Crusades in Northern Italy in the Fourteenth Century

Central and northern Italy witnessed numerous crusading conflicts in the fourteenth century. This chapter will provide an overview of these campaigns, examine the factors that motivated popes to launch them, evaluate their outcomes, investigate how contemporaries perceived them, and discuss the historiography related to them. Italian historiography has privileged a “traditionalist” approach to the study of the crusades which largely overlooks crusading against Christians, while Housley’s seminal book on the Italian crusades only covers the period up to 1343. Consequently the crusading aspects of the later fourteenth-century Italian conflicts have been severely neglected. The investigation of contemporary perceptions of these crusades is of particular interest because their targets (who were now mainly signori, that is the lords who had taken over the city republics) were accused of being heretics without harbouring any real doctrinal differences. In other words, these were so-called political crusades, in which opposition to the papacy was considered as tantamount to heresy. This was particularly the case in regard to lands that belonged to what was known as the Patrimony of St. Peter, over which the papacy claimed direct lordship. Accordingly, this chapter will focus especially on Romagna, which was the northernmost portion of the Patrimony of St. Peter and was placed between central and northern Italy, in the period after that of Housley’s book.