In the years around 1200 the European crusade underwent a profound transformation into a complex institution, and its ethos became pervasively ingrained in the religious consciousness of European society. This process has often been described as a centralised programme masterminded from Rome.Footnote 1 After the almost eschatological taking of Jerusalem in 1099 and then successive shocks and disappointments at the Latin losses in the twelfth century, Pope Innocent iii (r. 1198–1216) realised that the holy war could only be sustained by more clearly defined legal privileges, more regularised financial apparatus and more distinctive liturgical forms. Ideologically, the pope made the crusade but one focal point of a much wider moral reform of Christian society. To promote this vision, Innocent iii and his immediate successors deployed a propagandistic mechanism consisting of the appointment of papal legates, the circulation of papal letters and the commission of specialised preachers.
Scholarship has often focused on crusade preaching as an instrument of papal policies and on a handful of prominent preachers appointed by Rome.Footnote 2 Preaching tours are enumerated and meticulously placed on the timeline between the issue of a papal encyclical calling for war and the launch of a major military expedition. The First Crusade was proclaimed by Pope Urban ii in 1095 at what was essentially a preaching event at Clermont. The Second Crusade was called by Pope Eugene iii in Quantum praedecessores in 1145 and preached by the fiercely charismatic monk Bernard of Clairvaux. Gregory viii, in reaction to the devastating defeat at Hattin in 1187, declared the Third Crusade in Audita tremendi and appointed church dignitaries such as Cardinal Henry of Albano to organise its promotion. From the early thirteenth century, the papacy began to employ mendicant friars who, transcending the diocesan structure, could be better mobilised to serve apostolic interests. Scholars evaluate the immediate impact of each major crusade preaching campaign on the basis of perceived popular enthusiasm and, especially, royal and aristocratic responsiveness to the papal cause.
To complement this overt emphasis on papal politics and centralisation, this article focuses on a relatively low-profile preacher operating at the diocesan level who none the less was deeply engaged in crusade campaigning as part of local reform. It will analyse a particular preaching event which reportedly took place in the late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century city of Cambrai: a notorious usurer was publicly turned into a penitent and then a crusader in a pre-scripted, well-orchestrated performance closely monitored by the charismatic preacher John of Cantimpré (c. 1155–c. 1205).Footnote 3 This hitherto understudied episode requires more scholarly attention for two reasons: first, the performance revolves around an unusually, if not uniquely, complex sequence of ritual behaviours, including ritual suicide, which possibly invokes the imagery of Judas Iscariot, and simulating birth. This is a rare narrative source to study the possible mise en scène of contemporary preaching and the communicative mechanism deployed during similar events in early thirteenth-century northern Europe. Second, this account, if contextualised with John of Cantimpré's Latin Vita as a whole, conjures up the image of a competent yet non-celebrity preacher working in local society, who had a clear pastoral vision reflective of the convergence of some of the most important spiritual currents of his time and whose success depended upon connecting local concerns with crusading affairs. John of Cantimpré's career, or an idealised version of it, was indicative of how systematic crusade preaching had become by the thirteenth century, and how deeply crusading spirituality was embedded in the religious consciousness of European society at that time.
