Crusading Proposals in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Abstract

One of the striking features of crusading in the aftermath of the fall of Acre (1291) was the sudden profusion of treatises written to offer advice on how the Holy Land could be recovered. In the years between 1290 and 1335, around thirty such proposals were written containing often detailed information about the Mamluks and practical recommendations on how they could be defeated and expelled from the holy places. This practicality distinguishes the ‘recovery treatises’ from other crusading literature. Prior to this period, non-descriptive writing on the crusades tended to be theological, dealing with the justification of crusading or the morals of participants. After the brief flurry of proposals written in the decades prior to 1335, similar works were rare until the treatises outlining plans for crusades against the Ottomans written in the mid-fifteenth century by such authors as John Torzelo and James Tedaldi. However, a few new proposals dealing with the crusade to the Holy Land were written during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. This is striking, given the great obstacles posed to such a crusade by the twin scourges of war and plague in Europe, and the greater immediacy of the Ottoman threat. It is possible that these later works were influenced by recovery treatises written between 1290 and 1335, since some of the latter survive in copies made during the later fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries which were held in European libraries, notably that of the dukes of Burgundy. These copies, and the new treatises on the subject, illustrate that the idea of a crusade to recover Jerusalem continued to exert an appeal on later generations at certain times during the period.