the primal egalitarian State of Nature had been mooted by John Wyclif (1329-84), the Morning Star of the Reformation in his Latin treatise De civili dominio, which he composed in Oxford in 1374. He argued that it for the unrighteous to hold lordship was mere usurpation, contrary to the first principles of law and incompatible with the divine purpose; whereas the righteous man, who renounced lordship for the sake of obedience to Christ, obtained in return complete lordship over the whole universe, such as had not been enjoyed since our first parents and the Fall. Wyclif went on to produce his own variation on the theory of man’s original egalitarian state of grace:

Firstly, that all good things of God ought to be in common. The proof of this is as follows: Every man ought to be in a state of grace; if he in a state of grace he is lord of the world and all that it contains; therefore every man ought to be lord of the whole world. But, because of the multitudes of men, this will not happen unless they all hold all things in common: therefore all things ought to be in common. 

Of course, Wyclif never intended this theory to be applied in practice to secular society, himself adding that in practical life the righteous must acquiesce in inequalities and injustices and leave the unrighteous in possession of their wealth and power. If in his attacks on the wealth and worldliness of the clergy Wyclif was in deadly earnest, these comments of his on the communal ownership of all things were little more than an exercise in formal logic. Nevertheless, when abstracted from their scholastic context and stripped of their qualifying clauses those same comments appear to be socially radical. Wyclif was in a position to speak truth to power as John of Gaunt had invited him to serve at the court of Richard II. Wyclif offended the church by backing the right of the state to seize the property of corrupt clergymen. His views were condemned by the pope in 1377, but Wyclif’s influential friends protected him.Wyclif pushed his anti-clerical views further, and began to attack some of the central doctrines of the medieval church, including ‘transubstantiation’. He also claimed that since the church consisted of God’s chosen people, they did not need a priest to mediate for them.

However, it would be surprising if, among his ‘congregations’ at Oxford, there had been none who snatched at such radical social ideas and scattered them abroad, simplified into propaganda slogans. He attracted support by his energetic teaching and preaching. Wyclif was gradually deserted by his friends in high places and the church authorities forced him and his friends out of Oxford. In 1382, he went to live in Lutterworth in Leicestershire, where he died in 1384. Some of his followers had gone there with him and continued his mission after his death. It has been suggested that John Ball had been one of his poor itinerant priests, or ‘Lollards’, whom he had sent out to share the gospels in his newly translated text from Latin into English. By 1395 they had developed into an organised group, with their own ministers enjoying widespread popular support.

The Lollards stood for many of the ideas set out by Wyclif. In particular, they believed that the main task of a priest was to preach and that the Bible should be available to everyone in his own language. From the beginning of the fifteenth century, the Lollards were suppressed, particularly when their protest became linked with social and political unrest. But Lollardy continued to thrive in some parts of England, thus preparing the way for the spread of Lutheranism to England in the next century.

For the fifteenth century and the early years of the sixteenth in Germany, the myth of the future Frederick no longer has to be pieced together from occasional reports from hostile chroniclers. At this point, it emerges into full daylight, in the form of detailed manifestos. The earliest of these works, the Latin tract known as Gamaleon, probably produced either in 1409, tells of a future German Emperor who is to overthrow the French monarchy and the Papacy. When he has accomplished his mission France will be remembered no more, the Hungarians and Slavs will have been subjugated and reduced to complete dependence, Jewry will have been crushed forever; while the Germans will be exalted above all peoples. The Church of Rome will have been expropriated and all its clergy killed. In place of the Pope a German patriarch will preside from Mainz over a new church, but a church subordinate to the Emperor, the eagle from the eagle’s race, a new Frederick whose wings will stretch from sea to sea and to the very limits of the earth. Those will be the Last Days, followed by the Second Coming and the Judgement.

In about 1439 a far more influential work was produced, the so-called Reformation of Sigismund. Its origin lay in a Latin manifesto prepared by a priest called Frederick of Lantnaw for submission to the General Council of Basle, which had been struggling to achieve reform in the Church since 1431. It was far more than a translation of this manifesto into German, however. The tract deals with the reform of the Empire as fully as it does that of the Church. Its author was clearly familiar with the conditions of life in the towns of southern Germany and sets out his stall as the spokesman above all of the urban poor, not the skilled artisans in the guilds but the unorganised workers, the poorest and least privileged stratum of the urban population. The Reformation of Sigismund demands the suppression of the monopolistic guilds and the great trading companies. It advocates an egalitarian order in which wages, prices and taxes will be fixed to serve the interests of the poor. Wherever serfdom still survives it must be abolished and towns must allow former serfs to immigrate.

Portrait of Sigismund of Luxemburg, by Pisanello

The book is inspired almost throughout by an empirical rather than a millenarian approach. It ends, however, with a curious messianic prophecy which the author puts into the mouth of Emperor Sigismund. He had only recently died after being himself for some years a subject of messianic expectations. Sigismund had been the longest-reigning medieval monarch of Hungary (1387-1437) was named Holy Roman Emperor in 1433, an event which marked the establishment of the great central-European empire which existed, under Habsburg rule, until 1918. His son-in-law, Albert Habsburg, was the first of that name to sit on the Hungarian throne (1437-39). Even before he became Emperor, Sigismund played a major role in European political affairs since, in addition to his extensive Hungarian crown lands, which included Croatia, he also ruled over Germany (from 1411) and Bohemia (1419).

