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Cutting the Budget: The Impact of the Crusades on Appropriations

for Public Works in France
William Chester Jordan

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Jordan William Chester. Cutting the Budget: The Impact of the Crusades on Appropriations for Public Works in France. In:
Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire, tome 76, fasc. 2, 1998. Histoire medievale, moderne et contemporaine - Middeleeuwse,
moderne en hedendaagse geschiedenis. pp. 307-318;

doi : 10.3406/rbph.1998.4269

http://www.persee.fr/doc/rbph_0035-0818_1998_num_76_2_4269

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 Cutting the Budget : The Impact of the Crusades on
Appropriations for Public Works in France O

William Chester Jordan

Princeton University, N.J.

A Flemish chronicler who died a generation after Louis IX's death but on
the eve of his canonization was caught up in the exuberant memorial ization
of the great figure occurring at that time. To the chronicler the king was
Ludovicus Justus, piisimus rex (2). Like many other writers he describes real,
exaggerated, or sometimes completely imaginary incidents from the king's
life that seemed to him to capture the spirit and essence of the man. In one
récit which purports to depict the king contemplating going to war, Louis is
portrayed "rapt in ecstasy for nearly two hours" (Lodewicus, rex Francorum,
in extasi raptus per duarum ferme horarum spatium), during which time, the
author insists, the king "was transported to the promised land and was told
that through him it would be purged of the enemies of the Christian faith" {in
terra repromissionis se vidit transposition, dictumque est ei quod per eum
esset ab hostibus Christianae fidei expurganda) (3). It was this vision, we are
then informed, that persuaded Louis to take the cross, gather an army of
heroic nobles, and invade Egypt at great cost(4).
The twin themes of this brief story are idealism (divinely inspired idealism)
and expense. The idealism achieves mythic proportions precisely because the
expense of the adventure mounted by the king was so great. How great ?
There are a number of documents which permit us to probe this issue, and in
earlier work I have tried to get some sense of the relative magnitude of the
expenditures of the French government on the crusade of 1248-1 254(5). But it
is not the purpose of this paper to pursue this issue. It is generally agreed that
the expenditures for Louis's crusade and all the major crusades {passagia
generalia) were enormous. What needs to be explored are the effects on other

(1) A version of this paper was presented at the conference on "Crusades and
Crusaders", at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (Israel), 18 June 1996.
(2) Chronicon Balduini Ninoviensis, in Recueil des chroniques de Flandre, ed. J.-J. De
Smet, 4 vols. (Brussels, 1837-1865), II, 728; these epithets are employed under the year
1270, the year of Louis's death. The chronicler died in 1294 (p. 584-585); Louis was
canonized in 1297. For a masterful description of the cultural image of Louis IX, see
Jacques Le Goff, Saint Louis. Paris, 1996, p. 527-886.
(3) Ibid., p. 725. The récit places the incident fajnno MCCXLIX.
(4) Ibid., p. 725-726.
(5) William Jordan, Louis IX and the Challenge of the Crusade: A Study in Rulership.
Princeton, 1979, p. 78-79.
308 VV.CH. JORDAN

enterprises of the redirection of much government capital to the crusades and

of the special taxation — what college and university fund raisers would call
'dedicated money' — that supplemented this redirection of capital.
Two immediate caveats : first, much of the capital, whether raised
specifically for the crusades or allocated, as college administrators again might
say, from general funds, went into projects whose direct economic benefits
advantaged the realm or principality mounting the crusade. Buying horses in
France for service in the crusades profited horsehandlers in France. Second,
to concentrate on government expenditures (the spending of kings, territorial
princes and municipalities) neglects the expenses of thousands of other
people — individuals, like churchmen, bourgeois, and many barons and
knights who were not or were only modest territorial magnates yet who put
together or joined companies that went on crusade. It also neglects women
who raised companies or financed individual knights who fought in their
behalf.
Fascinating as it would be, however, to explore the issues of growth
associated with expenditures in the French economy writ large or to explore
the financial expenses of individuals, what this essay concentrates on is a
different but related set of issues, namely, the kinds of cuts in customary
expenditures or concomitantly the increased demands on traditional and
extraordinary funding sources that rulers or governments had to make in
order to mount crusades and the ripple effect of these cuts and/or demands.
In other words, even if one or another trade or sub-sector of the domestic
economy benefitted from investment stimulated by preparing for the
crusades, other trades, projects and sub-sectors, from which money was
siphoned off, were necessarily disadvantaged. It is those that are addressed
here, specifically, public works projects. Because of the relative paucity of
sources on the earlier crusades, the focus here is on the thirteenth century (6).
Because of constraints of research, the focus is also on France. This is
not entirely inappropriate since the French played a leading and the most
consistent role in the crusades, but the conclusions about France are probably
similar, in quality if not in scale, to those for other regions, at least in
northern Europe.