Pietatis spectaculum: Alard the usurer transformed into a crusader
If the hagiographer's chronology is to be believed, around the year 1200 an intricately choreographed preaching event occurred in the city of Cambrai. A former usurer, Alard, who had undergone a profound religious conversion, actively made restitution for his past frauds and distributed his wealth to the city's poor. His act of penitence concluded with a ‘spectacle of piety’ (‘pietatis spectaculum’) in front of the ‘people and clergy of the city’ organised by John of Cantimpré, which ended with the moneylender taking the cross.Footnote 4 It is probably not coincidental that at exactly this time Fulk of Neuilly, an itinerant preacher, was promoting a new crusade in the name of Pope Innocent iii. Fulk's preaching mission was conspicuous for its overwhelming concern with moral reform and with uprooting usury as prerequisites for the crusading enterprise.Footnote 5 Although high-profile and extremely controversial, Fulk's activities are deemed ‘poorly documented’ by Penny Cole; Christoph Maier has commented, more generally, on the dearth of narrative sources to study the ‘communicative contexts’ of crusading sermons.Footnote 6 It seems that John of Cantimpré's anti-usury campaign shared similar reform agenda and crusade sentiments with that of Fulk, and can shed light on what contemporary preaching events in northern France and the Low Countries could have been like. According to Thomas of Cantimpré, Alard the usurer's public penance proceeded as follows:
He asked that a pit be dug beneath the threshold of his house and that he be pulled out of it naked with a rope around his neck, so that he might go forth poor and naked from his house as one who knew he possessed nothing of his own. To set an example for others, John shrewdly granted this request. So the clergy and people of the city were assembled and this moneylender Alard, stripped of his clothes, descended into the pit beneath his threshold. At the blessed John's command, one of the brothers approached, tied a rope around his neck, and pulled him out naked – as naked as he had come from his mother's womb. At once the naked man was dressed in clothes presented to him and led in procession to the church of the Blessed Virgin Mary, surrounded by throngs of clergy amid great praise to Christ. I will not pass over this remarkable incident: as he was being led along, he realized that he had a little fur cap on his head and violently threw it off, casting it to the ground with the words, ‘I do not have even this much that I can rightly call my own’. A great crowd of spectators were present, weeping abundantly. Who could contain his tears before such a piteous spectacle [pietatis spectaculum]? Even the vicious cruelty of our mutual alienation could hardly bear the sight. After this procession Alard was led into the church, and as a sign of spiritual absolution, he was released from the material rope around his neck. Upon receiving the cross to go on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he was set in a place of eminence right next to the blessed John as a solemn spectacle.Footnote 7
This passage recounts a classic example of ‘ritual performance’ which enacts the person's symbolic transformation from death to life, from sinner to saint. A rite de passage par excellence, the performance revolves around a liminal stage where the person is reduced to a state of vulnerability and lack of identity, akin to a newborn, symbolically represented by his nudity.Footnote 8 Another layer of liminality is further added when he takes the cross and embarks on a journey to the Holy Land as a penitent pilgrim, temporarily outside the everyday functioning of European Christian society. This text is also an elaborate narrative of a ‘social drama’ in the classic Turnerian sense.Footnote 9 The ritual marks a social offender's (i.e. a usurer's) secession from his community, then a transitory suspension of his social identity and his ultimate reconciliation with the community.
The hagiographer shows an acute sensitivity to the performative nature of the event. Every character in the narrative is plainly aware of the fact that this is a show, a spectacle meant to be seen, a melodrama intended to shatter the audience into a ‘profusion of tears’ (‘profusio lachrimarum’). The mastermind behind the scene, John of Cantimpré, ‘discreetly’ (‘discretus’) previewed and pre-proved the scripts for the performance ‘to set an example for the others’ (‘ad exemplum reliquorum’). He deployed extensive visual and theatrical technique to stage life and death, damnation and salvation, with compelling rhetorical power. For him, the ritual was ‘performative’ in that it affected and transformed both the performer and the audience; the meaning of every nicety of the ritual was constructed by them collectively. Alard was also keenly aware of being under public gaze. He even designed a dramatic climax by throwing away the little hat followed by a proclamation of total renunciation of material possessions.Footnote 10
As part of a preaching event, this conversion ritual reflects the fundamentally performative nature of popular preaching in this period, as some insightful studies on itinerant preaching in northern Italian cities have shown.Footnote 11 Thomas of Cantimpré's hagiographical narrative centred around the ritual, the theatrical and the spectacular, rather than the verbal content of the preacher's sermon. The rhetorical power of the preacher rested upon the ritual drama as much as upon his words. Apparently, Alard the moneylender had already been in penitent mode when he made restitution for his previous wrongs and distributed his wealth to the poor. Public penance, none the less, was considered the true marker of his spiritual conversion. It served both as a prelude to John of Cantimpré's subsequent preaching and also as a live exemplum. Instead of a narrative tale to illustrate the preacher's point, Alard acted it out. Alard's epithet presbiter may suggest a previous priestly career and possible familiarity with the ritual language which enabled him to fully cooperate with John of Cantimpré in this elaborately designed performance.Footnote 12 Essentially, this was a spectacle scripted, directed and played out by a priest and a renegade priest.