In 1396 Sigismund led the combined armies of Christendom, comprising a legion of knights from all over Europe, against the advancing Turks, who had taken advantage of the temporary helplessness of Hungary to extend their dominion to the banks of the Danube. This crusade, preached by Pope Boniface IX, was very popular in Hungary. The nobles flocked in the thousands to the royal standard and were reinforced by volunteers from nearly every part of Europe, the most important contingent being that of the French led by John the Fearless, son of Philip II, Duke of Burgundy. Sigismund set out with 90,000 men and a flotilla of 70 galleys. After capturing Vidin, he camped with his Hungarian armies before the fortress of Nicopolis. Sultan Bayezid I raised the siege of Constantinople and, at the head of 140,000 men, completely defeated the Christian forces in the Battle of Nicopolis fought between the 25 and 28 September 1396.

The disaster in Nicopolis angered several Hungarian lords, leading to instability in the kingdom. Deprived of his authority in Hungary, Sigismund then turned his attention to securing the succession in Germany and Bohemia, where his childless half-brother Wenceslaus IV recognised him as Vicar-General of the whole Empire. However, he was unable to support Wenceslaus when he was deposed in 1400, and Rupert of Germany, Elector Palatine, was elected German king in his stead. After the death of King Rupert in 1410, Sigismund – ignoring the claims of his half-brother Wenceslaus – was elected as successor by three of the electors on 10 September 1410, but he was opposed by his cousin Jobst of Moravia, who had been elected by four electors in a different election on 1 October. Jobst’s death 18 January 1411 removed this conflict and Sigismund was again elected as King of Germany on 21 July 1411. His coronation was deferred until 8 November 1414, when it took place at Aachen.

Right: The growth of Luxemburg power to 1387

As the King of Germany, he now took advantage of the difficulties of Antipope John XXIII to obtain a promise that a council should be called in Constance in 1414 to settle the Western Schism. He took a leading part in the deliberations of this assembly, and during the sittings made a journey to France, England and Burgundy in a vain attempt to secure the abdication of the three rival popes. The council finally ended in 1418, solving the Schism.

The Council created another problem for Sigismund, however, by having the Czech religious reformer, Jan Hus, burned at the stake for heresy in July 1415. This turned out to be of great consequence for Sigismund’s future career as it was an act which touched off the fifteen-year-long Hussite War.  It is thought that Sigismund’s sister, Anne of Bohemia (1366-94), who married Richard II of England, was instrumental in bringing the ideas of John Wycliffe to Bohemia, thus influencing Hus and his followers. The students of Prague had been going in great numbers to Oxford since the marriage between the two Angevin dynasties in 1382. Although Wyclif was forced to leave Oxford that same year and died in Lutterworth two years later, his teachings were still flourishing in the hands of his followers, the Lollards. Anne died of the plague in  1394, but the interest shown by Sigismund in English events persisted throughout his life.

(to be continued… )

 

Pursuing the Millenarians and their Messiahs:

Engraving representing the departure from Aigues-Mortes of King Louis IX for the Seventh Crusade (by Gustave Doré)

While researching into the apocalyptic literature of the first and early second centuries by revisiting Norman Cohn’s classic 1957 text, The Pursuit of the Millennium, republished in 1970, I found a sub-section of his fifth chapter on the Backwash of the Crusades entitled The Pseudo-Baldwin and the ‘Master of Hungary’. As an enthusiast for ‘all things Hungarian’ following my discovery of the rich history of this country, I was intrigued to find out more. Hungary emerged as a significant adjunct to Catholic Christendom in the eleventh century, and during the Crusades, it was of key strategic importance to the Papal project to ‘re-capture the Holy Land’ for Christianity, the effects of which it contended with well into Early modern times. According to Cohn, the gigantic enterprise of the crusades long-continued to provide the background for the popular messianic movements with which his book is concerned.

In the official crusades, secular politics loomed even larger than millenarianism, however. For centuries Constantinople had stood unconquered, though wave after wave of barbarians had attacked it. In the eleventh century, however, the Seljuk Turks, converts to Islam, advancing from their original home in Turkestan (see map above), had conquered the decaying Arab Empire and Baghdad, poured into Syria and Palestine and then turned upon the Byzantine Roman Empire. A battle was fought in Armenia at Manzikert in 1071, at which the armies of the Empire were overwhelmed. All Asia Minor lay in the hands of the Turks, and Constantinople was in great danger. The Eastern Emperor sought the aid of the Pope to organise help from the West to save Christianity in the East, even though the Patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church at Constantinople had quarrelled with the Pope.

The Arab followers of Mohammed had allowed Christian pilgrims to worship in Jerusalem, but after the Turkish conquest pilgrims returned from the Holy Land complaining of the cruelty of the new rulers. At a great meeting at Clermont (France) in 1095 Pope Urban II summoned kings and barons to unite to recover the Holy Land from the infidel. Peter the Hermit, a fanatical pilgrim, preached the cause from end to end of Europe. Thousands willingly joined the Crusading armies, for they believed that by so doing they could save their souls from purgatory. The Knights of the Western nations, by the rules of the Order of Chivalry, were taught to protect the Church, and they hoped for chances to display their prowess. Love of adventure or the desire for land and loot brought others into the great army of the Church. Italian cities, especially Venice and Genoa, gave financial support in order to free the Eastern trade routes from the control of the Turks.

