Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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On 5 April 1291 Sultan Khalil’s troops encircled Acre from the north shore above Montmusard to the coast south-east of the harbour, and the siege began. At this point, the city contained many members of the Military Orders–including the masters of the Temple and Hospital–and, in time, the severity of the threat now posed to Acre brought other reinforcements by sea, among them King Henry II (titular monarch of Jerusalem) with 200 knights and 500 infantry from Cyprus. Even so, the Christians were hopelessly outnumbered.

Khalil set about the task of crushing Acre with methodical determination. With his forces ranged in a rough semi-circle around the city, an aerial barrage began. The largest trebuchets, like ‘Victorious’ and another known as ‘Furious’, had been reassembled and were now pummelling Acre’s battlements with massive boulders. Meanwhile, scores of smaller ballistic devices and squads of archers were deployed behind siege screens to shower the Franks with missiles. Mammoth in scale, unremitting in its intensity, this bombardment was unlike anything yet witnessed in the field of crusader warfare. Teams of Mamluk troopers worked in four carefully coordinated shifts, through day and night. And, each day, Khalil ordered his forces to make a short forward advance–gradually tightening the noose around Acre, until they reached its outer fosse. Eyewitness Latin testimony suggests that, as these efforts proceeded apace, possible terms of surrender were discussed. The sultan apparently offered to allow the Christians to depart with their movable property, so long as the city was left undamaged. But the Frankish envoys are said to have refused, concerned at the dishonour that would be suffered by King Henry through such an absolute concession of defeat.

As the Mamluks pounded Acre, the Christians made some vain attempts to launch counter-attacks. Stationed on the northern shore, Abu’l Fida described how ‘a [Latin] ship came up with a catapult mounted on it that battered us and our tents from the sea’. William, master of the Templars, and Otho of Grandson also tried to prosecute a bold night-time sortie, hoping to wreak havoc within the enemy camp and torch one of the massive Mamluk trebuchets. The raid went awry when some of the Christians tripped over the guy ropes of the Muslim tents, raising a commotion. Thus alerted, scores of Mamluks rushed into the fray, routing the Franks and slaying eighteen knights. One unfortunate Latin ‘fell into the latrine trench of one of the emir’s detachments and was killed’. The next morning, the Muslims proudly presented the heads of their vanquished foes to the sultan.²⁴

By 8 May, Khalil’s inexorable advance had brought the Mamluk lines close enough to the city for sappers to be deployed on the outer walls. They quickly turned Acre’s advanced sewerage system to their advantage, using outflows to start their tunnels. Just as in the Third Crusaders’ siege of Acre in 1191, the work of undermining was focused particularly upon the city’s north-eastern corner, but with Acre now protected by double walls there were two lines of defence to breach. The first collapsed at the Tower of the King on Tuesday 15 May and, by the following morning, Khalil’s troops had taken control of this section of the outer battlements. With panic rising in the city, women and children began to evacuate by ship.

The sultan now prepared the Mamluks for a full-strength frontal assault through the breached Tower of the King, towards the inner walls and the Accursed Tower. At dawn on Friday 18 May 1291, the signal for the attack began–the thunderous booming of war drums that created ‘a terrible, terrifying noise’–and thousands of Muslims began racing forward. Some threw flasks of Greek fire, while archers loosed arrows ‘in a thick cloud [that] seemed to fall like rain from the heavens’. Driven forward by the overwhelming force of this onslaught, the Mamluks broke through two gates near the Accursed Tower and began rushing into the city proper. With Acre’s defences punctured, the Franks tried to make a last desperate stand to contain the incursion, but one eyewitness admitted that attacking the Muslim horde was like trying to hurl oneself ‘against a stone wall’. In the thick of the fighting, the Templar Master William of Beaujeu was mortally wounded when a spear pierced his side. Elsewhere, John of Villiers, master of the Hospital, took a lance thrust between his shoulders. Grievously injured, he was dragged back from the walls.