This staged conversion was deeply embedded in some rather curious northern European popular customs: Alard the moneylender was reenacting the scenario of suicide. The first obvious reference is, of course, the rope on the neck. Hanging seems to have been the most common means of suicide testified in medieval sources.Footnote 13 The peculiar ritual of digging a pit under the threshold was mimicking a regional custom of removing a suicide's corpse from the house. Alexander Murray has found some fourteenth- to sixteenth-century legal sources dictating that a suicide's body be dragged out of the house through a tunnel or a passage rather than over the main threshold of the house; these sources were predominantly German.Footnote 14 Cambrai, a French bishopric under the spiritual jurisdiction of the archbishopric of Reims but politically part of the Empire, may have shared similar customs with its adjacent German-speaking regions. The belief underlying such a custom, as expressed in one seventeenth-century legal opinion from Flanders, seems to have been a desire for ritual purity and proper separation of the living and the dead.Footnote 15
A hanged suicide conjures up the image of the most ignominious character in Christian history, Judas Iscariot. The association of Judas with hanging seems to have been popularised from the later twelfth century. The Gospel of Matthew asserts that Judas hanged himself (Matthew xxvii.3–5), but Acts says that he ‘burst asunder in the midst, and all his bowels gushed out’ (Acts i.18) – two accounts that later exegetic traditions struggled to reconcile.Footnote 16 The iconographical representation of Judas as a hanged criminal appeared in twelfth-century Romanesque architectural sculptures at Autun, Saulieu and Vézelay.Footnote 17 The linking of Judas with hanging was further strengthened in popular accounts such as that in Jacobus de Voragine's immensely influential compilation of saints’ Lives, The golden legend. In an excerpt in the Life of St Matthias, Judas hanged himself and simultaneously ‘burst asunder in the middle and all his bowels gushed out’:
Thus his mouth was spared defilement since nothing came out through it, for it would have been incongruous that a mouth which had touched the glorious lips of Christ should be so foully soiled. It also was fitting that the bowels which had conceived the betrayal should burst and spill out, and that the throat from which had emerged the voice of the traitor should be strangled by a rope. Moreover, Judas perished in the air, so that the one who had offended the angels in heaven and men on earth was kept out of the regions belonging to angels and to men, and was left in the air in the company of demons.Footnote 18
The golden legend fused the two New Testament accounts and provided an explanation for hanging as Judas's destined way of death: he was not to be accepted by either heaven or earth, but doomed to be in purgatory. This idea coincided with a medieval perception about the burial of a suicide's body. It was sometimes recommended in medieval sources that suicides should be buried on boundary areas, such as that between two land jurisdictions or that between land and water, i.e. on river banks or in marshes.Footnote 19 A contemporary popular belief that a suicide might come back to haunt the living also suggests the suicide's ambiguous status between the living and the (properly) dead.Footnote 20
The connection between Alard the moneylender and Judas the suicide is not complete without a further ingredient: Alard was a ‘judaizer’ or ‘became a Jew’ in virtue of his money-lending. Judas, in addition to the many other traits attributed to him in the New Testament, was increasingly identified with avarice, a ‘Jewish sin’, from the twelfth century. With the expansion of the profit economy in European urban centres, anxious Christian moralists launched ideological attacks upon the money trade, which was considered exclusively the work of the Jews.Footnote 21 Such scapegoating was so widespread that Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) notoriously accused Christians of ‘becoming Jews’ (‘iudaizare’) by virtue of their involvement in finance.Footnote 22 Roughly during the same period, representations of Judas grew exponentially in European art and architecture. It is standard in later medieval iconographical tradition to use the image of Judas as allegory for two kinds of sins: one is Avarice because of his betrayal of Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, and the other is Despair for his ultimate suicide as opposed to the theological virtue of Hope.Footnote 23 These two strands were often woven together. Judas's hanged corpse with the bowels burst out and the silver coins scattered around epitomised the fateful end of a greedy usurer: death and damnation.
