Texts in Context:
The Chalice and
the Sword

To do them justice, many soldiers had deserted the Fourth Crusade in disgust long before it sank to this—even Simon de Montfort, notorious for his part in the Albigensian Crusade, soon washed his hands of it. Above all, Pope Innocent III was enraged and horrified by the plundering of Byzantium, and excommunicated the crusaders. In 1205, he wrote to Boniface, Marquis of Montferrat, one of the few leaders still attendant on the Fourth Crusade:

How, indeed, will the church of the Greeks, no matter how severely she is beset with affIictions and persecutions, return into ecclesiastical union and to a devotion for the Apostolic See, when she has seen in the Latins only an example of perdition and the works of darkness, so that she now, and with reason, detests the Latins more than dogs? … Those who were supposed to be seeking the ends of Jesus Christ … made their swords, which they were supposed to use against the pagans, drip with Christian blood …

Yet—apparently in the desperate hope, or wishful belief, that this could still be the means through which reunion was effected—Innocent recognized the new Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. Few decisions could have been more certain to make the papacy appear to be a complicit, if not indeed a conniving, party to the sack of Byzantium. Many historians believe it was the Fourth Crusade, far more than the dispute between Leo IX and Michael I, that caused the breach between the Christian East and West to ossify irrecoverably.

As for the crusade in the name of which all this had befallen—well, apart from a fifteen-year stretch (1229-1244), Jerusalem remained in Muslim hands right up until the close of the First World War. The last outpost of Outremer was the city of Acre, on the northern coast of modern Israel; it was conquered in 1291. All this may make the military and political situation of Europe sound bad, but please allow us to assure you, it is just about to rapidly become much, much worse.

The Lion’s Den

We must, with great regret, bypass most of the fascinating, virtually unparalleled tale of Chinggis Khan, the man who built the largest land power in recorded history. The Mongol Empire only lasted intact from 1206 to 1259 (an even shorter span than the Latin Empire), as it turned out that “Asia” was not an easy territory to keep cohesive, but the pax Mongolica held well after the fragmentation of the realm, as late as the mid-fourteenth century. Sadly, this period did also see the Siege of Baghdad in 1258, including the destruction of the Bayt al-Ḥikmah (“House of Wisdom”), the first and greatest of the libraries of the Islamic Golden Age.

However, the lions of this section’s title are not the metaphorical kind the Mongol armies consisted in, nor the literal kind, actually. They are heraldic lions—one blue, two golden, and three black. The first three appear in the coat of arms of the House of Welf (pronounced⁶ vĕłf), while the black lions appear in that of the House of Hohenstaufen (pronounced hō-ĕn-shto͡w-fĕn). As the names suggest, these were German noble houses, native to the Holy Roman Empire; the Welfs were from Lombardy, while the Hohenstaufens’ seat of power was in the Swabian city of Wibellingen, which on occasion they used as a battle-cry.

All this would be mere curiosity for history and heraldry, only the old quarrel between the emperors and the popes over investiture got dragged into it; or rather, these two houses got dragged into the quarrel (the Welfs taking the papal side and the Hohenstaufens the imperial). Eventually, the names became detached from the actual dynasties, and also altered slightly in Italian, yielding the party terms Guelf and Ghibelline. The north of Italy—regions like Lombardy, Piedmont, Tuscany, and the Romagna—consisted largely in quarrelsome city-states. All theoretically owed civil allegiance to the Holy Roman Emperor, and all professed spiritual fealty to the Bishop of Rome as well; but all had their own cultures and their own strengths, weaknesses, and feuds with their neighbors. Whether to rely in a pinch on the leadership of the pope, who was uncomfortably close at hand, or that of the emperor who was usually safely north of the Alps, was a major political question for most of these cities. Before Europe tore itself apart during the Reformations, it had plenty of practice tearing itself apart under pope and emperor, Guelf and Ghibelline, the golden lily of France and the black eagle of the Empire … Even King John’s unsuccessful struggle not to come to the terms represented by Magna Carta was of a kindred type.