Before long, the Christian defenders were overrun and the sack of Acre began. One Latin, then in the city, wrote that the ‘day was terrible to behold. The [ordinary people of the city] came fleeing through the streets, their children in their arms, weeping and despairing, and fleeing to sailors to save them from death’, but hunted down, hundreds were slaughtered and abandoned infants were said to have been trampled under foot. Abu’l Fida confirmed that ‘the Muslims killed vast numbers of people and gathered immense [amounts of] plunder’ once Acre fell. As the Mamluks surged through the city, masses of desperate Latins tried to escape in any remaining boats, and there was utter chaos at the docks. Some got away, including King Henry and Otho of Grandson. Half dead, John of Villiers was carried to a boat and sailed to safety. But the Latin patriarch fell into the water and drowned when his overburdened craft became unstable. Elsewhere, some Latins chose to remain and face their fate. Khalil’s troops found a band of Dominican Friars singing ‘Veni, Creator Spiritus’–the same crusader hymn intoned by Joinville in 1248–in their convent, and butchered them to a man.²⁵

Many Christians sought to take refuge in the fortified compounds of the three main Military Orders, and some managed to hold out for days. The robust Templar citadel was eventually undermined by sappers and collapsed on 28 May, killing the Templars within. Those sheltering in the Hospitallers’ quarter surrendered on promise of safe conduct from Khalil, but Muslim chronicles testify to the fact that the sultan deliberately broke this promise, leading his Christian prisoners out of the city and on to the surrounding plains. Almost exactly one hundred years earlier, Richard the Lionheart had violated his own pledge of clemency to Acre’s Ayyubid garrison, executing some 2,700 captives. Now, in 1291, Khalil herded the Latins into groups and ‘had them slaughtered as the Franks had done to the Muslims. Thus Almighty God was revenged on their descendants.’

Acre’s fall was a final and fatal disaster for the Latin Christians of Outremer. Recalling the city’s sack, one Frankish eyewitness who fled by boat declared that ‘no one could adequately recount the tears and grief of that day’. The Hospitaller Master John of Villiers survived to pen a letter to Europe describing his experiences, although he admitted that his wound made it difficult to write:

I and some of our brothers escaped, as it pleased God, most of whom were wounded and battered without hope of cure, and we were taken to the island of Cyprus. On the day that this letter was written we were still there, in great sadness of heart, prisoners of overwhelming sorrow.

For the Muslims, by contrast, the glorious victory at Acre affirmed the efficacy of their faith, sealing their triumph in the war for the Holy Land. One witness described in amazement how, ‘after the capture of Acre, God put despair into the hearts of the other Franks left in Palestine’. Christian resistance crumbled. Within a month, the last outposts at Tyre, Beirut and Sidon had been evacuated or abandoned by the Franks. That August, the Templars withdrew from their strongholds at Tortosa and Pilgrims’ Castle. With this, the days of Outremer–the crusader settlements on the mainland Levant–were brought to an end. Reflecting upon the wonder of this event, Abu’l Fida wrote:

These conquests [meant that] the whole of Palestine was now in Muslim hands, a result that no one would have dared to hope for or to desire. Thus the [Holy Land was] purified of the Franks, who had once been on the point of conquering Egypt and subduing Damascus and other cities. Praise be to God!²⁶

CONCLUSION

THE LEGACY OF THE CRUSADES

With Acre’s fall and the loss of Outremer’s last remaining strongholds, Latin Christendom’s political and military presence on the mainland Levant came to a definitive end. The final conquest of the crusader states helped further to validate Mamluk authority, and the sultanate’s power in the Near East held for more than two centuries. In the West, however, the kingdom of Jerusalem’s collapse caused widespread shock and anxiety. Not surprisingly, explanations were sought and recriminations levelled. The Levantine Franks were derided for their sinfulness and propensity to factionalism, the Military Orders criticised for pursuing international interests rather than focusing upon the Holy Land’s defence.

Commercial contact between Europe and the Muslim Near East continued long after 1291 and Cyprus remained under Frankish rule until the late sixteenth century. But the mainland Levant remained a target of holy war. From the 1290s onwards, many detailed treatises were composed in Europe, advancing various plans and methods to secure Jerusalem’s reconquest. New expeditions to the Near East were discussed, some were even launched–one culminating in the brief capture of the Egyptian port of Alexandria in 1365. Through the fourteenth century and beyond, many more crusades were preached and wars fought against the likes of heretics, Ottoman Turks and the papacy’s political enemies. The Templars were dissolved as an order in 1312, after accusations of abuses and neglect spearheaded by an acquisitive French monarchy, but other Military Orders survived through the Middle Ages. The Hospitallers established new headquarters, first on Cyprus and then on Rhodes and later Malta, while the Teutonic Order carved out their own independent state in the Baltic. Yet, despite all of this, no crusade ever reclaimed the Holy City, and Islam’s hold over the Levant did not weaken until the early twentieth century.¹

