The Role of Pope Honorius III in the Fifth Crusade

In the historiography on the Fifth Crusade, the idea that the expedition represented the epitome of a ‘papal crusade’ still looms large. Thomas Van Cleve wrote that in planning the Fifth Crusade, Pope Innocent III took ‘every precaution to insure that the plans did not miscarry through falling into the hands of others than the chosen agents of the church … the Fifth Crusade was to be above all else a papal crusade’. Helmut Roscher, writing contemporaneously with Van Cleve, argued the exact opposite. He forcefully made the case that Innocent did not attempt to keep the Fifth Crusade under exclusively papal direction, stating that ‘the idea that Innocent wanted to exclude the kings from the crusade no longer holds up’. Nonetheless, it has endured. Hans Mayer maintained that Innocent III deliberately sought to exclude the kings of Europe from the crusade and that he fought ‘to make the crusade an ecclesiastical and specifically a papal enterprise’. Mayer concluded his account of the Fifth Crusade by asserting that it was ‘the Church’s final attempt to turn the crusade into an enterprise directed and led by her alone’. James Powell was influenced by the view of Roscher and cautiously sided with him over the topic of papal crusade leadership, making the astute point that, because of the sporadic departure of crusaders, ‘the role left for the pope was that of a coordinator and at times a clearinghouse for information, rather than a director of operations’. Elsewhere in Powell’s work, there are nevertheless indicators that he considered Pope Honorius III to have had ‘control over the conduct of the war’, at least for a time. Innocent III’s supposed desire for total control over the Fifth Crusade stemmed from an apparently broader aim for papal control of the crusade movement, and Donald Queller and Thomas Madden have argued that Innocent also meant the Fourth Crusade ‘to be wholly under papal control’. Christopher Tyerman suggested that the notion of the pope as willing director of the Fifth Crusade is flawed, but did not drive the point home. While Pierre-Vincent Claverie does not subscribe to the idea that the papacy purposely attempted to exclude the kings of Europe from the leadership of the crusade, he writes that Honorius ‘entrusted the direction of the crusade’ to the legate Pelagius, Cardinal-Bishop of Albano, ‘who had already defended the interests of the Holy See in the East’.