Public Works

I have, in published work, already assembled the evidence of a decline in

outlays for public works projects (pro operibus) by the French central
government. What the evidence shows for the years of preparation before the

(6) A fine, if preliminary, article that tries to assess the costs of the earlier crusades and
the constraints on expenditure at home as a result is Jonathan Riley-Smith's "Early
Crusaders to the East and the Costs of Crusading 1095-1130", in Cross Cultural
Convergences in the Crusader Period. Essays Presented to Aryeh Grabois on His Sixty-Fifth
Birthday, ed. Michael Goodich and others. New York and elsewhere, 1995, p. 237-257. But he is
able to say little about public works per se.
THE IMPACT OF THE CRUSADES ON APPROPRIATIONS FOR PUBLIC WORKS 309

great crusade of the mid-thirteenth century is that those public works, like
roads and bridges, whose maintenance was charged against royal revenues
and, most significant, which were not otherwise especially important in the
actual preparations for crusade received no active maintenance support,
beyond the very minimum. Indeed, outlays pro operibus declined to a
pittance(7). But in reaching this conclusion two other points became clear:
first, that it was not inappropriate to call efforts like the building of the
Mediterranean port of Aigues-Mortes for the embarkation of the crusaders
and the creation or expansion of roads and canals in its vicinity a form of
public works which offset and redirected expenditures from traditional public
works projects in the north. Second, most of the work of construction and
maintenance of material infrastructure in the kingdom was not a direct royal
responsibility anyway. Subordinate territorial princes and especially
municipalities had cognizance of these matters.
The question addressed here is whether one can discern or get a hint of the
same sorts of shifts in expenditures on public works among these other
princes and municipalities. Naturally, the evidence is uneven, but on the
princely side there are the fiscal accounts of Louis IX's brother, Alphonse of
Poitiers, and on the municipal side there is an abundance of scattered
evidence as well in fiscal accounts, court cases, and the like.
We may begin with Alphonse of Poitiers. It was Alphonse who was
invested in 1241 with the county of Poitou, a region that had been under the
overlordship of John of England until Philip Augustus and Louis VIII's
conquests in the early thirteenth century (8). Louis VIII, the father of Louis
IX and Alphonse, had stipulated that Alphonse receive Poitou at his coming
of age. The problem was that many local notables were unwilling to accept
his lordship, either because of their residual loyalty to the wearer of the
English crown or their desire to maintain a certain level of independence.
Whatever the cause, the investiture of 1241 was quickly followed by a
nativist uprising against the Capetians and an English invasion in support of
the uprising. The rebellion and invasion were put down by 1243, and French
rule in the person of Alphonse was temporarily secure. Soon afterwards
Louis IX took the crusader's vow, and his brother Alphonse followed suit.
Happily the accounts of Poitou from the feast of All Saints 1243 through
All Saints 1248 survive; and there are some useful fragmentary records as
well for 1249(9). Since income and expenses were accounted three times per
year, this means that there is a set of sixteen accounts without interruption
and they cover the period from the end of the rebellion to the departure of

(7) Jordan, Louis IX, p. 92-93.

(8) For details on the matters treated in this paragraph, see William Jordan, "Isabelle
d'AngouIême, By the Grace of God, Queen", Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 79
(1991), p. 842-849.
(9) A. Bardonnet, "Comptes d'Alphonse de Poitiers", Archives Historiques du Poitou,
4 (1875), p. 1-234. Some later accounts are edited by the same author in a subsequent
volume of the Archives (8 [1879], p. 1-160).
310 W.CH. JORDAN