Alard's conversion, then, was staged as a ‘resurrection’, and a ‘rebirth’. He was extracted from his house through a passage under the main threshold, naked, with a rope tied around his neck – like a child being pushed out of the mother's vagina (with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck). Thomas of Cantimpré made sure the birth metaphor was unmistakable by adding a note that Alard was ‘naked as he had come from his mother's womb’ (‘sicut de utero matris nudus exierat’).Footnote 24 This element of stripping naked as ritual gesture of conversion more famously appeared in Francis of Assisi's story composed by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure, in which the young Francis dramatically stripped off all his clothes in front of the bishop and renounced his earthly, ‘carnally minded’ father.Footnote 25 It is likely that Alard's conversion was earlier than Francis's, even though a direct chain of influence is impossible to prove.Footnote 26 Alard, after his conversion, took the cross and joined Baldwin ix, count of Flanders, in the Fourth Crusade which concluded with the sack of Constantinople in 1204. Francis's break with his father probably occurred slightly later, in 1206. John of Cantimpré died before 1210, and Francis died in 1226 and was canonised in 1228 while Thomas was finishing his Vita for John in the Low Countries.Footnote 27 Besides possible literary precedence, another virtue of the Alard story is that it provides a more coherent narrative about a completed ritual process. The symbolic meaning of Francis's nakedness might have been transparent to a medieval audience, but it is open to interpretation for modern commentators because the episode appears to be a fragment taken out of a whole. Caroline Bynum has proposed that Francis's nakedness is an indicator of liminality and ‘womanly fertility’ as if he was giving birth like a woman, thus representing a gender reversal.Footnote 28 But it seems more convincing to interpret nudity as representing the status of a newborn rather than of a woman in labour.
While Alard's spiritual death was compared with Judas's suicide, his spiritual rebirth invoked images both of Christ's crucifixion and of Lazarus’ resurrection from the dead. After Alard had led the ritual procession to the cathedral church, he was released from the noose and immediately took the cross.Footnote 29 These two ritual gestures reinforced the contrast between ‘death’ and ‘life’, ‘damnation’ and ‘salvation’, underpinning Alard's entire ritual performance. In addition, the act of taking the cross was to embark on a pilgrimage as a penitent, a journey that is known to us as ‘the crusade’. A certain Adam, the dean of the cathedral chapter, stood up and started to expound on the meaning of Alard's conversion drama: while Lazarus’ resurrection was a bodily one, what Alard had experienced was a resurrection of the mind, an even greater miracle than the biblical story.Footnote 30
Alard's conversion follows a remarkably neat ritual structure: a sinner passes through a liminal stage as a suicide to become a penitent; then through a liminal stage as a pilgrim/crusader to become a saint. The finale of Alard's story was reached when he followed Baldwin of Flanders to the Fourth Crusade and had a blessed death in the Holy Land. His sanctity was confirmed when, again, lying in the open air, the dying man had his mouth stung by some wasps while emitting a sweet odour.Footnote 31 Thomas of Cantimpré assured his readers that the fragrance was a sign of Alard passing into posthumous glory.Footnote 32 In contemporary popular belief, a dying person would breath out his soul from the mouth, so a fragrant smell on the mouth was indicative of the blissful status of the postmortem soul. Although some of the bits and pieces of Alard's story may appear sensational or frivolous, they contribute to a coherent representation of Alard's three-stage development from sinner to penitent to saint. Symbols such as nakedness in the open air were repeated rhythmically to mark the transition from one stage to another.
The true protagonist of this ritual drama was, in fact, not Alard, but John of Cantimpré, the revival preacher. Alard's scripted performance was previewed and pre-proved by John, who strategically capitalised on its didactic potential as an exemplar for the people. Theatrical performance served multiple rhetorical functions for John's preaching campaign. Theatre was a more efficient means of communication than verbose sermonising. Complicated ideas that would require a treatise could be grasped instantly by the medieval audience by means of Alard's simple yet potent symbolic gestures and props (e.g. the noose and the cross). This vivid example also prepared an attentive and emotionally receptive audience for John's subsequent preaching. The people and clergy of Cambrai who had accompanied Alard in the liturgical procession were already in a state of frenzy, having shed a profusion of tears and sung a plethora of praises to God, before they moved on to listen to the sermon. Moreover, Alard's conversion was unfolded as a miracle, a divine approbation of John's credentials as a graced preacher. Alard, completing his performance, ‘was put on a position of eminence right next to the blessed John as a solemn spectacle’ (‘in eminentiori loco iuxta beatum uirum ad spectaculum sollemne statuitur’).Footnote 33 The preacher, along with his handiwork, was the true spectacle here. The preacher's spiritual authority was firmly established even before he opened his mouth.