There were nine crusades altogether, spaced over two hundred years, but it was only in the first three that the spirit of religious fervour was the chief motive. The great nobles of Western Europe set off in 1096 by different routes to Constantinople. Godfrey de Bouillon was the most famous leader. With the aid of the Byzantine Emperor, they crossed the Bosphorus, overran Asia Minor and in 1099 entered Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands for over four hundred years, installing Godfrey as its governor.

The rulers of the three other Catholic kingdoms they established – the County of Tripoli, the Principality of Antioch and the County of Edessa – paid homage to him. But the success of this Crusade was short-lived, for the Turks soon began to recover their lost lands. St Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade in 1147, but it achieved nothing. In 1173 a great Muslim leader, Saladin, united Egypt, Syria and Palestine and in 1187 recaptured Jerusalem and most of the Crusading states after his crushing victory at Hattin.

In the ill-fated Third Crusade (1189-91), Richard I of England succeeded in conquering Acre and gaining from Saladin the right for Christian pilgrims to enter Jerusalem. Due to his leadership, this crusade remains the most memorable in English popular consciousness, but it was actually ineffective and simply demonstrated how disunited the Christian leaders were.

Above: Crusader Europe (Eastern Section), c. 1180

Already the political interests of the secular states – especially the Empire of France and England – had found open expression. Then the Fourth Crusade, in the opening years of the thirteenth century, ended as a purely lay war waged for purely political ends, in which the commercial objectives of Venice combined with the territorial ambitions of the French and German princes to bring about the capture of Constantinople and the conquest and partition of the Byzantine Empire. It was this Crusade which had the most influence on the history of Europe, although Pope Innocent III himself was its organiser. He used his power and strength to free the Holy Land, but his idea was to attack Egypt, the centre of Muslim power, but the Crusades were dependent for transport on the services of Venice, the most powerful state in the Mediterranean. As the price for her assistance, she forced the Crusaders to fight her rivals, also persuading them to attack Constantinople, since the Eastern Empire was also unfriendly to her. The Crusaders plundered the city and set up a new Emperor chosen from their ranks. As a result, Latin rulers governed from Constantinople for nearly sixty years, and though the Greeks were finally restored, the Byzantine Empire was greatly weakened. Greed, ambition and revenge had destroyed a movement which had started with so much idealism.

One of the positive results of the first four Crusades, however, was that a new interest in intellectual matters grew up in the West, for large numbers of scholars were influenced by the older civilisation of the Eastern Roman Empire as well as the new ideas of the Arabs. Philosophy, mathematics, science and medicine began to be studied in the medieval universities. There was a great awakening of intellectual curiosity in men’s minds. Although for a time, the power and authority of the Church were strengthened through the uniting of Christians wholeheartedly in the support of a great cause, in the end, new beliefs made men more critical of the universal Catholic faith. Heresies grew up, and the traditional dogma and rituals of the Church were undermined. One of the chief economic results was the increase in trade between East and West, as Crusaders discovered new grains and fruits, as well as costly goods and luxuries on their journeys.

The commercial cities of Italy, especially Venice and Genoa, grew rich in commerce as the Mediterranean became the centre of increased trade. Towns grew up all over Europe, and the power of merchants developed at the expense of the nobles. Although the burghers purchased their privileges from the nobles, the latter increasingly used this source of income as a means of funding their participation in the Crusades. Moreover, the absence of the barons on Crusade greatly strengthened the authority of kings in governing unruly lords. A notable example of this was the kings of France, who gained considerable power over this period. Two religious orders, the Knights Templars and the Knights Hospitallers were founded to serve the needs of pilgrims journeying to and from the Holy Land and to take charge of the sick and injured on their arrival in Jerusalem.

After the Fourth Crusade, these great ‘knightly’ events to recapture the Holy Land became largely irrelevant for the vast majority of the feudal subjects of Church and State, both of which were losing authority in the face of growing disillusionment and anticlericalism. In such a crusade there was no longer any room for the paupers, but they themselves had not abandoned the original idea of the liberation of the Holy City, nor their old eschatological hopes. On the contrary, now that the barons had given themselves up completely to ‘worldliness’, the poor were even more convinced that they alone were the true instruments of the ‘divine will’, the true custodians of the eschatological mission.

In 1212 armies of children set out to recapture the Holy City, one army from France and another, much larger, from the Rhine Valley. Each was headed by a youth who believed himself chosen by God and who was regarded by his followers as a miracle-working saint. These thousands of children could be held back neither by entreaty nor by force; their faith was such that they were convinced that the Mediterranean would dry up before them as the Red Sea had done before the Israelites. These crusades also ended disastrously, with almost all of the children either drowned in the sea or starved to death, or sold into slavery in Africa. Nevertheless, these mass migrations had inaugurated a tradition; for more than a century, autonomous crusades of the poor continued to occur from time to time, and with consequences which were no longer disastrous to themselves alone.

The Sleeping Emperor of Constantinople:

In 1223-4 an age-old fantasy of The Sleeping Emperor reappeared. When the Crusaders had captured Constantinople in 1204, they had installed Baldwin IX, Count of Flanders as Emperor of the city and the other territories of the Eastern Empire which the western princes had been trying to carve up between themselves. Baldwin’s state was, however, very vulnerable, and within a year he had been captured by the Bulgarians and put to death. Nevertheless, less than twenty years later Baldwin had become a figure of superhuman dimensions in the popular imagination, and a whole legend had grown up around him. It was rumoured that the Count was not dead but had been discharging a penance imposed on him for his sins by the Pope. For many years, he had been living in obscurity as a wandering beggar, a hermit. He would very soon be returning in glory to free his land and his people. In April 1225, a suitable hermit was found in a forest near Valenciennes, living in a hut made of branches, and was paraded into the town on horseback wearing a scarlet robe beneath his long hair and flowing beard. He was crowned the following month, as Count of Flanders and Hainaut and Emperor of Constantinople and Thessalonica. In that year, these territories were in the throes of appalling famine such as had not been seen for generations. According to one contemporary observer, although the rich tended to look askance at their new sovereign, the poor were convinced that this was indeed Baldwin who had reappeared among them:

If God had come down to earth, he could not have been better received…. The poor folk, weavers and fullers, were his intimates, and the better-off and rich people got a bad deal everywhere. The poor folk said they would have gold and silver… and they called him Emperor.