Alphonse on crusade. A few scholars have used the records, wonderfully

edited in 1872 by A. Bardonnet, but the thousands and thousands of pieces of
information that they contain still remain to be systematically exploited by a
modern scholar. The most recent treatment, that by Francis Hartigan, is an
embarrassment and, as it turns out, woefully misleading(10).
Hartigan tried to rearrange the accounts in summary form for statistical
treatment. Not only is the quality of his work problematic at best, his
lumping technique obscures some extraordinarily important trends which the
records can be made to reveal. For example, in the case of entries in the
accounts for public works (opera), Hartigan's figures would lead one to
believe that, despite some ups and downs in expenditures, there was no
general diminution in outlays for public works over the course of these
sixteen accounting terms ("). What this lumping method obscures is the very
nature of the thinking in Count Alphonse 's circle. Public works projects
recorded in the account at Ascension 1247 and All Saints 1247 would appear
to a modern reader to fit rather comfortably with present-day expectations.
There are outlays for repairs to or construction of mills, bridges and wells,
expenses for public ovens, purchase of millstones, even expenditures for the
planting of vineyards to provide grapes for the residents of the count's castles
and other settlements(12).
If we turn our attention to the Ascension 1248 and All Saints 1248
accounts, however, we discover that without any noticeable change in the
total expenditures in the course of the year, the distribution of outlays has
changed radically (l3). There are still a few of what might be called typical
public works projects, but the count's men have listed under opera the
purchase of nearly five thousand fletchings (pro . . . milliaribus plumarum),
the feathers used on bolts and arrows. They list outlays for sixty additional
battle shields (pro ... targis) at one location and for engines of war including
ten catapults (mangonellis factis) at this and other locations in western
France. (This equipment was not meant to be taken on crusade.) Crossbows
(baliste), categorized as public works, constitute another item now listed for
stockpiling at local fortresses. The engines and equipment of war were
intended to provide the means to intimidate and keep under subjection a
whole region, one recently in rebellion, in the absence of its despised prince
on crusade. They were meant to preserve peace and obedience, the greatest of
public works in the mental universe of the count's men, even if a great many
bridges and wells and public ovens fell into perhaps irremediable disrepair.
The proximate cause for all of this was the decision to go on crusade ; and the

(10) Francis Hartigan, The Accounts of Alphonse of Poitiers, 1243-1248. A

Quantitative Edition. Lanham, Maryland, and elsewhere, 1984. See my review in Speculum, 61
(1986), p. 233.
(11) See the totals provided (Hartigan, Accounts) at p. 22, 31, 37, 44, 50, 55, 63, 70,
76,82,91,99, 105, 113, 119, 127.
(12) Bardonnet, "Comptes d'Alphonse", p. 168-169, 181.
(13) Ibid., p. 203-204, 223-224.
THE IMPACT OF THE CRUSADES ON APPROPRIATIONS FOR PUBLIC WORKS 311

fiscal inability both to preserve the peace and maintain the infrastructure of
traditional public works resulted from the necessary expenditures of money
for the crusade.
When we turn to the municipalities, the ripple effect of demands made on
these authorities to support the crusade becomes equally clear. Medieval
municipalities survived financially from a wide variety of revenues. Entry
fees, which are to say payments made by bourgeois to a municipality to
achieve citizenship or to purchase the privileges or commercial freedom of a
town, were an unpredictable but basic source of income in the thirteenth
century (l4). Road and bridge tolls would have been important wherever a
town was a major transit point, but rents and income from public lands and
municipal buildings and facilities also provided substantial sums to local
governments(15). These public lands were of various types, including pasture
and arable (l6). The buildings, too, were varied. Sometimes the specific type
is not named in the records that have come down to us(17). But there is good
evidence of municipal warehouses where staple products — wool and grain,
for example — were weighed and assayed (l8). Several towns operated
municipal mills(19). Others provided presses (presumably cider or wine
presses) (20). And, of course, municipal ovens were quite common(21).
Market tolls and sales taxes were the cornerstone of the financial well-
being of commercial towns (22). Yet, the so-called profits of justice were often