To further show off John of Cantimpré's virtuosity as a preacher, Thomas added another dramatic twist. Adam, dean of the cathedral, a very erudite Magister (a title that may indicate a university education), spoke first, yet could not finish his sermon. In great shame, he sat down and left the stage to John. John promptly and courteously asked: ‘Give me anything I can speak about.’ The dean whispered a certain sentence in his ear; lo and behold, John fluently delivered a lengthy sermon with the utmost eloquence.Footnote 34 Whether this episode actually happened or was also premeditated is hard to say – it appears suspiciously like a didactic tale about the intellectual deficiency of certain preachers. But the ability to speak extemporaneously added yet another miraculous, pentecostal quality to John of Cantimpré's persona.
The story of a moneylender turned crusader is, admittedly, a literary piece constructed with care and craftsmanship, but it also revealed genuine concerns over actual societal conflicts. On the one hand, there are traces of literary embellishment: the wasp story about Alard's joyful death in the Holy Land, with a strong folkloric flavour, might have more to do with the hagiographer's distinct literary taste and fertile imagination. On the other hand, the Alard story is remarkable for its lack of supernatural occurrences, with the exception of the change of heart by the penitent. The gestural and ritual ensemble was sophisticated yet practicable enough so that rhetorical effectiveness primarily relied on human execution rather than on an appeal to divine intervention. The text's diagnosis of monetary economy as an inducement to communal conflict could be corroborated by abundant evidence from burgeoning urban centres in this period. As Mary Mansfield points out, usury was an issue in northern French cities that could potentially cause social unrest and typically ended with public penance.Footnote 35 The literary quality of the Alard story does not necessarily deprive it of its significance. Thomas created what he believed to be an idealised model for other preachers. Either he or his oral sources were willing to repeat certain qualities about a model preacher's life and work instead of others. More importantly, these literary choices could reveal the desirable attributes of a popular preacher, along with the needs and yearnings, fears and hopes of those who chose to follow him.
John of Cantimpré: the preacher and his method
A native of Cambrai, John of Cantimpré made his clerical career mainly in the city and its neighbouring areas in the Low Countries and northern France, with a strong penchant for intellectual influences from Paris. According to his Vita, John received a liberal arts and theological education from the Parisian schools in the latter half of the twelfth century, probably before 1177. While in Paris, John might have had the chance to learn from Master Peter the Chanter (d. 1197), the influential theologian whose intellectual circle was particularly concerned with social issues, moral reform and pastoral efficacy.Footnote 36 Moral and pastoral theology, rather than the speculative kind, occupied some of the most brilliant minds during those years. These like-minded scholar-preachers would help to usher in a ‘pastoral revolution’ in the thirteenth-century Western Church culminating in the decrees of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.Footnote 37 The most famous prelate associated with this circle was none other than Pope Innocent iii. Almost exactly contemporary to the pope, John could have met the young Lothar of Segni in Paris in the 1170s or at least shared certain aspects of social outlook with that generation.Footnote 38 Reminiscent of Peter the Chanter's famous trio of ‘study, disputation and preaching’ (‘lectio, disputatio, praedicatio’) as the crowning intellectual achievements, John, after returning from Paris to his native town, dedicated himself to a life of ‘prayer, study and preaching’ (‘orationi, lectioni, predicationi’) as well as to hearing confessions.Footnote 39
Later, John of Cantimpré sought to affiliate his newly founded community at Cantimpré near Cambrai with the Augustinian canons of Saint Victor in Paris.Footnote 40 Saint Victor, with its close ties to the masters of the Paris schools and the Capetian royal house, stood as a prominent centre of biblical exegesis, moral reform, as well as crusade promotion in the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries.Footnote 41 In John's Vita, his strenuous efforts and ultimate success in making Cantimpré a filial house to the renowned abbey was a major accomplishment in his early career. It is not far-fetched to cite the regular canons’ emphasis on ‘teaching by word and example’ (‘docere verbo et exemplo’) as one of John of Cantimpré's prime inspirations.Footnote 42
John's biographer, Thomas, based his composition not on personal knowledge but on secondhand reports from people who did know John and likely some local oral tradition surrounding the legendary figure. Born almost half-a-century later, around 1200, Thomas was destined for a clerical career, because his father, a nobleman once in the service of Richard the Lionheart, had promised a hermit in Jerusalem that he would make his son a priest.Footnote 43 First an Augustinian canon at Cantimpré, Thomas later transferred to the Dominican house in Louvain.Footnote 44 When young Thomas launched his hagiographical career by writing a Vita for the founder of his own community of Cantimpré around 1223, John had been dead for at least a decade.Footnote 45 It would be pointless to defend the Vita's veracity in all its factual details; however, the silhouette of the life story, the spiritual ideals and religious atmosphere, must have been believable for the local community which in the 1220s still held a living memory of the charismatic personality.
