The religious rites that were particular to the crusading situation, from the proclamation of the First Crusade in 1095 up to the sixteenth century, comprised various forms. They included single rites (usually within a definite liturgical field, such as pilgrimage, war, and knighthood); composite rites (consisting of single elements received from several fields and fused together into integral rites); and sets of complete rites (pertaining, usually, to several fields). These rites could be personal, in that they sustained the crusader’s progress on his journey, and communal, in cases where crusade-related rites were performed by collectivities in the field or in the crusaders’ home countries.
Rites of Inception
The inception of a crusading journey was solemnized through two rites: the new practice of “taking the cross,” mainly spontaneous and informal, and the traditional ritual of the pilgrim’s departure, which by 1099 was common and regular. They delineated two kinds of inception. The rite of taking the cross established the status of the would-be crusader, whereas the rite of the pilgrim’s departure initiated the actualization of that potentiality. Formal services in church for taking the cross, and departure services that combined the separate rites of the pilgrim’s departure and the taking of the cross, appeared by the late twelfth century and were performed alongside the traditional rites.
Taking the cross, an innovation commonly attributed to Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont (1095), consisted in attaching the sign of the cross to clothing or armor. This rite remained largely informal during the twelfth century and to some extent in the thirteenth. Many crusaders seem to have “crossed themselves”: whereas the frequency of “selfcrossing” terminology expressed the volitional and determinant role of the individual, it also reflected the prevalence of that practice. Although would-be crusaders usually received the cross from clerics and in ecclesiastical venues, it was also given by secular persons and in nonecclesiastical contexts (for example, Bohemund of Taranto distributed crosses to his soldiers during the siege of Amalfi in 1096).
No regular formal ceremony of taking or giving the cross is documented prior to the late twelfth century, and the public venues described are often characterized by disorderly ecstasy and inspired improvisation. Taking the cross was perceived as a public pledge to fulfill the crusading vow, but its largely informal makeup weakened the prospects of its enforcement. Explicit promises (documented vow attestations, though, were extremely rare), sworn oaths, and formal rites for taking the cross were therefore devised in order to secure implementation. Some of the new formal rites were very elaborate, especially those that attached the service of “crossing” to the sacrament of confession and penance and to a votive Mass.
The traditional rite of pilgrimage inception was generally practiced on the crusader’s departure in his parochial church. He confessed, received penance, took part in an appropriate votive Mass (for example, the Mass for Those on the Road), and received his pilgrim’s scrip (satchel) and staff kneeling in front of the altar; these were blessed in a special service that comprised psalms, prayers, and formulas of blessing. The more evolved forms of this rite combined the two services of inception (pilgrimage as well as “crossing”) and provided the departing crusader with his cross in addition to the scrip and staff. Some of the ceremonies were quite elaborate: the Lincoln Pontifical service comprised no less than four psalms and four prayers, the imposition formulas of scrip and staff, a separate blessing of the cross, and a formula for its imposition, and it concluded with the Mass for Those on the Road and two after-Mass prayers for the crusaders.
Increasingly popular were sets of rites that combined rituals of pilgrimage, knighthood, and Christian kingship. In these sets, the traditional rites of “crossing” and of the pilgrim’s departure were supplemented with rites of penance (a corollary of the pilgrimage ritual), of the just war, and of the pre-death ritual. When King Louis VII of France left on the Second Crusade, he visited several holy men in Paris and a leper asylum, kissed and adored the relic of St. Denis at the abbey of Saint-Denis, and received the banner of St. Denis from above the altar along with his scrip and staff. John of Joinville adopted an essentially similar set: on the eve of his departure he assembled his vassals and settled all disputes with them; he received his scrip and staff at the hands of a Cistercian abbot on the day of his departure, then went on foot, barefooted and in his shirt, and visited several places of pilgrimage where he adored holy relics. Only then did he proceed on his way to his port of embarkation.
These rites declared the meanings of the crusade in a liturgical mode through the spoken word and in symbolic gestures, objects, and performance; their subtexts and implied allusions were often explicated by nonliturgical sources. On the most basic level they defined the crusade as an Imitation of Christ, the ultimate self-sacrifice of the martyr in total love and service of God. This idea was transmuted into the notion of pilgrimage, that is, the pilgrim’s journey as an encapsulating enactment of the ideal Christian life perceived as a permanent combat with the ancient foe and as a penitential, ascetic progress from sin to salvation in the heavenly Jerusalem. It was further transformed into the practicable Jerusalem pilgrimage and, finally, into the Jerusalem pilgrimage as a crusade.
