The popular crusade of 1320, whose participants were known in French as the pastoureaux, was the last and probably the most violent of the medieval crusades of the “shepherds.” Like the Children’s Crusade (1212) and the First Shepherds’ Crusade (1251), the crusade of the pastoureaux was unauthorized. Unlike the participants in those movements, however, the pastoureaux were named and condemned by the papacy. Terrified by the prospect of their arrival in Avignon, Pope John XXII ordered their dispersal (19 June 1320). As with other popular crusades, their collective name gives an inexact indication of their social composi-
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Tion. Actual shepherds probably formed the nucleus of the movement, but soon the multitudes flocking to join it included peasant laborers, craftsmen, the poor, and the socially marginal, both urban and rural, male and female. Although the French chroniclers refer to no knights in their ranks, a few nobles do appear in the Aragonese records. People of all ages participated, with youths of fourteen to sixteen particularly notable.
The movement lasted around four months. It originated in northern France, perhaps in Normandy, around Easter (20 March) 1320, reaching Paris by early May, then headed southward to Languedoc and Aragon, where, in the second half of July, it was crushed. In France as in Aragon the royal armies prevailed. Many of the pastoureaux were hanged. In the north, their leaders were reportedly a defrocked priest and a runaway monk, while in Languedoc no leaders are mentioned. At first, the pastoureaux professed crusading goals of fighting the infidels and regaining the Holy Land. In Paris, they may have believed that King Philip V of France, who had taken the cross, would lead them. An official crusade, planned since 1318, was still being discussed as recently as 17 February 1320. Royal propaganda thus aroused illusory expectations, inciting popular crusade enthusiasm. Memories of the “Crusade of the Poor” (1309) and the unsettling miseries of the great famine of 1315-1317 may have also played a part in the origins of the movement. From Paris onward this shepherds’ crusade was characterized by anti-Jewish and anticlerical violence and civic disorder. Jews were offered baptism or death: Their goods were stolen, their debt records destroyed; they were then massacred—as, for example, at Verdun on the Garonne, Toulouse, or Monclus—or, like Baruch l’Allemand, forcibly baptized. What alarmed the Dominican chronicler Bernard Gui was that in their plundering of clerics and religious orders, the pastoureaux were often aided by local people, even the civic authorities. Crusading aims were eventually overshadowed by antiJudaic and anticlerical rioting that carried more than a hint of sociopolitical rebellion.
-Gary Dickson
See also: Popular Crusades
Bibliography
Barber, Malcolm, “The Pastoureaux of 1320,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 32 (1981), 143-166. Reprinted in Malcolm Barber, Crusaders and Heretics, 12th-14th Centuries (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1995).
Dickson, Gary, “Encounters in Medieval Revivalism: Monks, Friars, and Popular Enthusiasts,” Church History 68 (1999), 265-293.
Housley, Norman, The Later Crusades, 1274-1580 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
Nirenberg, David, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
World History