(14) For the town of Chauny in mid-century, see Layettes du Trésor des chartes, ed.
Alexandre Teulet and others, 5 vols. (Paris, 1863-1909), 111, n° 4609 {d'entrée de
conmunne, with variant spellings), and Alphonse Giry, Documents sur les relations de la
royauté avec les villes en France de 1180 à 1314. Paris, 1885, p. 104 n° 42 (de introitu
communie). For the town of Doullens, see Giry, Documents, p. 102 n° 39 (de introitu
communie). Towns — the example, again, is Chauny — also made money from "exit fees"
(de ysue de conmunne; de exitu communie). But the necessity of paying them was being
contested at the same time ; Les Olim ou Registres des arrêts rendus par la cour du roi, éd.
Arthur Beugnot (Paris, 1839), I, 658 n° xxi.
(15) Very frequently the sources simply make reference to rents, redditus, (unspecified)
as income; see Layettes, 111, n° 4644, Giry, Documents, p. 91-105 nos 1-7, 9-12, 14-16, 18-
27,29-31,33,35-38,41-43.
(16) Chauny had municipal pastures for which it hired guards, As wardes des pastures ;
Layettes, 111, n° 4609. Crépy-en-Laonnois possessed extensive fields producing wheat and
oats with which it paid many of its debts, de tali blado et de tali avena, videlicet, que prove-
niunt et crescunt in territorio dicte ville de Crespi (Layettes, 111, n° 4644).
(17) Cf. Layettes, 111, n° 4613 : // louaiés des maisons (Athies).
(18) Layettes, III, n° 4583, locatio domus in qua ponderatur flana] (Saint-Riquier).
Layettes, 111, n° 4599 : De le maison du pois ...là où on poise les blés et les fermes (Bray-
sur-Somme).
(19) The mills of Crépy-en- Valois were said to cost the town more to run than they
made every year, C'est sanz les moulins de la ville, et H moulin coûtent plus à la ville que il
ne valent par an: (Layettes, 111, n° 4592). The number of these mills in Crépy's case was
three; Giry, Documents, p. 93 n° 3.
(20) Layettes, 111, n° 4594: de quatuor pressoriis (Asnières).
(21) Layettes, 111, n° 4594, De furno (Asnières). Giry, Documents, p. 92 n° 2: Et in
quatuor furnis (Saint-Quentin).
(22) Athies made money from // estai (Layettes, III, n° 4613); Vailly-sur-Aisne drew
312 W.CH. JORDAN

as significant, depending on the jurisdictional reach of the town(23).

Although registration of documents (gracious jurisdiction) constituted at best
a modest supplement to municipal income(24), fines and forfeits brought
windfalls to municipalities^5).
If receipts ran behind expenditures, urban authorities routinely resorted to
borrowing, which took many forms. Municipal bonds might be offered(26);
Jews could be approached(27) ; private merchants might be solicited with or
without promises of interest(28). Direct taxation of citizens which went
under several names — tallia and misia and their vernacular equivalents,
taille and mise, being the most common — was not the revenue source of
first resort, but turning to it was frequent(29). This was because large sums of
money were needed for really major capital improvements like public
works (30). These improvements in the urban environment included
construction of and repairs to town walls and gates and administrative buildings(31).

income from the estatts des bouchiers {Layettes, III, n° 4645). Phrases describing income de
mtndinis (Compiègne), in halis (Pont Audemer), or hanssiis (Rouen) are common; Giry,
Documents, p. 91, 106 nos 1, 45, 47. Sales taxes (in vendis or with variant spellings) may
cover charges on movables and perhaps immovables. It is sometimes hard to tell ; cf. the
reference to Crépy-en-Laonnois having income tarn in censibus et vends, quant entendis
(Layettes, 111, n° 4644).
(23) La justiche vaut à le vile caskun en χ liv., l'un en plus, l'autre mains (Athies)
(Layettes, III, n° 4613). Valeur ... de jostise and recette ... de jostise (Sens) (Layettes, III,
n°4621).
(24) References to income from gracious jurisdiction are denominated receipts from the
use of the municipal seal, such as, Valeur doit seel and Recette de la valeur don seel
(Layettes, 111, n° 4621). The example is from records for the town of Sens.
(25) For fines (medieval Latin entende; Old French amandes or amendes), see the
following mid-century fiscal accounts of northern French towns: Layettes, III, nos 4583,
4598-99, 4609-10, 4621, 4644. For forfeits (entende forefactorum; forfeits or fourfaits),
Layettes, III, nos 4583, 4599, 4614, 4645.
(26) In the form of term, life and perpetual rents; see William Jordan, "Communal
Administration in France, 1257-1270: Problems Discovered and Solutions Imposed", Revue
Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, 59 (1981), p. 304-305. See also Id., Women and Credit in
Pre-1ndustrial and Developing Societies. Philadelphia, 1993, p. 71-72, for a summary of
some of the evidence over a longer period of time.
(27) I have summarized a number of instances from Italian sources in Women and
Credit, p. 71 n. 88. 1 cannot document such instances for thirteenth-century northern French
towns, probably because Jews were held as seigneurial monopolies in France. No town, so
far as I can tell, "owned" Jews.
(28) The usual references are vague: Por amprunt fet d'une partie de ceaus de la
commune [de Sens] ; quibusdam burgensibus dicte ville of Verneuil, ex causa mutui gratis
et libère facti (Layettes, III, nos 4621, 4655). See also Giry, Documents, p. 102-103 n° 39
(De mutuo sibi [Doullens] facto sub usitra) and 41 (De mutuo sibi [La Neuville-Roi] facto).
(29) The number of references to these taxes is enormous; nearly all the documents
cited in previous notes on municipal finance provide examples. On the equivalence of tallia
and misia in this context, see Olim, I, 471 n° xi.
(30) Sometimes general references are made to outlays on public works with the details
unspecified (pro operibus; see, e.g., Giry, Documents, p. 102, 106 nos 39, 44) or only partly
specified (pro novis mûris et retentione operum in Saint-Riquier ; Layettes, III, n° 4583).
(31) In addition to the reference to Saint-Riquier (previous note) on walls, see another
in Giry, Documents, p. 103 n° 40, for the same town and another, p. 104 n° 42, for Chauny
THE IMPACT OF THE CRUSADES ON APPROPRIATIONS FOR PUBLIC WORKS 313

