The Cross and the State

On the face of it, medieval crusading appears to have little to do with the creation of modern secular Europe. The crusades were a form of Christian holy war characterized by demonizing rhetoric, spiritual enthusiasm, religious ceremonies, ecclesiastical institutions, political objectives, social climbing and status-seeking. They speak of a society at once intensely local – region, city, lordship – yet ideologically wedded to universals: church, faith, empire, papacy. Yet from the growth of the idea of a nation specially favoured by God – familiar even today as in ‘One Nation Under God’ – to techniques of mobilizing political consent and fiscal exploitation, crusading fed into the establishment of states in which public religion became the servant, not the arbiter, of the civil community.

The first western European income tax was probably the levy authorized by Henry II of England in 1166 – imposed for crusading purposes. Some of the earliest national extraordinary lay or clerical taxes in medieval France or Germany were levied in the twelfth century for the Second and Third Crusades. After the church developed regular taxation of ecclesiastical property for the crusades in the thirteenth century, secular rulers attempted – successfully in most cases – to annexe this power to themselves. The need of the authorities to persuade and the expedients of bottom-up organization held together most large-scale eastern crusades as much as the ties of lordship, cash or coercion; and behind the religious propaganda and glamour,  crusading helped stimulate the political engagement of a wide civil society, characterized by discussion and debate. By the later Middle Ages, lay powers felt the need to control such diversity, a process that contributed directly to the consolidation of nation-states. All this may sound a far cry from the efforts of the ‘armies of God’ to win terrestrial space to match the limitless sovereignty of their Maker.