Moreover, the Guelf-Ghibelline question tended to morph into a more fundamental one about political philosophy. Should society be governed constitutionally—i.e., as far as possible by fixed, impersonal principles? The Guelfs thought so. Or should it be, for lack of a better term, royalist—unabashedly personal and autocratic? Most Americans are brought up to believe the former so firmly that the idea of someone believing the latter is almost unthinkable; only cartoon villainy can be brought in to explain Ghibellines. But, besides the personal charisma dictators often possess,⁷ what words like “autocratic” can unintentionally conceal is the immense flexibility of personal rule. Formulating a rule that will apply to all situations of such-and-such a kind is quite difficult and time consuming. Writing two lettres de cachet to address two distinct cases in different ways is quick, satisfying, and sometimes even fair. All the good and all the bad of Guelf and Ghibelline alike seem to be summed up in this passage, from Dorothy Sayers’ introduction to the Inferno:

He was born and brought up Guelf, and he liked … their rooted republican constitutionalism and their modern liberal outlook, their underlying puritanism in conduct and religion. But he did not like the commercialism and vulgarity … that was growing up among them, and he came more and more to loathe and fear the temporal power of the Papacy which their policy supported and encouraged; the avarice and corruption of a wealthy church … and the undignified spectacle of the Vicar of Christ maneuvring, like a bishop on a chess-board, through that game of European politics in which kings and queens set the pace. By many of his strongest sympathies he was drawn to the Ghibellines … He liked their princeliness—the large mind, the magnificent aristocratic gesture; the patronage of art and learning …; the public spirit of some of their great leaders … But he could not but dislike their irreligion, their lack of principle and contempt of law, their tyranny, their Gothic clannishness overriding the claims of the commonwealth …

As it happens, the poet about whom she wrote this—in a twist he would probably find rather funny—will almost serve as an allegorical personification of the transition from the High to the Late Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265, and set his Comedy in the year 1300; we shall be turning to him and his successors next.

¹You don’t really hear about wretched engenderings these days. What happened?
²A distinction which, through no fault of his own, he dubiously shared with his forty-first successor to the same office, one Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici; but we shall come to Pope Leo X in due time.
³This is the same year King John was compelled to sign the Magna Carta. That document was authored primarily by Stephen Langton, whom Innocent III had consecrated Archbishop of Canterbury (also despite King John’s opposition).
⁴England and France ca. 1200 were not quite the shapes we think of today. France, even if defined generously, was missing a good bit of its eastern reaches, especially in the south, where the Kingdom of Arles (or Burgundy) took up Provence and the area around the Rhône. Moreover, the western half of France—though under the French king’s suzerainty on paper, theoretically, in Minecraft—was held by the Counts of Anjou, who from 1154 were the Kings of England as well. What historians now call the “Angevin Empire” (Angevin is pronounced ânzh-vâ, and means “from Anjou”) embraced all England, half of France, and the east of Ireland, as well as having feudal superiority (falling short of outright rule) over the rest of Ireland, the Kingdom of Scotland, and the princedoms of Wales.
⁵The Despotate of Epirus covered the west of continental Greece, later absorbing what is now the southern half of Albania. The Empire of Nicæa (the largest of these rump states, ruled by a son-in-law of the freshly-deposed Angelid dynasty) ruled the Anatolian regions of Bithynia, Ionia, Lydia, and Phrygia. The Empire of Trebizond ruled the regions of Paphlagonia and Pontus, as well as having footholds in the Crimea.
⁶That is, this name is now pronounced with the usual w → v sound shift of Standard German. In the High Middle Ages, it seems likely that at least some dialects of German had a w-sound here, because the names Welf and Wibellingen both had a g added to the beginning (hence Guelf, Ghibelline) when they were borrowed into the medieval dialects of Italy: Italian had the v-sound and would have had no reason to change it, but it did not (and does not) have a stand-alone w-sound—only one in combination with g, most often spelled gu. (Ghibelline probably lost its –u– thanks to its larger syllable count, which would encourage simplification in rapid speech, and ‘gwib’ to ‘gib’ is an easy change.)
⁷Despite appearances, there is nothing eerie or even odd about the fact that most dictators seem to exhibit a certain magnetism; it is merely an example of the principle Darwin called “natural selection.” In most circumstances, the only kind of person who will both achieve a dictatorship and also hang on to it for any appreciable length of time will be a person of immense charisma. Would-be dictators who lack that gift will be knocked down at some earlier point in the process, before they reach the stage labeled “has held the dictatorship for any appreciable length of time.”

Gabriel Blanchard wrecchedly engendres editorship-at-large for CLT-kynde. He lives in Baltimore, MD.

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Published on 5th May, 2025. Page image of Srebrenik Castle in northeastern Bosnia, photographed by Martin Brož, used under a CC BY 3.0 license (source); this castle appears to date to the late thirteenth or early fourteenth centuries (and therefore would not have been used in the Bosnian Crusade alluded to in the timeline accompanying this post). Author thumbnail is a fourteenth-century illumination depicting a lutanist; sadly, though the words flute and lute seem parallel, there is, to the present author’s knowledge, no musician known as a “loutist.”