Neighbouring princes sent ambassadors to his court and Henry III of England offered him a treaty directed against France. But the hermit also accepted an invitation from the French King, Louis VIII to attend his court in Péronne. This turned out to be a fatal blunder on his part as, in conversation with Louis, he was unable to recall things which the real Baldwin would almost certainly have known. He fled from court back to Valenciennes, where the rich burghers tried to arrest him, but the common people prevented them from doing so. He was identified as one Bertrand of Ray from Burgundy, a serf who had taken part in the Fourth Crusade as a minstrel to his lord, and who, since his return, had become notorious as a charlatan and impersonator.  With Valenciennes about to be besieged by the French, the imposter escaped again, this time with a large sum of money. Recognised and captured, he was paraded through the towns which had witnessed his ‘triumph’, before being hung in the market-place of Lille in October 1225. Nevertheless, the hermit-Emperor took his place in Flemish mythology among the sleeping monarchs who must one day return. In the words of the contemporary observer, at Valenciennes people await him as the Bretons await King Arthur.  

The Messianic Capetians: Philip II & Louis IX of France:

In France, messianic expectations centred on the Capetian dynasty, which during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries came to enjoy a quasi-religious prestige. On the death of the last descendant of Charlemagne in 987 Hugh Capet, Count of Paris had been elected King of the Western Franks. His lands were fertile and easy to defend. After his election as King these lands were called the Royal Demesne (domain), and this was the only part of France that the Capetian kings really controlled. Over the rest of the country they had very little authority other than the right to demand homage from the great nobles; some of them, like the Dukes of Normandy, held more land than the king. The Capetians ruled France for many centuries, and their chief task in France was to master the great feudal lords and so to establish the authority of the king. It was Philip II (1180-1223), known as Philip Augustus, achieved this. At his accession, he was overshadowed by Henry II of England, but he succeeded in adding vast territories to his Royal Demesne and thereby became more powerful than any noble in his kingdom (see maps above and below). He set out with Richard I of England on the Third Crusade but quarrelled with Richard and returned home before the task was complete in order to establish his authority over unruly nobles. He won a great victory over King John of England and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Battle of Bouvines in 1214 which resulted in the Emperor’s downfall and John’s submission to the barons at Runnymede.

Already at the time of the Second Crusade Louis VII had been regarded by many as the Emperor of the Last Days. In the early thirteenth century, there were sectarians in Paris who saw in the Dauphin, the future Louis VIII, a messiah who would reign forever under the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, over a united and purified world. If in the event Louis VIII distinguished himself by his shrewdness and determination rather than by any spiritual gifts, his successor was indeed a secular saint.

Above: Louis IX leaving Limassol

Louis IX, called St Louis (1226 -70) set a new standard for kings throughout Christendom. Together with his rigorous asceticism, the genuine solicitude which he extended to the humblest of his subjects earned him an extraordinary veneration. He also resisted the great feudal nobles, chiefly by gaining control over the administration of justice. In addition to his services to the Church, he also organised two Crusades. When this radiant figure set off on the Seventh Crusade in 1248, miraculous happenings were expected. When he was defeated at Mansura in 1250, losing his army and being captured by the Egyptians, all Christendom was dealt a terrible blow. The disillusionment was so great in France that many began to taunt the clergy, saying that, after all, Mohammed seemed to be stronger than Christ. Louis’ release was eventually negotiated in return for a ransom of 400,000 livres tournois (at the time France’s annual revenue was only about 1,250,000 livres tournois) and the surrender of the city of Damietta. Following his release from Egyptian captivity, Louis spent four years in the Latin kingdoms of Acre, Caesarea, and Jaffa, using his wealth to assist the Crusaders in rebuilding their defences and conducting diplomacy with the Islamic powers of Syria and Egypt. In the spring of 1254, he and his army returned to France.

Louis IX was taken prisoner at the Battle of Fariskur, during the Seventh Crusade (Gustave Doré).

It was in response to this catastrophe, and the refusal of the barons and clergy to raise reinforcements, that there sprang up the first of the anarchic movements known as the Crusades of the Shepherds. At Easter 1251 three men began to preach the crusade in Picardy and within a few days their summons had spread to Brabant, Flanders and Hainaut – lands beyond the frontiers of the French kingdom, but where the masses were still as hungry for a messiah as they had been in the days of Bertrand of Ray a generation earlier. One of these men was a renegade monk called Jacob, who was said to have come from Hungary and was known as the ‘Master of Hungary’. He was a thin, pale, bearded ascetic of some sixty years of age, a man of commanding bearing and able to speak with great eloquence in French, German and Latin. He claimed that the Virgin Mary, surrounded by a host of angels, had appeared to him and had given him a letter – which he always carried in his hand, as Peter the Hermit is said to have carried a similar document. According to Jacob, this letter summoned all shepherds to rescue King Louis and help him to free the Holy Sepulchre. God, he proclaimed, was displeased with the pride and ostentation of the French knights and had now chosen the lowly to carry out his work. It was to shepherds that the glad tidings of the Nativity had first been made known and it was through shepherds that the Lord was now about to manifest his power and glory. His followers, said to number between 30,000 and 60,000, were mostly young peasants, men, women, and children, from Brabant, Hainaut, Flanders, and Picardy. I shall return to the narrative of these events later, but to understand them in more depth it is important to place them within the broader European context of those times.

