SOME of the most important crusades in the late Middle Ages were waged
against men and women who had been baptized as Catholics. In some
cases they comprised groups holding heterodox beliefs, against whom the
normal procedures established by the Church for the investigation and
suppression of heresy had failed, or could not even be applied. In others
they were individuals in possession of secular authority, whose political
opposition to the papacy was construed as posing a serious threat to the
integrity and faith of the Church. Both forms of crusade, and especially
the latter, aroused controversy in their day; and they still provoke lively
disagreement amongst scholars of the crusading movement. In this
chapter we shall therefore need not only to examine the crusades
themselves, but also to give some attention to their historical origins and
the polemic to which they gave rise.

In the 1320s the publicist Augustinus Triumphus, posing the question
'Should the Pope send crusaders against tyrants who resist him?', played
Devil's Advocate with the reply 'Since they are Christians, tyrants are
signed with the cross. Consequently they must not be overthrown by
people signed with the cross (crucesignati).' Christ's soldiers should not
fight against those who had been received into His Church. Augustinus's
answer to this criticism was essentially the same as that put forward about
seventy years previously by the great canonist Hostiensis, who had
written:

If it seems correct that we should promote the crusade overseas (crux transmarina),
which is preached in order to acquire or recover the Holy Land, then we should
use all the more vigour in preaching the crusade on this side of the sea (crux
cismarina), against schismatics, which is aimed at the preservation of ecclesiastical

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