Combat in the service of God was seen as predominantly spiritual and only secondarily as martial and directed against worldly foes, while ascetic progress was realized in a penitential journey that culminated in the mimetic and redemptive visit to Jerusalem, a prefiguration of the heavenly city of salvation. The primacy of pilgrimage in this complex is best illustrated by the prevalent contemporary opinion that a crusader’s vow was deemed fulfilled only after he had visited the holy places or died as a martyr on the way.
Rites of Crusading Warfare
Crusaders on the road required ordinary and extraordinary formal rituals. The first category comprised the communal celebration of the cycles of liturgical time, ordinary rites applying to the individual (for example, penance, unction of the sick, and extreme unction), and rites that related specifically to the journey (for example, the invocation Veni creator spiritus [Come, creator spirit] to secure propitious wind on the first hoisting of sails). The second consisted of liturgical remedies for unexpected emergencies and particularly grave crises, such as when exceptional liturgical and disci-
The Crusader’s return. Relief from the Abbey of Belval, perhaps in commemoration of the return of Hugh I of Vaudemont (d.1154). (Erich Lessing/Art Resource)
Plinary measures were taken to purge the crusading host from corruption, as during the siege of Antioch in 1098. There was no shortage of clerics equipped with portable altars, books, and vestments to administer these rites, as most crusading expeditions consisted of distinct contingents that were served by their own clerics according to their liturgical uses.
The liturgy of crusading warfare was grounded on war liturgies that had been regularly practiced in the Byzantine Empire and by Western armies since the Carolingian era, and also comprised innovations introduced by the crusaders. A battle was often preceded by various rites: fasts, penitential processions, almsgiving, the sacrament of penance, and the communion of the Eucharist. When crusaders entered the field they were accompanied by clerics in white stoles, who circulated among the combatants, bearing crosses and relics; they made the sign of the cross (often on crusaders’ foreheads), gave blessings, and promised plenary indulgence and remission of sins to those who would fall in the battle. The bishops did the same for the commanders and preached before them, while clerics in the base camp, dressed in their priestly vestments, prayed continuously for the combatants. This pattern appeared also in atypical operations: on the eve of his landing at Damietta (1249), Louis IX of France commanded the crusaders to confess and make preparations as before death and heard the Mass for Those at Sea before he armed himself. While the crusaders were going down to the assault boats, they were blessed by the legate, and the whole flotilla was led by a boat flying the banner of St. Denis.
During fighting, formal collective war liturgy gave way to informal individual practices. Combatants made use of apotropaic objects such as the sign of the cross attached to clothes and armor or painted on foreheads, consecrated arms and war banners, relics carried on the person or attached to weapons, and scriptural quotations engraved on swords. Combatants also kneeled down and prayed for succor, made vows in desperate situations, and appealed to Christ, Mary, angels (such as the Archangel Michael), and patron saints (such as the military saints George, Demetrius, and Maurice).
Formal liturgy reclaimed the battlefield once the fighting was over: clerics administered to the wounded and the dying the sacraments of unction of the sick and the viaticum, identified the dead, and gave them a full Christian burial. Rites of thanksgiving for victory were sometimes practiced on the spot, as when the crusaders took the beach at Damietta (1249). The same spirit of thanksgiving inspired the more elaborate victory ceremonies, but they were designed, in addition, as either rites of conquest and religious conversion or rites of triumphal homecoming. Trophies of victory were occasionally deposited in churches (for example, the standard of the vanquished Muslim amir in the Ascalon campaign of 1099). Permanent victory commemorations were introduced into the liturgical calendars not only of the churches involved, but also abroad, as with the liberation celebrations of Jerusalem, Acre, and Damietta.