There was a need for covered markets and shelters for market inspectors(32).
Warehouses fell into disrepair(33). Roadways and bridges required
substantial investment to be built and maintained(34). Drains and conduits were less
expensive to keep in repair but still could require considerable outlays of
capital (35). Public lighting was rudimentary by our standards but was
nonetheless a real expense (36). Jails were always a necessity (37). For all
these requirements municipal authorities reluctantly had recourse to tailles
and mises.
To satisfy a superior governmental authority, like a king, who demanded
financial aid from a town, for a crusade, for example, or for buying off an
enemy, municipal authorities simply had to resort to direct taxation as
well(38). And this is the point that needs emphasis. Because of apprehension
about the social discontent that might arise from too frequent direct taxation
or from disagreements about where the fruits of the taxation were going,
these authorities tended to be very hesitant about levying other direct taxes
for even urgently coveted new infrastructure and infrastructural repairs if
they had recently authorized such taxes to support royal projects like a
crusade. A number of court cases reported in the mid-thirteenth century
records of the Parlement of Paris, the highest royal court, deal with the
(illegal) efforts of discontented bourgeois to form rival 'governments'. These
governments were stigmatized as conspiracies^9). In one case, dated 1255
and involving the town of Corbie, it was explicitly conceded by the
royal court that the direct taxes levied by this illegitimate government,

(both these records use the same phrase, pro operibus murorum). For incidental information
on iii.
n° the building of the municipal belfry of Saint-Riquier in the 1260s, see Olim, I, 790-791,
(32) Layettes, 111, n° 4609, dated June 1260 : As cous de la hale, qui estoit conmenchié à
faire, qu 'en pierre, qu 'en caus, qu 'en saulon, qu 'en maçons, qu 'en manovriers ... Et en
chele hale vender a on les dras et les denrées de le vile of Chauny. Chauny was still
expending vast sums for the new market a year later: As cous de la hale qe H vile a fait faire
(Layettes, IV, n° 4692). For the shelter referred to above (Pro quadam logafacta inforo, ad
preposituram colligendam diefori), see Layettes, 111, n° 4591.
(33) Layettes, III, n° 4599 : A le maison du pois refaire ... et ... as verrières (Bray-sur-
Somme).
(34) Layettes, 111, nos 4609: As cous ... des pons et des caucies refaire in Chauny;
4610: As pavemens de le vile et as cauchies in Beauvais; Layettes, IV, n° 4692 : As cous ...
des cauchies, des pons refaire, also in Chauny.
(35) Layettes, 111, n° 4644, pro fossatis et calceis nostris reficiendis in Crépy-en-Laon-
nois.
(36) Au luminaire (Bray-sur-Somme) (Layettes, III, n° 4599). A le lumière qui art en le
boucherie (Beauvais) (Layettes, III, n° 4610).
(37) Layettes, III, n° 4591 ; in 1259-1260 Poissy expended funds: Pro quadam lignea
prissione, de novo pro mulieribus facta.
(38) Jordan, "Communal Administration", p. 293-94 ; Id., From Servitude to Freedom :
Manumission in the Sénonais in the Thirteenth Century. Philadelphia, 1986, p. 13-15.
(39) Olim, I, 3 n° i, 74-75 n° xxviii, 314 n° xviii; authorities used many words
to describe the so-called conspiracies: confederaciones, conjuraciones, colligaciones,
confratrie, congregaciones.
314 W.CH. JORDAN