The Master of Hungary speaking to the shepherds before being received in Amiens by the religious authorities

Margaret ‘Capet’ and the Crowned Heads of Europe:

Above left: The grand coin from the time of Béla III. Béla was made important by the economic and geopolitical position of Hungary during his reign. He introduced the country’s first coinage. His companion on the coin is his first wife, Anne Chatillon (of Antioch) who, though of French descent, he brought with him from Byzantium.

Above Right: The tomb of Béla III and Anne Chatillon formerly in Székesféhérvár, now in the Matthias Church in Buda. Béla’s second wife, whom he married in 1186 was Margaret Capet, who was a Princess of France who was also the widow of young Henry III of England, who died in 1183 before he could succeed his father. She had therefore been Richard I’s sister-in-law.

We know very little about Jacob’s supposed Hungarian origins, but we do know that the Hungarian King Béla III  (1172-1196) had two ‘western’ wives, both of whom introduced and developed ‘the French style’ at court. His first wife was Anne de Chatillon (of Antioch), of French descent, and Margaret Capet was his second, she having been previously married to the Angevin King Henry II of England. Béla himself was a very talented ruler, an outstanding politician who was able to operate well under favourable international conditions. The Holy Roman Empire was very much distracted by its conflict with the Pope, as well as with internal opposition.  Accordingly, the Empire had relinquished its claims of suzerainty over Hungary. Byzantium, too, was paralysed by dynastic struggles and her Serbian and Bulgarian subjects had also risen in arms. Béla had been raised in Byzantium and was for a time the heir apparent to the imperial throne. He had brought his first wife, Anne, with him from Byzantium. For a while after taking up the Hungarian throne, Béla acted as the protector of the Byzantine Empire, but eventually accepted the independence of the Serbs and the Bulgars, bringing an end to the direct links between Byzantium and Hungary. Venice then became Hungary’s greatest rival, attempting to acquire Dalmatia from the Hungarian kingdom. Béla was the most significant Hungarian ruler of the twelfth century, recapturing Dalmatia and Nándorferhérvár (Belgrade) at a time when István’s ‘Crown Lands’ were more than three times the size of modern-day Hungary.

Dynamic economic and social progress along with closer bonds with a generally developing Europe strengthened Hungary. Later, however, a number of serious problems were to arise as a result of this. Waves of French and German settlers flocked to Hungary from the West and the immigrants from France spread viticulture north and east of the Danube. Western settlers also brought with them the idea of crop rotation systems. More efficient agriculture lead to the appearance and growth of towns. The French and Italian merchants of the two earliest such settlements, Esztergom and Székesfehérvár, carried on a profitable trade. They exchanged precious metals from Hungarian mines, wax and animal skins for Western luxury goods. These included cloth from Flanders, French enamelled bronze items, German weapons and Italian silk. Esztergom and Székesfehérvár also served as the locations of royal residences. During Béla III’s reign, the requirements of the royal court increased significantly.

Béla himself had been used to a life of luxury in Byzantium. Previously, though,  the kings of Hungary and their courts had been content with primitive articles made by the craftsmen on the royal estates. The services of rural cooks, dog-catchers and minstrels were required in the palace once a week, and in the past that had satisfied the needs of the royal party. At this time Hungary did not have a permanent capital, so the king travelled from one royal estate to another, using up the revenue of each on the spot, as well as the two-thirds of the county revenues that were his due. Now, however, the court purchased better quality goods, which were either imported from abroad or made by craftsmen who had settled in Hungarian towns. A class of professional officials had also emerged. Béla III had had a permanent residence built at Esztergom, a splendid palace where he could even receive the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick Barbarossa in a way which befitted his rank.

With King Béla as their example, the barons increasingly followed the fashion trends of western Christendom, further prompting Hungary’s participation in world commerce. With the growth of royal income derived from foreign settlers, minting money and from mines which produced salt and precious metals, the financial dependence on the royal estates and the counties declined in importance. The king could afford to cede some of these estates to ambitious feudal lords, who gradually adopted the expensive lifestyles of the knights in western Europe. The feudal lords were not satisfied with the income received as ispán, namely, one-third, and later two-thirds of the county revenues. They wished to acquire estates of their own, in the same way as the feudal aristocracy in the West had done.