In their innovations, the crusaders harked back to biblical war rites: the procession that encircled Jerusalem in July 1099 echoed Joshua’s march around Jericho, whereas the silver trumpets made for the Second Crusade corresponded to those produced for Moses. Battle-cry and banner usually formed the semiliturgical sign of a military contingent, but the First Crusade broke with this tradition. Although the crusaders marched into battle behind the banners of their individual leaders, they adopted a single, common battle cry: Deus vult (“God wills it”), regularly shouted twice (or thrice, according to some sources) by the entire army with one voice. Contemporaries saw this as an expression of unity and a repudiation of “prideful diversity,” and they were certainly right as to its rationale. It went, however, against the grain of the common military ceremonial, and subsequent crusades reverted to particular battle cries.
Crusading clerics in the field prayed mostly from common prayer books and used generic prayers traditionally said during war and crisis, but they also innovated, trying for specificity through the naming of protagonists and by adapting generic texts to particular events and situations. Such prayers related to events in a more direct mode, in contrast to general prayers, which required explication. A set of original war prayers composed during the Fifth Crusade (1217-1221), for example, contains a prayer that calls upon God’s power over wind and water in relation to the fighting in the Nile Delta with its seasonal rises and falls, two others that invoke miracles of fire in the specific context of harassment by fire during the siege—one of which supplicates “liberate us from that fire and from the hands of the sinful Sara-cens”—and finally, a prayer that beseeches: “Look at our true faith... in the cause of which we have assembled in this alien land, and do not let us perish at the hands of the cruel heathens” [“Gesta Obsidionis Damiate,” ed. Reinhold Rohricht, in Quinti belli sacri scriptores minores (Geneva: Fick, 1879), pp. 82-83, 98-99].
A striking example of such specification can be seen in a thanksgiving prayer said after the victory at Dorylaion in
1097. Composed of five heavily edited verses from Exodus (15:11, 6, 7, 9, 13, in this order), it concludes: “Now, Lord, we know that you carry us in your strength unto thy holy habitation, that is unto your Holy Sepulchre” [“Robert Monachi historia Iherosolimitana,” in Recueil des Historiens des Croisades: Historiens Occidentaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1844-1895), 3:763].
Support from the West: Common Liturgical Practices and Dedicated Rites
Liturgical activity in support of crusades during the twelfth century related to the catchment area of any given crusade and was usually of short duration. However, from the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187, sustained crusading agitation produced an intense liturgical activity throughout Europe that actually outlasted crusading to the Holy Land and continued well into the sixteenth century. This activity consisted of two types: single practices (mainly of penance) performed either singly or in sets, and dedicated rites, mostly connected with the celebration of Mass.
Penitential practices employed in the cause of the crusade consisted of fasts (a bull in 1187 enjoined on all Christians a five-year Lent-like fast on Fridays as well as abstention from meat on Wednesdays and Saturdays), sumptuary regulation of dress, chastisement, and almsgiving. The most conspicuous and participatory penitential practice was the procession: clergy and laymen chanting litanies, respon-sories, and prayers marched toward a church, usually on Fridays, where an appropriate Mass (for example, Salus populi) was celebrated. The participants were given indulgences. Cloistered communities held their processions indoors; the Cistercians, for example, usually went in a procession to the high altar every Friday after “mournfully” chanting the seven penitential psalms and litanies, then held a special service and celebrated a Salus populi Mass.
Other practices involved the celebration of Mass in the cause of the Holy Land: its time was fixed for the ninth hour, bells were rung in its course, and people outside the church knelt and said the Lord’s Prayer. Several gestures were expected of the congregation inside: stooping with humility whenever Christ’s name was mentioned, kneeling, and prostration. Exceptionally, relics were shown to the public, as in 1191, when relics of SS. Denis, Rusticus, and Eleutherius were exhibited at the abbey of Saint-Denis in France in order to promote public intercession for the Holy Land and the crusade of King Philip II Augustus.
A liturgical innovation after 1187 was the Clamor for the Holy Land, a sequence of psalms, versicles, and prayers. The first such Clamor, which appeared in London in 1188, was interjected into the Mass between the Pater noster and the Agnus Dei and consisted of Psalm 78, several versicles, and a prayer, all said in prostration. With time, the Clamor evolved into more elaborate and expanded forms (with additional psalms, versicles, and prayers as well as alternative and additional objectives) and became a permanent component in both the Mass (that is, the celebration of the Eucharist) and the divine office (the recitation of prayers at fixed times during the day). The original London Clamor was a temporary seven-day program of seven daily Masses, each one anchored on a different psalm and on the traditional Good Friday prayer for the emperor (Omnipotens sempiterne Deus in cuius manu). It was subsequently simplified by reducing the sequence of seven daily Masses to one daily Mass: twelve different forms of such Clamors survive. Another contemporary Holy Land Clamor, anchored on Psalm 78 and on a specific Holy Land prayer (Deus qui ad nostre redemptionis), evolved in connection with both Mass and office. It was practiced quite extensively, but its use declined after the thirteenth century.
