Far Be It from Me to Glory Save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14): Crusade Preaching and Sermons for Good Friday and Holy Week

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Chapter 5 “Far Be It from Me to Glory Save in the Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ” (Galatians 6:14): Crusade Preaching and Sermons for Good Friday and Holy Week

Jessalynn Bird

Both general surveys of the crusading movement and specialist monographs on crusade preaching note that recruiters focused on certain dates in the liturgical year, including the Invention and Exaltation of the Cross and Holy Week. However, few scholars have traced how precisely preachers adapted themes from the readings and liturgy of specific feast days to construct crusade appeals. Matthew Phillips has carefully studied the image of the cross in monastic circles in the twelfth century and its impact on crusade preaching, but little has been done recently on the preaching of the Passion in the later twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, a transformative moment in the context and nature of crusade recruiting.1 A mass of unpublished crusade appeals and liturgical treatises illustrates that themes from Holy Week and Good Friday dominated sermons delivered to crusaders in this period. The loss of Jerusalem and the relic of the True Cross focused attention on Christ’s redemptive work. So too, did crusading liturgies which borrowed heavily from Good Friday’s bidding prayers, including daily petitions for the deliverance of the Holy Land inserted into the Mass and processions instituted by Innocent iii, which fell on the first Friday of each month.2 The Good Friday liturgy traditionally focused on the symbolism of the

1 C. Matthew Phillips, “O Magnum Crucis Misterium: Devotion to the Cross, Crusading and the Imitation of the Crucified Christ in the High Middle Ages, c.1050–c.1215” (PhD. Diss., Saint Louis University, 2006); C. Matthew Phillips, “The Thief’s Cross: Crusade and Penance in Alan of Lille’s Sermo de cruce Domini,” Crusades 5 (2006): 143–156. 2 Christoph Maier, “Crisis, Liturgy and the Crusade in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 48 (1997): 628–657; Amnon Linder, Raising Arms: Liturgy in the Struggle to Liberate Jerusalem (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002); M. Cecilia Gaposchkin, Invisible Weapons: Liturgy and the Making of Crusade Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2017).

204221 130 Bird cross and overlapped heavily with the feasts of the Invention and Exaltation of the Cross regularly associated with crusade commemoration and recruitment. Margot Fassler has illuminated the prominent role played by Paris masters and Victorine canons in liturgical reforms which spread throughout northern France and as far as the cathedral of Aix-la-Chapelle in Aachen, reforms which were favored by Innocent iii. The Victorines were particularly known for their promotion of the Laudes crucis and Dulce lignum; the former proved a conve- nient liturgical set-piece for linking church reform to Christ’s salvific work, a project dear also to Paris masters involved in promoting various reform initia- tives while preaching the crusade.3 With the introduction of cyclical and insti- tutionalized diocesan crusade preaching under Innocent iii, preachers were required to generate crusade appeals on a regular basis, and the imagery of certain feast days lent itself readily to the construction of crusade sermons.4 In the early medieval period, the theme of imitatio Christi through martyr- dom was reinterpreted as crucifying the flesh through taking up the voluntary cross of monastic life, serving God as a miles Christi in the cloister through renunciation of personal possessions, prayer, and self-discipline.5 From the First Crusade onwards, the project of imitatio Christi was re-appropriated for crusaders by preachers, chroniclers, and participants, who focused on the crusader’s cross as the symbol of their spiritual undertaking and sign of the elect, sometimes literally imprinted on their flesh.6 The cult of the suffering and human Christ was only intensified by renewed pilgrimage links to and the importation of passion relics from the Holy Land, as well as the creation of replicas of important churches, including the Holy Sepulcher, within western

3 Louis van Tongeren, Exaltation of the Cross: Toward the Origins of the Feast of the Cross and the Meaning of the Cross in Early Medieval Liturgy (Leuven: Peeters, 2000); Margot E. Fassler, Gothic Song: Victorine Sequences and Augustinian Reform in Twelfth-Century Paris, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), pp. xix, xxviii, 22–28, 32–37, 47–48, 64–72, 77–82, 133–134, 209, 249, 262–263, 290, 294–311, 416–418, and passim. 4 Innocent iii, Quia maior, PL 216:817–821 and Pium et sanctum, PL 216:822. 5 See, for example, William J. Purkis, Crusading Spirituality in the Holy Land and Iberia, c.1095– c.1187 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2008); Katherine Allen Smith, War and the Making of Medieval Monastic Culture (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2011); Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), esp. pp. 278–282; Giles Constable, Three Studies in Medieval Religious and Social Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), esp. pp. 194–217; C. Matthew Phillips, “Crucified with Christ: The Imitation of the Crucified Christ and Crusading Spirituality,” in Crusades: Medi- eval Worlds in Conflict, ed. Thomas F. Madden, James, L. Naus, and Vincent Ryan (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 25–34. 6 Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986).

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