French and English Connections:

So, by the end of the twelfth century, Hungary had emerged as an important power in the East, by no means a primitive backwater or poor relation of the western empires of England and France. As part of this emergence, Béla had also consciously sought intellectual links with the West, and Hungarian scholars began attending the seats of learning in Paris on a regular basis. In a letter from Stephanus Tornacensis to Béla III, the envoy names three scholars, Jakab, Mihály and Adorján who were studying in Paris during the late twelfth century. Whether these were the same as the three men who began to preach in Picardy half a century later is unknown, but it may be that Jakab was not merely a renegade monk who had made his way west accidentally, but that, at the age of sixty, fluent in French, he had remained in the French-speaking territories after studying in Paris as a young man. Stephanus’ letter also refers to an adolescens Bethlem who had died and was buried in a churchyard near St Genevieve School, where the students may well have studied. This was also a favourite school with English students, and when Paris University was divided into nations, the English and the Hungarians belonged to the same nation. This may help to explain why Jacob was known as ‘Le Maitre de Hongrie’ in French, as the most senior of the domiciled students there, the others following him from Paris to the Cistercian Abbey at Citeaux in Burgundy (see the Orleans plaque below). If these students were, like their deceased colleague, ‘adolescents’ towards the end of Béla’s reign, the description of their ‘master’ as ‘a very old man’ in 1251 might well connect the two references to ‘Jakab’ or ‘Jacob’. The Hungarian students would therefore have been able not only to absorb the teachings, ideas and ways of thinking of the great English masters in Paris, but to live in the company of their English fellows, so that the Paris school was the first place where the Hungarians – through the media of French and Latin – came into contact with the world of English intellectuals and had the opportunity to absorb knowledge rooted in the soil of ‘English’ or Anglo-French intellectual life.

Above: The tombs of Richard I ‘the Lionheart’ (1157-99) and Henry II (1133-89) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (c 1122-1204)

It was also during this time that the first Hungarian scholar we know about, Nicolaus de Hungaria, spent three years at Oxford (1193-1196). His was the first Hungarian name to appear on record at the University. Apparently, the then King of England, Richard I (Lionheart) paid for his schooling. The Queen of Hungary, Margaret Capet, as the widow of the young King Henry III (crowned, but then died in 1183 before he could succeed his father) was, therefore, Richard’s sister-in-law. As Princess Margaret of France, she became Béla III’s second wife and queen from 1186 to 1196. Therefore, the ties between Angevin England and Hungary were not simply scholarly, but dynastic. Other evidence of the direct contact between England and Hungary was the determination of Henry II to pass through Hungary on his way to the Holy Land in order to carry out the Crusade he had undertaken as a penance for the murder of Archbishop Becket. His primary objective had probably been to visit his relative, Queen Margaret, but his untimely death prevented him from doing so. Nevertheless, we have a surviving letter written by Béla III to his royal kinsman, promising him every assistance and support to enable him to pass through Hungary.  Béla controlled a major section of the main ‘Crusader’s Route’ along the Danube to the Black Sea and the Bosphorus (see the maps above and below). Béla’s Chancellor was the first to keep written records and his anonymous Notary produced the first written history of the Magyars.

Andrew II & Béla IV:

Above: Hungary and Central-Eastern Europe/ Asia Minor

on the Eve of the Mongol Invasions, 1223.

Béla III’s son, Andrew II (1205-1235) was, according to all the Hungarian historians, including István Lázár (1990), in contrast to his puritanical and staid father, a rollicking, lavish, ambitious, and happy-go-lucky young man. He was certainly profligate king who gave away royal lands to his lords, lavishly satisfying their aspirations. Andrew bestowed royal and county estates on the feudal lords and attempted to offset the resulting loss of revenue by levying taxes and customs duties. By thus weakening his own position, he was forced to give in to the demands of the lesser nobles, issuing the so-called ‘Golden Bull’ in 1222, Hungary’s equivalent of ‘Magna Carta’, signed by King John in 1215. Andrew was himself full of ambition and much attached to ‘pomp’. He also engaged in an ill-fated war on Russian soil and was the first Hungarian king to undertake a Crusade in 1217. He dis so purely on borrowed money and even ceded Zara to Venice in exchange for the latter’s assistance in his Crusade adventure. He actually reached the Holy Land through Cyprus but ran out of resources before he could fight a real battle with ‘the infidels’. Returning in disgrace, he complained as follows in a letter to Pope Honorius III in 1218:

When were spending our time in regions across the sea in the service of the pilgrimage we had undertaken, we learned from frequent messengers beyond any shadow of doubt that the seed of dissension had spread inexpressibly in our country. Consequently, shaken by this great danger and so much evil news and unable to bear the destruction of the tender shoot of Christianity in our country, we left the Holy Land out of necessity and not gladly. When we arrived in Hungary after passing through many dangers on the road, we had to experience even viler viciousness than we had heard of, which the members of the Church committed, as did the laity, so many and such kinds that we do not consider it necessary to bring them to the attention of Your Holiness; after all, the enormity of the vicious deeds perpetrated could hardly have remained concealed from your keen-sighted eyes. Your Holiness should also be informed that when we arrived in Hungary, we found not Hungary, but a country so tormented and bereft of its income from the treasury that we could neither pay the debts which our pilgrimage had involved us nor restore our country to its previous condition even in fifteen years.

One of these ‘vicious deeds’ to which he referred was undoubtedly the murder of his despised German wife, Gertrude of Merano, by a conspiracy of discontented chief nobles, while he was away on crusade.  They were shocked by the life of luxury she carried on with her foreign companions at the court. Andrew II reigned for seventeen more years, with his renowned Golden Bull coming into being in 1222, an attempt to restore the shattered legal system by banning many acts of tyranny, as well as to curtail royal power by authorising the nobles to oppose the king by force of arms if he or his successors should breach the terms of the Bull. Gertrude’s tomb at Piliszentkereszt was prepared in 1221, by the French architect from Picardy, Villard de Honnecourt, the most distinguished French architect of the age. Whether he had any Hungarian connections in Picardy we do not know, but it seems a strange coincidence that this was where the so-called ‘Master of Hungary’ began his preaching thirty years later. It’s also reasonable to assume that for western-educated Hungarians like Jacob, the disappointment of the reign of Andrew II after that of Béla III and the sense of national disgrace following the collapse of Andrew’s Crusade would have added to the disillusionment of all Christendom with the Crusades by the mid-thirteenth-century.

