Worse than All the Infidels. The Albigensian Crusade and the Continuing Call of the East

Abstract

Contemporary critics and modern historians have both faulted the Albigensian Crusade, directed against heretics in the south of France, for weakening attempts to recover Jerusalem for Christendom in the early thirteenth century. This essay explores the competition between the Albigensian and Fifth Crusades. Placing these crusades alongside each other, this essay will examine the conversation between them. It is often charged that the armed and eventually royal effort against the Albigensian heretics drained French crusaders and resources from Pope Innocent III’s second great push from 1213 to recapture Jerusalem that eventually led to a negotiated settlement under Emperor Frederick II in 1229—the year of the capitulation of Count Raymond VII of Toulouse in the Treaty of Paris. Certainly the Albigensian Crusade played its part among the European conflicts which distracted potential crusaders from setting out for the Holy Land, but this picture is incomplete. In fact, the correlation between crusade preachers and crusaders who participated in the Albigensian Crusade and the Fifth Crusade suggests that the former may have indirectly strengthened participation in the latter. By contextualising contemporary criticism of the Albigensian Crusades in favour of the drive to the East and examining the participants in and timing of expeditions to the French Midi, Egypt, and Syria, this essay argues that the Albigensian Crusade reinforced as much as distracted from the Fifth Crusade.