The Alard story is emblematic of the representation of John of Cantimpré as an effective preacher sensitive to social environment and highly aware of rhetorical strategy. Besides conventional saintly attributes such as humility and perseverance, John stood out as a man of method. Operating almost exclusively at the local level, John of Cantimpré specifically targeted two social groups, the urban bourgeoisie and the military aristocracy, and devised different approaches to their conversion respectively. Throughout the Vita, John was not explicitly identified as a ‘crusade preacher’ in the sense of being commissioned by pope or bishop; his primary mission was moral reform and the conversion of souls. John's involvement in the crusading movement was partially due to his close ties with the comital house of Flanders – a crucial fact that was somewhat blurred in Thomas's text, perhaps because of the young cleric's lack of access to higher politics, his overriding concern with moralising issues or perhaps even his deliberate oblivion of the Fourth Crusade with a retrospective knowledge of its aftermath. Nevertheless, the crusading ethos permeated the textual background in a matter of fact way.
Thomas emphatically stated that John made painstaking efforts to cultivate a special relationship with the warrior class, as well as with wealthy urban dwellers. Many of his bourgeois or aristocratic converts in the text would serve the Church in pilgrimage warfare either against the Albigensians in southern France or against the heathens in the Holy Land. According to Thomas, John specialised in the nobility from France, Flanders and Hainaut and he had a ‘plainly wonderful’ method when dealing with them.Footnote 46 This was essentially not to offend or criticise at first, but to befriend and charm:
When he first began to speak with them in a friendly way, he did not abhor and condemn their deeds in lofty disdain, as some do, but after attracting them with humble and gracious talk, he drew them gradually away from their accustomed sins. He did not bring out the surgical knife and insert it harshly before he had cut away all the corrupt matter, but waited until he found them well prepared.Footnote 47
A prime example that proves the efficacy of this method was John's dramatic encounter with a French knight, Robert Mauvoisin. At an aristocratic gathering celebrating Christmas, John of Cantimpré ‘gave sincere thanks’ for the invitation to this, one would assume, ostentatiously opulent occasion and laid eyes on Robert, the most powerful amongst the guests, who was wearing an exquisitely woven floral crown. John complimented him on the vernal crown, a curiosity in the winter season, and then gave an inspirational speech on how it would be even more wonderful to gain an everlastingly vernal crown in Paradise.Footnote 48 Thomas praised the fact that John did not condemn outright the frivolous ornament of aristocratic vanity, but made a rhetorical detour. After his conversion, according to Thomas, this Robert ‘entered the service of Christ’, which could have meant his later career fighting in the Fourth Crusade and also as an important companion to Simon de Montfort in the Albigensian Crusade.Footnote 49
John of Cantimpré intentionally devised different approaches towards different social groups. He played humble and gracious in front of an aristocratic audience but dignified and majestic before commoners: he ‘tamed the proud minds of men with kindness and humility of spirit. This is the gracious method he used to overcome and humble the minds of the nobility for Christ. Towards the common crowds he seemed so holy and marvellous, as if superhuman, that a kind of apostolic dignity shone out in him’.Footnote 50 Whether this approach is psychologically insightful is beside the point; what is remarkable is John's self-fashioning as a preacher and performer. Thomas emphasised that John would postpone ascent to the pulpit until the common folk were already ‘stricken with compunction and dissolved in tears’; through a show of ‘the gravity of his face and a certain angelic majesty in his eyes’, he overcame his audience before opening his mouth.Footnote 51 In the case of Alard's penitential procession, John retreated to the background but maintained his majestic presence for most of drama, only to rise and deliver his sermon to close the case. This taciturn grauitas certainly contrasts with the proactive and amiable manner in which John approached Robert Mauvoisin, the proud and powerful knight.