CAUSES AND OUTCOMES

To begin with, the crusades were, at the very least, as much acts of Christian aggression as wars of defence. It is certainly true that Islam had initiated its own unprovoked surge of invasion and expansion in the seventh century, but the mercurial vigour of this onslaught had long since slackened. The First Crusade was not launched in response to an overwhelming and impending threat, nor was it the immediate result of any catastrophic loss. Jerusalem, the campaign’s averred goal, had been conquered by Muslims some four centuries earlier–hardly a recent injury. The accusations of widespread or systematic abuse of Christian subjects or pilgrims by the Islamic overlords of the Levant also appear to have had little basis in fact. After the First Crusade’s seemingly miraculous success and the foundation of the crusader states, the war for the Holy Land was perpetuated by cycles of violence, vengeance and reconquest, in which Christians and Muslims alike perpetrated acts of savage brutality.

A conflict unlike any other?

Through two centuries, diverse forces combined to fuel and propel this struggle. These ranged from the ambition of popes to achieve Rome’s ‘divinely ordained’ ecclesiastical primacy, to the economic aspirations of Italian merchants; from notions of social obligation and bonds of kinship, to an emerging sense of chivalric duty. Leaders–Muslim and Christian, secular and spiritual–came to realise that the ideals of holy war could be harnessed to justify programmes of unification and militarisation, even to facilitate the imposition of autocratic governance. In this respect, the crusader wars conformed to a paradigm common to many periods of human history–the attempt to control and direct violence, ostensibly for the common good, but often to serve the interests of ruling elites.

In the case of Latin Christian crusades and Islamic jihad, however, this ‘public’ warfare was imbued with a compelling religious dimension. This did not necessarily lead to a conflict marked by uniquely barbaric acts of violence or especially entrenched enmity. But it did mean that many of those involved in the contest for control of the Holy Land earnestly believed that their actions were enmeshed with spiritual concerns. Popes like Urban II and Innocent III preached crusades to affirm their own authority, but they also did so in the hope of helping Christians find a path to salvation. Venetian crusaders may have had an eye for earthly profit, yet, just like other participants in these holy wars, they seem to have been moved by a heartfelt desire to attain a spiritual reward. Even a power-hungry warlord like Saladin–content to exploit the struggle for his own ends–evidently experienced a quickening sense of pious dedication to Jerusalem’s reconquest and defence. Of course, not all crusaders, Frankish settlers or Muslim warriors felt these religious impulses in equal measure, but the pulse of faith, pervasive and enduring, resounded through the two-century-long battle for the Levant.

This devotional element infused these wars with a distinct character, inspiring remarkable feats of resilience, fortitude and, on occasion, intolerance. It also helps to explain how and why tens of thousands of Christians and Muslims continued to participate in this protracted struggle across so many decades. The enthusiasm of Near Eastern Islam is more easily understood. Jihad was a devotional obligation rather than a voluntary form of penance, and generations of Muslims could take inspiration from a mounting succession of Zangid, Ayyubid and Mamluk victories. The lasting appeal of crusading in western Europe is more striking taken against a backdrop of an endless sequence of depressing defeats and the redirection of holy wars into new theatres of conflict. The very fact of continued recruitment, through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and beyond, illustrates the compelling allure of taking the cross–of participating in an endeavour that fused the ideals of military service and penance–and ultimately purifying the soul of sin. From 1095 onwards, Latin Christians wholeheartedly accepted the idea that crusading was a permissible and efficacious form of devotion. There is virtually no sign of concern over the union of violence and religion among medieval contemporaries. And even when criticism of the crusading movement gathered pace, the questions raised related to issues such as wavering commitment and finance, not the basic principle that God would support and reward wars fought in his name.²