9,000 pounds over three years, were expended for the necessaries of the
town(40).
Annual urban receipts, depending on the size of the town in northern
France, varied widely : a great city like Amiens might be able to budget more
than 6,000 pounds a year ; a town Corbie's size would probably have a normal
annual budget of less than 1,000 pounds in the thirteenth century (4I). For
the men who seized power in Corbie in the 1250s to levy direct taxes of
9,000 pounds in three years and to expend them for the necessaries of the
town implies a crisis of extraordinary proportions which they thought the
legitimate town fathers unwilling to face. That these 'conspirators' did face
up to the problems was indeed cited as a mitigating factor in their relatively
light punishment for seizing power (42).
One reason there was a need for expenditures on behalf of the town was
that the legitimate town fathers (the oligarchy formally in power) were wary
of levying additional direct taxes, in large part on themselves, after having
imposed a taille of 1,000 pounds a few years before for the king's
crusade (43). Corbie was probably dunned for additional cash of about the
same amount (1,000 pounds) during the crusade if its history is like that of
other towns that contributed to the war levy (44). To the men who governed a
town whose annual budget in normal times was below 1,000 pounds, the
costly sustaining of infrastructure and the costly defense of local collective
interests did not seem sustainable while sums that dwarfed the budget had to
be raised and sent to the king for a war nearly two thousand miles away. So
they simply subordinated the collective interest of Corbie to their private
interest in order to escape direct taxation.
It should come as no surprise that Corbie is not exceptional. What can be
inferred from its history is explicit in the cacophony of surviving complaints
about royal demands(45). Sometimes, as in the case of Corbie, the situation
had the indirect result of the erection of illegal counter-governments. Orléans
provides another example of a town that had given heavily to the king's
crusade (at least 1 ,500 pounds) and suffered the revolt of a conjuracio of its
discontented burghers a few years later(46). Perhaps the underlying causes of
the revolt involved more issues than oppressive direct taxation. (The revolt
occurred in 1258 ; the last payments to the king for the crusade probably date

(40) Olim, 1, 3 n° i.
(41) For the Amiens figure, see Giry, Documents, p. 105 n° 43. Towns like Compiègne,
Doullens, La Neuville-Roi (in the Beauvaisis), and Chauny (p. 91, 102-104 nOb 1, 39, 41-42)
all had yearly receipts of less than 1,000 pounds.
(42) Olim, I, 3 n° i.
(43) Jordan, Louis IX, p. 95 : Corbie made the second of two payments of 500 pounds
to the king at Ascension 1248.
(44) Ibid., p. 98.
(45) Jordan, "Communal Administration", p. 293-295.
(46) Of the grant, the second 750 pounds were paid at Ascension 1248, see Jordan,
Louis IX, p. 95. Again, Orléans probably contributed another 1,500 pounds or so to the
king's crusade if it behaved as other towns did (p. 98).
THE IMPACT OF THE CRUSADES ON APPROPRIATIONS FOR PUBLIC WORKS 3 15

from 1255, judging from the rhythm of contribution of other towns) (47).
Even so, the levying of heavy direct taxes, their sometimes unfair distribution
across groups, and the redirection of capital away from the necessaries of
town welfare encouraged discontent. To give aid to the crown in the amount
the crown demanded was, in effect, to let bridges and roads fall into disrepair,
to allow wharves and quais to rot, to permit harbors to silt up, to let
warehouses and covered marketplaces fall into the danger of collapse, and, much
more dangerously, it was to allow traditional urban social and political
alliances to unravel. Later records, like those edited and studied by Andrew
Lewis and documenting a dispute between the Hôtel-Dieu of Pontoise and
the town of Chambly in the early fourteenth century, demonstrate how just
getting the raw materials for repairs to municipal works like roads was
fraught with controversy, even in the absence of special royal levies, and
depended on an intricate calculus which balanced (or failed to balance) royal
interests against the interests of ecclesiastical institutions and of urban
governments(48). When the drain of money from other jurisdictions to the
central government also occurred as, for example, for a crusade, an already
intricate calculus must have become labyrinthine in its complexity and laden
with contestation.
A conspiracy to force the urban government of the southern town of
Cahors to respect the rights of the popular classes in 1269 fits nicely in this
analysis (49). It was once alleged that Cahors granted the king 500 marks
(333 pounds) for his mid-century crusade and that the town did so at a
meeting of its "estates". Thomas Bisson showed that historians who made
these allegations were certainly in error about any formal meeting of urban
estates, and in the absence of other evidence of southern towns giving money
to the king's crusade, I originally rejected the authenticity of the grant as
well(50). But, in fact, the matters can be separated. We need not think that
formal estates met in order to levy a taille for a grant to the king, but the
grant itself could have been made. The allegation, by local historians, that the
crown was given another large grant "to deal with the Albigensian heresy" in
1251 also makes sense (5I). The year 1251 in the south saw a series of
demonstrations {émeutes) after the king was captured in Egypt(52). It is not
at all unlikely that to contain them — to stop them from becoming a full
scale rebellion against a regime that had subjugated the south under the