Yet a greater disaster was set to befall the country in the reign of Andrew’s son, Béla IV (1235-70). Prince Béla was quite different from his father. He was a devout Christian who took inspiration from St Francis, St Dominic and from his own sister, St Elizabeth. It was as though he had a premonition of the danger which was to threaten Hungary as a result of Mongol expansionism. Even before he succeeded to the throne, Béla tried to fortify the Transylvanian frontiers and after he became king he made every effort to reconstitute the disintegrating Crown Lands and counties. However, this was not a viable path of social development. Béla also sought help from abroad, sending Julian, a Dominican friar, to Bashkiria where he was to invite the remaining Magyars there to move to Hungary. Following that, he also invited the Cuman people, who had already been attacked by the Mongols, to settle in Hungary as well. However, these measures gave rise to internal measures which contributed towards the devastating defeat of 1241. In that year Béla’s army was routed by Batu Khan at Múhi on the River Sajó. The Mongols ravaged the country for more than twelve months and after they eventually left, the Hungarian state had to be re-founded.

Jacob, the Mysterious Magyar ‘Master’ and his Crusade of ‘Les Pastoureaux’ of 1251:

Whatever the details of these earlier links and their connection to, and effects on the radical ideas of Jacob, ‘Master of Hungary’, he must have been a very charismatic preacher by the time he began to gather a ‘flock’ of faithful supporters around him in Picardy in 1251. Shepherds and cowherds – young men, boys and girls alike – deserted their flocks and, without taking leave of their parents, gathered under the strange banners on which the miraculous visitation of the Virgin was portrayed. Before long thieves, prostitutes, outlaws, apostate monks and murderers joined them; and this element provided the leaders. But many of these newcomers also dressed as shepherds and so all alike became known as the Pastoureaux. Soon there was an army which – though the contemporary estimate of sixty thousand need not be taken too seriously – must certainly have numbered many thousands. It was divided into fifty companies; these marched separately, armed with pitchforks, hatchets, daggers, pikes carried aloft as they entered towns and villages, so as to intimidate the authorities. When they ran short of provisions they took what they needed by force; but much was given freely since, as contemporary sources reveal, people revered the Pastoureaux as holy men.

Surrounded by an armed guard, Jacob preached against the clergy, attacking the Mendicants as hypocrites and vagabonds, the Cistercians as lovers of land and property, the Premonstratensians as proud and gluttonous, the canons regular as half-secular fast-breakers; and his attacks on the Roman Curia knew no bounds. His followers were taught to regard the sacraments with contempt and to see in their own gatherings the sole embodiment of truth. For himself, he claimed that he could not only see visions but could also heal the sick, whom the people brought to him to be touched. He declared that the food and wine set before his men never grew less, but rather increased as they were eaten and drunk.  He promised that when the crusaders arrived at the sea the water would roll back before them and they would march dry-shod to the Holy Land. On the strength of his miraculous powers, he claimed the right to grant himself absolution from every kind of sin. If a man and a woman among his horde wished to marry he would perform the ceremony himself; and if they wished to part he would divorce them with equal ease. He was said to have married eleven men to one woman, which rather suggests that he saw himself as a ‘living Christ’, requiring ‘Disciples’ and a ‘Virgin Mary’. Anyone who ventured to contradict him was at once struck down by his bodyguard. The murder of a priest was regarded as particularly praiseworthy and, he said, could be atoned for by a drink of wine.

Jacob’s army went first to Amiens, where it met with an enthusiastic reception. The burghers put their food and drink at the disposal of the crusaders, calling them the holiest of men. They even begged Jacob to help himself to their belongings. Some knelt down before him as though he had been the Body of Christ. After Amiens, the army split into two camps, one marching to Rouen, where it broke up the Archbishop’s synod. The other group marched on Paris, where he so fascinated the Queen Mother that left him free to do whatever he wanted. He dressed as a bishop, preached in churches and sprinkled holy water in a ritual of his own. Meanwhile, the Pastoureaux in the city began to attack the clergy, putting many to the sword and drowning many in the Seine. The students of the University, themselves clerics in minor orders, would have been massacred if the bridge had not been closed in time, though some may have been minded to join the Crusade.

Above: The Commemorative Plaque in Orleans

When they left Paris, the Pastoureaux moved in a number of bands, each under the leadership of a ‘Master’, who, as they passed through towns and villages, blessed the crowds. At Tours, the Crusaders again attacked the clergy, especially Dominican and Franciscan friars, whom they dragged and whipped through the streets. Their churches and friaries were looted: the sacramental instruments were thrown out onto the street. All this was done with the enthusiastic support of the townspeople, as it was at Orleans. There the Bishop had closed the gates against the oncoming horde, but the burghers opened them again in defiance of him. Jacob preached in public, and a scholar from a cathedral school who dared to oppose him was struck down with an axe. The houses where the priests and monks had hidden were stormed and burnt to the ground. Many of the clergy, including teachers at the University, and many burghers were struck down or drowned in the Loire. The remaining clergy were forced out of the town. When the Pastoureaux left, the Bishop, enraged at the reception which had been given them, put Orleans under interdict. It is understandable that some clerics, observing unchallenged killing and despoilation of priests, felt that the Church had never been in greater danger.