Accounting for victory and defeat

If the continued attraction of crusading was noteworthy, so too was the associated survival of Frankish Outremer for close to 200 years. Even so, there is no escaping the fact that, in the end, the Latins lost the war for the Holy Land. The path from the First Crusade’s victory in 1099 to Acre’s fall in 1291 was by no means simply a spiral of defeat and decay. But equally, from the Second Crusade’s failure at Damascus in 1148 to King Louis IX of France’s ignominious capture in Egypt in 1250, there hardly was a tide of success. Whenever historians have sought to explain this trend, the focus generally has turned to Islam–to the supposed resurgence of jihadi enthusiasm and the shift to Muslim unification across the Near and Middle East. Yet in reality, until the advent of the Mamluks, enthusiasm for holy war was sporadic and pan-Levantine accord ephemeral at best. Of course, events within Islam did impact upon the outcome of the crusades, but there were other, perhaps even more powerful, issues at work.

The very nature of crusading itself was a fundamental cause of Christendom’s ultimate defeat in the struggle for mastery of the eastern Mediterranean. The idea of holy war did not remain static between 1095 and 1291. It was subject to evolution and development–although these changes were not always apparent to contemporaries–and underwent some adjustment in response to wider developments in religious thinking, including the incorporation of mission and conversion as means to overcome non-Christian opponents. Throughout, however, crusading expeditions remained badly suited to the business of defending or reconquering the Holy Land. To survive, the crusader states desperately needed external martial assistance, but in the form of permanent (or at least long-standing) and obedient military forces. More often than not, crusades actually brought short-lived injections of massed armies–often adulterated by non-combatants–led by independent-minded potentates fixated upon their own objectives.

The fact that Outremer’s needs were not met by the crusading movement should come as no surprise, because this form of holy war was not expressly designed to fulfil such a purpose. Instead, at an elemental level, crusades were constructed as a voluntary and personal form of penance. Participants might expect to pursue an established goal–the capture of a particular target or the defence of a region. They also might envisage themselves as fulfilling a duty of service owed to God, as bringing succour to fellow Christians, even as imitating the labours and suffering of Christ himself. Yet always, at the heart of the crusading impulse, lay the promise of individual salvation: a guarantee that the penalties owing for confessed sins would be cancelled out by the completion of an armed pilgrimage. This was the overwhelming allure of a crusade–its capacity to eradicate the taint of transgression, to offer an escape from damnation. And this was why hundreds of thousands of Latins took the cross in the course of the Middle Ages.

The febrile aura of religiosity that enveloped most crusading expeditions could instil a unity of purpose and an unparalleled determination in its participants, empowering them to undertake unimaginable feats of arms. It was this sense of divine sanction and spiritual devotion that helped Louis IX’s troops to survive the Battle of Mansourah, that enabled the Third Crusaders to endure the gruelling siege of Acre and led the Franks to risk total annihilation by marching on Jerusalem in 1099. Burning with enthusiasm, crusaders could prevail against seemingly insurmountable odds, but this fiery passion often also proved to be impossible to control. Crusade armies were made up of thousands of individuals, each ultimately intent upon forging their own path to redemption. As such, they could not be led or governed in the same way as other, more conventional military forces. Raymond of Toulouse discovered this to his cost at Marrat and again at Arqa during the First Crusade; so too did Richard the Lionheart when he twice retreated from Jerusalem. Arguably, no Christian king or commander ever truly learned how to harness the force of the crusading tempest.

In the course of the thirteenth century, popes like Innocent III strove to control crusading through increased regulation and the effective institutionalisation of holy war. But they faced the converse problem: how to tame fervour without smothering the fire that lent these sanctified campaigns their strength? They also failed to find a workable formula, and new ideas about reconfiguring the whole basis of crusading activity–with professional forces stationed semi-permanently in the Near East–came too late and incited little response.

Some historians have suggested that Christendom was defeated in the war for the Holy Land because of a gradual slump in crusade enthusiasm after 1200–a malaise supposedly brought on by papal manipulation and dilution of the ‘ideal’. This view is somewhat simplistic. True, the thirteenth century did not witness the same massive expeditions that had punctuated the period between 1095 and 1193, but a plethora of smaller-scale campaigns still enjoyed substantial recruitment, even when directed against new enemies and into different theatres of conflict. If anything, the decline came in Latin Europe’s direct concern for the fate of the Holy Land, but this apparent deterioration likewise should not be exaggerated. The huge campaigns of the twelfth century were themselves only spawned in the wake of seismic shocks–the fall of Edessa and the Battle of Hattin–and otherwise western Christendom often remained immune to Outremer’s urgent appeals for assistance. Domestic problems and concerns, from succession disputes and dynastic rivalries to failed harvests and outbreaks of heresy, might only too easily trump the needs of the embattled crusader states. Evocative and potent as the fate of Jerusalem and the Holy Land might be, the course of crusading history proves that most Latins living in Europe did not exist in a permanent state of anxiety over events in the East and thus were rarely willing to upend their lives at home to save a distant, if sacred, outpost.