The dominant Holy Land Clamor was promulgated by Pope Innocent III in 1213 in a drive to promote a new crusade. Anchored on Psalm 78 and a different prayer for the Holy Land (Deus qui admirabili), it was promulgated again by Pope Innocent IV in 1245, received into the pontifical of William Durand, and practiced universally. It acquired new versicles and prayers in the process, until it was reformed by Pope Nicholas III (1280) and Pope John XXII (1322 and 1328) from a crusade service to a general supplication for the church. One of its more durable variants was the Sarum Use permanent mass Clamor with its numerous strains. At the height of its evolution, it made intercession for the liberation of the Holy Land and for bishop and king with an expanded complement of three psalms, three prayers, and (usually) eight versicles, all aligned on these three objectives. It was abolished in the sixteenth century.
Whereas the Clamor interrupted the normal performance of the Mass, another approach consisted in manipulating entire Masses. Votive Masses, because of their essentially intercessory nature, were particularly appropriate for this purpose, and at least eight such Masses were performed in the cause of the Holy Land, either singly or in various sequences: the Masses of the Holy Ghost, St. Mary, the Angels, the Holy Cross, and the Holy Trinity; the Mass in Time of Tribulation; the Mass for Any Necessity; and the Mass for the Intercession of the Saints.
Regular Masses were converted into crusading Masses by adding three dedicated prayers to the regular prayers of the Collect, the Secret, and the Postcommunion. Some eight local triple sets of this kind are known, of relatively limited diffusion and duration. In 1308 Pope Clement V launched a new version of the old triple set Contra Paganos anchored on the prayer Omnipotens sempiterne Deus in cuius manu, among other preparatory measures for a new crusade, and that set served the church in numerous crusades and conflicts until the twentieth century. It was immensely popular, because as a generic crusading set it was compatible with an almost unlimited range of “crusades.” The last Holy Land triple set to be decreed by the Curia was the Deus qui admirabili set promulgated by John XXII in 1331-1333 in anticipation of a new crusade.
The Trental of St. Gregory, a typical English rite based on a triple set, is documented from the late fourteenth century. It converted the ten major feasts of the year into an instrument of intercession for the liberation of the Holy Land, on the one hand, and of designated souls from Purgatory, on the other, by the insertion of a triple set of special prayers into three Masses said on the Octaves of these feasts, making thirty Masses in all. Practiced widely in England, it evolved into more complex forms combining the Mass with the office, personal piety with priestly mediation, and flexibility with rigidity in the actual practice of the Trental until it was finally abolished in the sixteenth century. A similar manipulation of regular Masses involved the insertion of a prayer calling for the liberation of the Holy Land into the Bidding Prayers, the series of intercessory vernacular prayers said in parish churches during the Sunday Masses. Documented in many parts of Europe from the late thirteenth century and well into the seventeenth, the easy accessibility of the Bidding Prayers to lay worshippers made them a potentially important vehicle of propaganda for the crusade.
The complete crusading Mass, designed to serve the cause of the crusade through the alignment of the Mass’s variable components with the crusade and its objectives, represents the perfect form of this kind of intercessory eucharistic service. Grounded on the traditional war Mass Contra paganos and on the Holy Land triple sets of Mass prayers, numerous Masses of this type were created and practiced in the late Middle Ages. Mostly generic rather than specific and hence applicable to any non-Christian or heretical adversary targeted by a crusade, many of them were nevertheless specifically aimed at the Turks (recognized as the main enemy since the First Crusade and always perceived in relation to the Holy Land, even when they were seen as a threat nearer home). A handful were specifically dedicated to the liberation of the Holy Land.
-Amnon Linder
See also: Liturgy of Outremer
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World History
