RE: [A-List] The Unbearable Costs of Empire

["Mark Jones" <markjones011@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Henry wrote:

> In England, the Crusades gave
> the nation the
> Magna Carter.  The Crusades contributed to the rise of nation
> states against a
> centralized Christian empire ruled from Rome, depriving the Pope
> of secular
> authority and gave rise to shipping port city states such as Venice.

This is a very interesting question altho tangential to this list I guess.
In fact Pope Innocent III seemed generally supportive of the baronial rebels
and even took the unusual step of freeing the Welsh King, Llywelyn, from his
oath fealty to King John. True, Innocent had second thoughts when he saw the
enormity of the constitutional challenege to the existing order presented by
the Magna Carta (which none of the signatories to it themselves seem to have
grasped) and understaood it as a threat to his own position as ultimate
source of feudal authority. But most of King John's reign was spent
virtually at war with the Holy See, to the point where John even once wrote
to the ruler of Algiers offering to become a Muslim in exchange for his
protection.

In 1207 the pope imposed Stephen Langton as archbishop of Canterbury and
John's resistance provoked a papal interdict on England. The people suffered
the distress of being unable to bury the dead, receive mass or confess their
sins. Many nobles, the archbishop and several prominent churchmen, including
Giles de Braose, bishop of Hereford, fled to France where king Philip
encouraged the exiles in their intrigues against John. John's main European
ally was the German Emperor Frederick, the so-called 'Stupor Mundi' because
of his great learnig, and (some think) a secret convert to Islam. Innocent
III fought a constant battle with the Emperor, who was also suzerain of
Sicily, to preserve the rights and secular powers of the Holy See, a battle
which as oyu say the papacy eventually lost. But I should have thought that
the Crusades probably played a unifying role in Europe--they were a great
rallying-cry to the European nobility who for more than a hundred years
answered the call to go to the Holy Land and save the soil which our
Redeemer trod from the defiling footsteps of the Infidel. In that time, they
of course greatly enriched themselevs and also picked up a lot of science,
maths, medicine and philosophy, as well as learning about things like cane
sugar and the silk trade.



Mark