In reality this was a function of another, decidedly practical consideration that impacted upon the outcome of the battle for the Near East. In physical and conceptual terms, the Levant was simply a long way from western Europe. Christians living in France, Germany or England faced journeys covering thousands of miles to reach the Holy Land. The huge distances involved caused significant difficulties when it came to mounting military expeditions or even maintaining regular contact with the Latin settlements in the East. The comparison is by no means perfect, but the other major territorial contest being played out between Latins and Muslims–the so-called Spanish Reconquista–ended in Christian victory at least in part because of the basic fact of Iberia’s relative geographical proximity to the rest of Europe. Outremer’s problems of separation were partially alleviated by the rise of the Military Orders as supranational institutions and the growth in trans-Mediterranean trade, but the gap was never fully bridged. At the same time, the Levantine Franks failed to cooperate fully or effectively with the eastern Christian allies, from the Byzantine Empire to Cilician Armenia, who could have helped to mitigate their isolation, and allowed themselves to become embroiled in countless highly disruptive internal power struggles.

For all these reasons, Outremer found itself in a precarious state of vulnerability throughout much of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Nonetheless, it took a concomitant degree of strength and advantage for Islam to be capable of exploiting Frankish weakness. The crusader wars were not fought, in the first instance, in the political or cultural heartlands of Eastern Islam, but rather in the frontier zone between Egypt and Mesopotamia, and neither can the Holy Land be characterised in any way as a uniformly Muslim society. Yet even so, in the long run Islam did benefit from the physical propinquity of the Levantine battlefield and the inescapable fact that it was waging a war on what was tantamount to home ground. The Muslim world was also lifted to victory in this prolonged struggle by the insightful and charismatic leadership offered by Nur al-Din and Saladin, and by Baybars’ unflinching ruthlessness.³

CONSEQUENCES IN THE MEDIEVAL WORLD

The crusades have been presented as an international conflagration that reshaped the world: dragging Europe out of the Dark Ages towards the beckoning light of the Renaissance; consigning Islam, militarised and radicalised in the pursuit of victory, to centuries of insular stagnation. Some have characterised these holy wars as apocalyptic conflicts that left indelible scars of ethnic and religious hatred, initiating an unending cycle of hostility. Such grand assertions rely upon simplification and exaggeration. Huge changes were undoubtedly wrought across the medieval world between 1000 and 1300. This was a period marked by population growth, migration and urbanisation; advances were made in learning, technology and cultural expression; and international commerce was extended. Yet the precise role of the crusades remains debatable. Any attempt to pinpoint the effect of this movement is fraught with difficulty, because it demands the tracing and isolation of one single thread within the weave of history–and the hypothetical reconstruction of the world, were that strand to be removed. Some impacts are relatively clear, but many observations must, perforce, be confined to broad generalisations. It is certain that the war for the Holy Land was not the sole influence at work in the Middle Ages. But equally, this Levantine struggle did have a significant impact upon medieval history, especially in the Mediterranean basin.

The eastern Mediterranean

The threats posed by the Franks, both real and imagined, presented the Muslim world with an enemy to rally against and a cause for which to fight. This enabled Nur al-Din and then Saladin to resurrect the ideal of jihad. It also allowed them to impose a degree of unity upon Near and Middle Eastern Islam that, while yet imperfect, still far outstripped anything witnessed since the early era of Muslim expansion. The process reached its ultimate expression, with the added and overriding danger presented by the Mongols, when the Mamluks forged a unitary state under Baybars and Qalawun.