(47) Ibid., p. 99 table 6.

(48) Andrew Lewis, "Forest Rights and the Celebration of May : Two Documents from
the French Vexin, 131 1-1318", Mediaeval Studies, 53 (1991), p. 269, 276.
(49) O/m;, 1,314, n° xviii.
(50) Thomas Bisson, Assemblies and Representation in Languedoc in the Thirteenth
Century. Princeton, 1 964, p. 1 3 1 ; Jordan, Louis IX, p. 97-98.
(51) Bisson, Assemblies, p. 131, who summarizes earlier views doubts at least the
meeting of estates to make the grant.
(52) Leopold Delisle, "Chronologie des baillis et sénéchaux", in Recueil des historiens
des Gaules et de la France, 24 vols, éd. Martin Bouquet and others (Paris, 1738-1904), vol.
XXIV, p. 249.
316 W.CH. JORDAN

banner of ridding it of heresy — the crown or, more probably, its local agents
demanded and got a great deal of money from southern towns like Cahors to
do so. Again, the underlying cause of the attempt of the populäres to achieve
fair treatment from the urban government of Cahors, even though their
method was deemed illegal by the crown, was not limited to the onus or
mishandling of direct taxation. The legacy of the Albigensian Crusades was
much more significant. Yet their action must also have owed a great deal to
the long legacy and unfair distribution of taxation on them and the erosion of
civic life that these encouraged in a period already made tragic by wars and
rebellion.

Conclusions : Implications

How do the issues surrounding public works projects fit into the wider
theme of the economic effects of the crusades on France and, by implication,
on Europe ? One illustration will have to suffice. It is well-known that there
was a decline in charity, free-will giving, by the crown in the mid-century in
anticipation of the crusade. Ancient grants that it had promised in perpetuity
were honored; new and supplementary grants were highly restricted in
number and size(53). A subspecies of charitable giving, patronage of
ecclesiastical building(54), was particularly affected by this necessary stinginess.
Already in the 1960s, for example, Robert Branner established that
construction in Paris which otherwise might have been underwritten by the crown,
was curbed — reduced to a snail's pace or simply suspended — during the
first crusade of Saint Louis from 1248 through 1254. Royal investment in
those architectural projects which were already under way outside of Paris
was curtailed with equal abruptness almost from the moment the king swore
the crusader's vow in December 1 244. And new investments in the provinces
were out of the question(55).
More recent research, which can be summarized quickly, confirms and
makes it possible to expand on these conclusions. Following but nuancing
Branner, both Caroline Bruzelius and Linda Papanicolaou have shown
independently that work in the environs of Paris and at the Cathedral of Tours
was either slowed down (in the first case) or completely suspended (in the
latter) to accommodate the diversion of royal funds in the crusade years.
Significantly, the architect of the Cathedral of Tours did not put his
construction team back to work until after the crusade in 1255(56). Meredith Lillich

(53) Jordan, Louis IX, p. 90-92.