A more prominent convert with whom John of Cantimpré associated was John of Montmirail (d. 1217).Footnote 52 A knight of illustrious lineage and military prowess, John of Montmirail was an important vassal of the count of Champagne, companion to King Philip Augustus of France and veteran of the Third Crusade. After a conversion experience, he voluntarily led a penitential and charitable life while still exercising secular lordship for some years until finally entering into the Cistercian monastery of Longpont in the diocese of Soissons. In his official Vita, written by an anonymous monk from Longpont, the prince's initial conversion was facilitated by ‘a certain regular canon’ (‘canonicus quidam regularis’).Footnote 53 According to Thomas, this person was none other than John of Cantimpré.
Although these two hagiographical accounts about the same prince, one from the perspective of a regular canon and the other monastic, in general corroborated each other, they differed in various aspects. In the Cistercian account, the unnamed regular canon converted the prince through harsh exhortation ‘without flattery or favourable praise’ (‘non cum adulatoria sive favorabili laude’), questioning the ultimate value of tournaments and the knightly lifestyle.Footnote 54 This rhetoric somewhat contradicts the strategy of amicability attributed to John of Cantimpré by Thomas, but conforms to the stereotypically monastic contempt for worldly vanity. Thomas only talked about ‘some horrible sign’ (‘quoddam horroris signum’) through which John of Cantimpré was able to convert the great lord, and declined to go into details for the lack of authentication.Footnote 55 Thomas seemed to have few sources of information outside the city of Cambrai, so his anecdotes about the knight were geographically restricted and mainly focused on the lord's charitable and protective role in his engagement with the urban population, especially the lower strata and the outcast: he cared for the lepers, made restitution to the poor and defended the innocence of a man wrongly charged with homicide in the city of Cambrai.Footnote 56 With the more monkish virtues left out, John of Montmirail appeared to be a good and just lord in monastic habit, busying himself with extramural affairs. Although this lengthy ‘mini-Vita’ of John of Montmirail reads like an insertion or some loose ‘notes’ that Thomas had not been able to fully work into the Vita for the preacher, this depiction of John of Montmirail nevertheless fits into Thomas's general portrayal of the secular aristocracy as receptive to the teachings of the Church and as potential benefactors to the urban poor. Thomas promoted this rather positive view on what he perceived as benign exercise of seigneurial power for religious purposes, which he then used to justify John of Cantimpré's attitude of rapprochement in dealing with the aristocracy.
The most intimate spiritual relationship that John of Cantimpré cultivated was with Marie of Champagne (1174–1204), daughter of Count Henry the Liberal of Champagne and Marie of France, and wife of Count Baldwin ix of Flanders (d. 1205).Footnote 57 Overall, John of Cantimpré was represented as a spiritual mentor to the countess and possibly political advisor in her entourage. According to Thomas, John provided vital assistance at two crucial moments in her life. Probably sometime around 1200, when the countess experienced a difficult labour, John was summoned and offered prayers to help her successfully deliver her firstborn. This child, heiress to the county, was named Jeanne after the saintly priest.Footnote 58 Later, in April 1202, Baldwin left for the Fourth Crusade when Marie was pregnant with their second child. In Thomas's account, which is inaccurate in a number of places, Baldwin sent a message informing his wife about his election as emperor in Constantinople and summoning her to the East. The countess was reluctant to go and asked for advice from her vassals, who unanimously tried to dissuade her from following her husband's command. But John of Cantimpré thought otherwise. Marie accepted John's counsel and left for the Holy Land, only to receive the news of Baldwin's death in Jerusalem.Footnote 59 This story is especially garbled. In other more credible sources, the countess had not known about the diversion to Constantinople when she set out for the Holy Land; she received the news about her husband's imperial election in Acre, then sickened and died in August 1204, before she could be reunited with Baldwin and certainly before Baldwin's death in prison in Bulgaria in 1205.Footnote 60 Thomas himself seemed to be aware of the less than solid evidentiary base for his version. He concluded his story with an apology: readers need only see from his account how much weight the saintly man's counsel held back in those days. Footnote 61