However, for all the contact between Muslims and Latins witnessed in this era–through war and peace–Islam’s attitude towards western Christendom was not radically altered. Old prejudices remained, among them popular misconceptions about the worship of Christ and God as an indication of polytheism, as well as entrenched antipathy towards the use of figurative religious images, forbidden in Islam, and wild assertions of Frankish sexual impropriety. Familiarity does not seem to have bred much in the way of understanding or tolerance. But equally, contrary to the suggestion of some scholars, the advent of the crusades did not prompt widespread deterioration in Muslim relations with indigenous eastern Christians. There were some intermittent signs of a hardening in attitudes, particularly in cases where native Christians living under Islamic rule were suspected of aiding or spying for the Franks, but, broadly speaking, little changed until the rise of the more fanatical Mamluks.

For both Islam and the West, perhaps the most striking transformation wrought by the crusades related to trade. Levantine Muslims already maintained some commercial contacts with Europe before the First Crusade through Italian seaborne merchants, but the volume and importance of this economic interaction were revolutionised in the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, largely as a result of the Latin settlement of the eastern Mediterranean. The crusades and the presence of the crusader states reconfigured Mediterranean trade routes–perhaps most powerfully after Constantinople’s conquest in 1204–and played a critical role in solidifying the power of the Italian mercantile cities of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. Europe’s adoption of Arabic numerals can also be dated to around 1200 and likely resulted from trade with Islam, though this cannot definitively be connected to contact with the ‘crusader’ world.

The Franks residing in Outremer did not live in a hermetically sealed environment. Pragmatic reality and political, military and commercial expediency meant that these Latins were brought into frequent contact with the native peoples of the Levant, including Muslims and eastern Christians, and later the Mongols. In this way, the crusades created one of the frontier environments in which Europeans were able to interact with and, in theory, absorb ‘eastern’ culture. The ‘crusader’ society that developed in Outremer certainly was marked by a degree of assimilation, though whether this was the result of conscious choice or an organic process remains uncertain. There can be no doubt that the social milieu found in the Latin East was utterly unique. This was not the result of an unprecedented degree of connection with Islam–indeed, this type of contact was as, if not more, common in medieval Iberia and Sicily; nor was it a consequence of the ongoing holy war in the Near East. Instead, the distinctive character of ‘crusader’ Outremer was born of the extraordinary array of different Levantine influences encountered–from Greek and Armenian to Syriac, Jewish and, of course, Muslim–and the mixture of so many western European influences, drawn from the likes of France and Germany, Italy and the Low Countries.⁴

Western Europe

Historians have long recognised that interaction between western Christendom and the Muslim and wider Mediterranean worlds during the Middle Ages played an important, perhaps even critical, role in advancing European civilisation. These contacts resulted in the absorption of artistic influences and the transference of scientific, medical and philosophical learning–all of which helped to stimulate far-reaching changes in the West, and ultimately contributed to the Renaissance. Gauging the relative importance of different spheres of contact within this process is all but impossible. Thus, while the art and architecture of the ‘crusader’ Levant exhibited unquestionable signs of intercultural fusion, ‘crusader’ styles of manuscript illumination or castle design cannot reliably be tracked back to the West and categorically isolated as the sole inspiration for any given European exemplar. By its nature, the textual transmission of knowledge is easier to trace. In this area of exchange Outremer played a notable role–as witnessed in the translations made at Antioch–but its importance was secondary to the plethora of copied and translated texts that poured out of Iberia in the Middle Ages. At best, we can conclude that the crusades opened a door to the Orient, but by no means was it the only portal of contact.

Other forms of change brought about by the crusades in Latin Europe can more easily be determined. On a practical level, large-scale expeditions had a huge political, social and economic impact upon regions such as France and Germany, culminating as they did in the interruptive disappearance of whole kinship groups and sections of the nobility. The absence of the ruling classes, and especially crown monarchs, could cause widespread instability and even regime change. The advent of the Military Orders and the spread of their power to virtually every corner of the West had an obvious and profound effect upon medieval Europe–as new and formidable players on the Latin stage, these orders possessed the might to rival established secular and ecclesiastical authorities. The popularity of crusading served to increase the authority of the papacy and to reconfigure the practice of medieval kingship. It also influenced the emerging notions of knighthood and chivalry. By creating a new form of penitential activity, these holy wars likewise altered devotional practice–a process that accelerated markedly in the thirteenth century with the vast extension of crusade preaching, the commutation of vows and the system of indulgences.