Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Balard, Michel

Titel

When Ideology Met Reality: Clement V and the Crusade

Ist Teil von

• La Papauté et les croisades / The Papacy and the Crusades, 2011, p.117-128

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2011

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Jonathan Riley-Smith, in one of his early collection of crusader sources, bestowed on Innocent III the distinction of being one of the most devoted popes to the Holy Land to the point that he was “obsessed” by the crusades.1 Coming from a leading medievalist, such characterization seems prima facie rather convincing. Indeed, elevated to the see of St Peter 12 years after the Christian defeat at the Horns of Hattin, Innocent III led the Fourth Crusade and laid the basis for the Fifth. Still, as is well known, the Fourth Crusade never reached the Holy Land but brought about the emergence of the Latin Empire, whose short existence accelerated the process of decadence and, ultimately, the fall of the Byzantine Empire.2 The Fifth Crusade, which Innocent did not see materialize, produced only temporary achievements, with the papal struggle against the excommunicated emperor, Frederick II, relegating the renewed Christian rule over Jerusalem into a secondary plan.3 Against the historiographical debate around papal crusader policy throughout the thirteenth century,4 this paper attempts to reconsider the crusader policy of Pope * For a more comprehensive analysis of papal policy, see Sophia Menache, Clement V (Cambridge, 1998).