(54) This is how 1 classifed it ibid., p. 92.
(55) Robert Branner, St. Louis and the Court Style in Gothic Architecture. London,
1965, p. 65-67,86.
(56) Caroline Bruzelius, The Thirteenth-Century Church at St-Denis. New Haven,
1985 ; Linda Papanicolaou, "Stained Glass from the Cathedral of Tours : The Impact of the
Sainte-Chapelle in the 1240s", Metropolitan Museum Journal, 15 (1980), p. 53-64.
THE IMPACT OF THE CRUSADES ON APPROPRIATIONS FOR PUBLIC WORKS 3 17

has also been able to demonstrate that the slowdown in construction in the
years of preparation for the crusade and during the crusade itself led to the
abatement of glazing campaigns (the installation of stained glass) at many
sites in northern and western France in the same periods because of the
crown's and of lesser lords' redirection of revenues away from religious
building(").
Of course, it is legitimate to think of the ceremonial and devotional
performances associated with the crusade as costly acts of charity and indeed of
the crusade itself as charity (an "act of love", in Riley-Smith's apt but chilling
phrase)(58). If we were to do so, there is little doubt that expenditures for the
crusade (especially for the building of Aigues-Mortes) and for the ceremonial
and devotional accoutrements of the crusade (including part of the spending
on the Sainte-Chapelle) would more than offset savings realized from the
restrictive policies on other charities, including traditional large building
campaigns(59). But the point is that, as with public works, traditional
recipients of royal, princely and municipal investment and largesse suffered
significant shocks as a result of the financial arrangements accompanying the
crusades.
Several questions, rather than conclusions, follow from these
observations. First, it remains to be seen whether any of the stronger criticisms of
crusading emerged from among the practitioners of those trades, or
promoters of those projects, or laborers in those sub-sectors of the economy that
were routinely disadvantaged by the redirection of capital to the crusade
enterprise. Of course, there is no necessary connection between money
problems and sentiment ; even an unemployed glazer might have supported
his king's war despite the unemployment that that war bestowed on him, and
perhaps he would not have found it humiliating to find a job in some other
part of the economy stimulated by the war. No scholar, however, so far as I
know, has yet tried to look into this issue with the care it deserves (60).
A different but related question is whether there were long-term economic
and non-economic harms to the trades, projects, and sub-sectors of the
economy periodically disadvantaged by the fiscal demands of crusading.
Time and again from 1096 through the early 1270s — and massively at least
eight times in these years — there occurred wrenching re-directions of
capital flows away from important public works ventures, from traditional
charity of various sorts, and from ecclesiastical building campaigns whether
supported by the crown, territorial princes or municipalities. These occurred

(57) Meredith Lellich, The Armor of Light : Stained Glass in Western France, 1250-
1325. Berkeley and elsewhere, 1994, p. 8.
(58) Jonathan Riley-Smith, "Crusading as an Act of Love", History, 65 (1980).
(59) Cf. Jordan, Louis IX, p. 91-92.
(60) The two now standard works on criticism of the crusades are valuable but hardly
comprehensive: Elizabeth Siberry, Criticism of Crusading, 1095-1274. Oxford, 1985;
Palmer Tiiroop, Criticism of the Crusade. A Study of Public Opinion and Crusade
Propaganda. Amsterdam, 1940.
318 W.CH. JORDAN

while massive and unequally apportioned direct taxation destabilized

communities of all sizes. No scholar has looked sufficiently long and hard at the
implications of this taxation or these recurrent gigantic shifts in capital flow
on particularly disadvantaged people and institutions.
A closely related and final question is whether the French economy on the
whole and perhaps, mutatis mutandis, of northern Europe in general, suffered
or benefitted from the economic arrangements brought into play by
crusading. My still very tentative impression, on balance, is that the economy
suffered enormously. Let us take the great crusade of the mid-thirteenth
century as paradigmatic. The largest single project which stimulated
employment and production, the building of Aigues-Mortes, in fact, could not be
paid for in the short run. The crown was forced to conscript laborers and
requisition building materials precisely because the enormous sums of
money that might have been used to pay for the port were being spent not in
France — not even in southern France — but in the central and eastern
Mediterranean for buying grain, leasing a battle fleet, and building a flotilla
of landing craft(61). It may be argued that the mere coming into existence of
the port — which was to have a checkered history — had long-term positive
consequences for the French economy and that these more than offset the
drain of capital to the Mediterranean during the crusades. In fact, it would
take a considerable amount of very sophisticated research to prove the point
one way or the other. That research, too, like so much else about the effects
of the crusades on the society, economy and culture of Europe, remains to be
done.

(61) On the requisitions of materials and labor for Aigues-Mortes, see William Jordan,
"Supplying Aigues-Mortes for the Crusade of 1248 : The Problem of Restructuring Trade",
in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Stray er, ed.
William Jordan, Bruce McNab, and Teofilo Ruiz. Princeton, 1976, p. 172 ; on expenditures
in the central and eastern Mediterranean, Jordan, Louis IX, p. 70, 76-77.