At Bourges, however, the tide began to turn against the Pastoureaux. Here too the burghers, disobeying their Archbishop, admitted as many of the hordes as the town could hold, the remainder encamped outside. This time, Jacob preached against the Jews and sent men to destroy the Sacred Rolls in the synagogue. The Crusaders also pillaged houses throughout the town, taking gold and silver where they found it and raping any woman they could lay hands on. The clergy were not molested because they remained in hiding, but by this time the Queen Mother had realised what sort of movement this was and had realised what sort of movement this was and had outlawed all those taking part in it. When the news of this reached Bourges, many of the Pastoureaux deserted. Eventually, while Jacob was preaching, one of the crowd dared to contradict him. Jacob rushed at the man with a sword and killed him; but this was too much for the burghers, who then armed themselves and chased Jacob and his followers out of the town. The ‘Master’ was pursued by mounted burghers and cut to pieces near Villeneuve-sur-Cher. Many of his followers were then captured by royal officials at Bourges and hanged. Bands of survivors made their way to Marseilles and Aigues Mortes, where they hope to embark for the Holy Land, but both towns had received warnings from Bourges so that the Pastoureaux were rounded up and hung. A final band reached Bordeaux, only to be met by English forces under Simon de Montfort, the Governor of Gascony. One of their leaders, attempting to embark for the East, was recognised by sailors and drowned on de Montfort’s orders in the Gironde. Another fled to England and having landed at Shoreham, managed to collect a following of a few hundred peasants and shepherds. When the news of these happenings reached King Henry III, he was sufficiently alarmed to issue instructions for the suppression of the movement to sheriffs throughout the kingdom. The movement very soon disintegrated of its own accord, the Shoreham apostle being torn to pieces by his erstwhile disciples when they heard that the Pope had excommunicated all the Pastoureaux.

Once everything was over rumours sprang up on all sides. It was said that the movement had been a plot begun by the Sultan himself, who had paid Jacob to bring him Christian men and youths as slaves. Jacob and other leaders were said to have been Muslims who had won ascendancy over Christians by means of black magic. There were also those who believed that the Pastoureaux had only enacted the first part of its programme. These people claimed that the intention had been to massacre first all priests and monks, then all knights and nobles; and when all authority had been overthrown, to spread their teaching throughout the world. These messianic mass movements were not only becoming, for both church and state, more dangerously independent, they were also becoming more frankly hostile to the rich and privileged in general. In this, they reflected a real change in popular sentiment, although the possibility of peasant uprisings was nothing new. Under the manorial system, most developed in France, peasants felt they had the right to turn against their lords if his rule was tyrannical, contrary to feudal customs, or capricious. Nevertheless, it was only as the manorial system was disrupted by the development of the commercial and industrial economy referred to by historians and political economists as ‘mercantile capitalism’ that the upper classes of the laity became the target for a steady stream of resentful criticism to which the clergy had already been subjected. The crusade seems to have been more of a revolt against the French church and nobility, who were thought to have abandoned Louis; the shepherds, of course, had no idea what happened to Louis, or the logistics involved in undertaking a crusade to rescue him.

What more do we know of the ‘Master of Hungary’? Two Englishmen, the chronicler Matthew Paris and the philosopher Roger Bacon, were intrigued by his understanding of crowd psychology. Matthew Paris was well-informed about the movement and believed that the ‘Master’ had been one of the leaders of the Children’s Crusade of 1212. If so, this would also fit with the idea of him being a novice in Paris in the 1590s. Matthew Paris had interviewed the archbishop of Canterbury, who had been in France at the time, and Thomas of Sherborne, an English monk taken prisoner by the Pastoureaux. According to Matthew Paris, the Master of Hungary “infatuated” the people who heard him, whereas Bacon, who witnessed his spellbinding performance in Paris, spoke of “fascination” as the key to his success. His anti-Semitism was echoed in a Second Shepherds’ Crusade of 1320, in which many more Jews were killed, and which I shall be writing about in a further article.

In a parliament held in Paris, 24 March 1267, Louis and his three sons took the cross. On hearing the reports of the missionaries, Louis resolved to land at Tunis, and he ordered his younger brother, Charles of Anjou, to join him there. The Crusaders, among whom was Prince Edward of England, landed at Carthage 17 July 1270, but disease broke out in the camp. Many died of dysentery, and on 25 August, Louis himself died.

Death of Saint Louis: On 25 August 1270, Saint Louis dies under his fleur-de-lis tent before the city of Tunis. Illuminated by Jean Fouquet, Grandes Chroniques de France (1455–1460)

 

Sources:

Norman Cohn (1970), The Pursuit of the Millennium. St Alban’s: Granada Publishing.

Sándor Fest (2000), Skóciai Szent Margittól A Walesi Bárdokig: Magyar-Angol történeti és irodalmi kapcsolatok (From St Margaret of Scotland to ‘the Bards of Wales’: Anglo-Magyar Historical and Literary Links). Budapest: Universitas Könyvkiadó. 

Sándor Fest

 

István Lázár (1990), A Brief History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books. 

Péter Hanák (ed.)(1988), One Thousand Years: A Concise History of Hungary. Budapest: Corvina Books.

Irene Richards & J. A. Morris (1946), A Sketch-Map History of Britain and Europe to 1485. London: Harrap.

András Bereznay et. al. (1998), The Times History of Europe. London: Times Books (Harper Collins).