It is possible that Thomas, a young cleric in his twenties, was not informed about high politics. In addition, he might have suppressed some memories about the Fourth Crusade, given his retrospective knowledge of its aftermath and the tragic end of its main protagonist Baldwin. Thomas commented on Baldwin's ‘supreme worldly ambition’ (‘ambitione seculi summa’) as his motivation in summoning his wife. Thomas did not give specific reasons why John of Cantimpré advised the countess to follow her husband, but vaguely mentioned the young emperor's mind as being ‘frequently swayed by competing impulses’ (‘contrariis frequenter fluctuare affectionibus’), as if Baldwin needed his wife's steadfast counsel to avoid reckless actions.Footnote 62 The detail that Marie, the dutiful spouse and devout pilgrim, died in Jerusalem might have been wishful thinking on the part of her circle back home. Another curious fact is that the period from 1223 when Thomas began working on the Vita to 1228 when he abruptly abandoned the project (only to pick it up again in the late 1260s near his death) happened to witness the social turmoil in Flanders when Jeanne's rule was challenged by a Baldwin imposter, who claimed to be the emperor returning alive from the East and who gathered considerable popular support in the Flemish cities.Footnote 63 Whether Marie of Champagne did leave for the Holy Land in 1204 as instructed by John, that decision was consequential and arguably disastrous for Flanders in the 1220s. When Thomas commented that ‘to this day she [Jeanne] rules the counties of Flanders and Hainaut with wise government’, he certainly aimed at creating a smooth moralising tale about aristocratic piety and glossed over much of the unpleasant complexity of its historical context.Footnote 64
Despite some inaccuracies, the evidence still allows us to reconstruct a relatively coherent picture of John's life and social milieu at the turn of the thirteenth century: first, most of the datable events in John of Cantimpré's Vita cluster around the year 1200 and the Fourth Crusade, which might suggest the background to his rise to local prominence. John's fierce campaign against usury probably gathered steam in the intense religious atmosphere created by the Church's effort to reinvigorate the crusading movement; the themes in Alard's penitential procession ran in parallel with Fulk of Neuilly's crusade preaching commissioned by Innocent iii. John's social rise was probably facilitated by his entry into Marie of Champagne's circle during her crusade regency. Second, the two kinds of recipients of his pastoral attention, urban usurers and military aristocrats, were groups targeted in preparing and recruiting for the crusade as well as in general social reform pursued by reform-minded clergy. The individual converts in the text, from Alard the moneylender to the various lords and ladies, either aspired to undertake or actually undertook a crusade after their supposed conversion.Footnote 65 The canon regular did not call for a conversion in the sense of monastic retreat and contemplation, but an active life of social charity, just rule and service to the Church; and a pilgrimage to the Holy Land was taken for granted as what would follow suit.
John of Cantimpré is consistently presented as a shrewd preacher, socially sensitive and methodical. What stands out is his self-consciousness as a performer and orator rather than some inborn charisma that spontaneously overflows. His preaching is conspicuous for the absence of miracles and the abundance of deliberation. On the one hand, John was resolutely local in his concerns and connections. He rarely gained or sought much attention from the higher ecclesiastical hierarchy. Once, given the chance to have the bishop of Cambrai as overlord to his religious community, John preferred, instead, a secular lord, Hugh of Oisy.Footnote 66 His dedication to the local network of pious lay men and women was unwavering. On the other hand, he connected the overtly local concerns for monetary economy and predatory lordship with crusading affairs; the sinners were, quite often, granted a chance of redemption in the form of a penitential pilgrimage to the Holy Land or to fight against perceived heretics. Crusading was integrated into the everyday reality of religious reform at the local level; and this certainly helped to strengthen the connection between the crusader states and the European home front. Given the unequivocal evidence, John does not meet the criteria for a ‘crusade preacher’ if that definition entails papal commission or a task-specific grand preaching tour; he never left for the Holy Land himself but arranged and encouraged such journeys of redemption for others. However, this is exactly why his case is illuminating: in the early thirteenth century, crusading was an inherent element in the very concept of social reform, and its spirituality indelible in the mundane religious consciousness of the people.
