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Review: [untitled]

Author(s): Anthony LuttrellReviewed work(s):

"Fideles Crucis": The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land, 1274-1314 bySylvia Schein

Source: The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 285-286Published by: Catholic University of America PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25023780

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BOOK REVIEWS 285

"Fideles Crucis": The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land,

1274-1314. By Sylvia Schein. (New York: Clarendon Press. Oxford University

Press. 1991. Pp. x, 310. $82.00.)

This doctoral thesis of 1980, updated to about 1986 but ignoring certain important

subsequent publications, employs an extremely broad and valuable range of chroni

cle and other printed sources to argue that, while the Latins' loss of Acre in 1291

shocked Western opinion deeply, it did not in itself produce a decline in enthusiasm

for Jerusalem or its crusade, and was not seen by contemporaries as doing so or,

indeed, as being a final and irreversible catastrophe. She maintains that the Jerusalem

factor remained central to the crusading idea, however widely its machinery was

being employed "politically" in the West, that there was no clear break between thecrusades "proper" and a "later" crusading movement, and that the latter was not

merely the unrealistic dream of a few fanatics. This book contains a timely debate

about opinions and motives rather than a rehearsal of military and political events.

Dr. Schein is critical of other scholars, notably of P. A. Throop and Norman Housley,

but the differences involved are to some extent terminological. Much of what she

says seems acceptable, and it includes many shrewd and pertinent observations.

One may wonder how influential the treatises de recuperatione or certain popular

propheciesreally

were, and how far the remarks of Western chroniclers

effectivelyconstituted "public opinion." The author could have provided some consideration of

"Jerusalem" legacies in private wills and of other themes explored in Toscana e

Terrasanta net Medioevo, ed. F. Cardini (Florence, 1982), which is not cited. An

investigation of Philip LV of France's finances to gauge how far he was dependent on

clerical "crusade" incomes would probably be most revealing. Aragonese policies,

the military orders, and the still inexplicable Templar affair do not receive full treat

ment, while the topic really demands more consideration of developments after

1314, when the papacy was more firmly established at Avignon; but given the

complexities of theWestern European context, coverage is understandably selective.

Machinations involving the crusade operated within complicated and overlapping

situations which produced genuine ambiguities and much confusion between ideas

and realities. The papacy was responsible for the direction of crusading affairs and

some popes, Clement V in 1309 and Clement VI in 1344, for example, did encourage

and finance Levantine crusades. Others gave priority toWestern wars; by the 1370's

Gregory XI was expending enormous sums in Italy while allotting to the East a

meagre and problematic 3000 florins a year for the defense of Smyrna. Philip IVs

media machine

presentedthe crusade as almost "a local French affair" centered on

France (pp. 234, 259) with the rex christianissimus as its Spiritus movens (p. 13)

who "lent steady support" to Clement V (p. 8) and was prepared after 1305 "to

follow in the footsteps of St. Louis" (p. 199). Philip badly needed crusading taxes,

and he may also quite genuinely have been convinced by his own propaganda, but

the facts were that there was no French Levantine crusade or crusading expenditure

in the East; that itwas Philip who destroyed the Temple; and that when the pope and

the Hospitallers launched the Levantine passagium of 1309 which allotted no cru

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286 BOOK REVIEWS

sading tenths toWestern rulers, itwas the French king who whined about pretended

affronts and the exclusion of French influence, refused the subsidies he himself had

promised, and actually sought to obstrua the Hospitaller crusade (pp. 227, 230).

Historians will never agree in their estimations of Philip IV, but they will always

need to consult this original and extremely informative book.

Anthony Luttrell

Bath, England

Council andHierarchy:

The PoliticalThought of

William Durant theYounger. By

Constantin Fasolt. [Cambridge Studies in Medieval life and Thought, Fourth

Series.] (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1991. Pp. xx, 416. $64.50.)

William Durant the Younger is best known as apurported forefather of concilia

rism. Constantin Fasolt already has written insightful studies of Durant's works,

disentangling his Tractatus maior and Tractatus minor from what had been printed

as a single book on councils. In this book Fasolt attempts, largely successfully, to

explicate his subject's thoughton reform, to which his conciliar proposal

was subor

dinate. To penetrate behind modern presuppositions, Fasolt places Durant in context

as bishop of Mende, allied with Philip the Fair against local nobles and willing to

capitalize on the papacy's weakness following the defeat of Boniface Vin to advance

his own program of reforms. Although Fasolt does not emphasize this, Durant's

Tractatus maior, written for the Council of Vienne (1311-1312), can be seen as part

of a French Episcopalist, anti-mendicant tradition which helped spawn conciliarism

and Gallicanism. This program was received with little favor at the Council; and

Durant's gradual descent from prominence can be dated from the composition of the

Tractatus minor, a more personal but less daring text.

The heart of Fasolt's book is an extensive analysis of the Tractatus maior, which

embodied Durant's most novel ideas, including regulation of the papacy by a series of

councils, prohibition of begging, especially by religious, and a suggestion that clerical

celibacy be abolished. The author attempts to penetrate behind his subject's thick

tissue of legal citations to the method of argument employed. These citations prove

to be chosen carefully tomake certain points. Using this insight, Fasolt underlines the

conflicting concepts of hierarchy, in its broadest sense, and of community inDurant's

thought. The structure of the book, however, weakens this point by deferring to the

end of the discussion of the Tractatus maior any effort to describe the common

ground behind these differing emphases. Fasolt, moreover, writes about hierarchy as

ifDurant were ignorant of the difference between nature and grace. More fruitful is

Fasolt's examination of Durant's idea of law, which is revealed as tautological, mak

ing ancient texts authorities in their own right which even the pope could not touch.

Neither gloss nor decretal counted in the face of the conciliar canons handed down

from Antiquity. These became the measure of what affected the status ecclesiae,

demanding that a conservative brand of reform be applied where the mendicants had

received dispensations and privileges. This exposition of ancient law fits badly with