Crusades in Northern Italy in the Thirteenth Century

This chapter will explore and discuss the introduction, consolidation, and impact of crusading against Christians within the world of the Italian city republics, which took place in the thirteenth century. This is especially worth exploring because the Italian city republics had very distinctive experiences of non-monarchical government and popular sovereignty in medieval Europe. While Italian historiography has generally overlooked crusading against Christians, the first seminal work on the topic focussed on Italy, namely, Housley’s The Italian Crusades (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982). Housley’s book, however, covered the entire peninsula and only the period after 1254. Yet, while the topic has not been expanded since Housley’s book, crusading against Christians was actually introduced in northern Italy in the first half of the thirteenth century. After outlining the phenomenon and the historiography on it, this chapter will discuss its nature (the role of heresy for instance), its impact and evolution by comparing the two halves of the century. One of its main arguments is that this type of crusade did not attract overt criticism in northern Italy in the first half of the century, but, around the middle of the century, it did give an unprecedented religious dimension to the endemic factional strife within and among the city republics, exacerbating it. That, however, gradually became more and more problematic in the second half of the thirteenth century because of the consolidation of the use of crusades within northern Italy, which contributed to the downfall of many republican regimes and started to attract harsher criticism.