The Pope Who Declared a Crusade Against Pirates

There are many things one might reasonably expect a pope to declare a crusade against.

Heretics, perhaps.

A rival Christian kingdom.

The Holy Land.

But pirates?

That sounds less like a medieval papal proclamation and more like the plot of a particularly ambitious Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.

And yet, in the 12th century, Pope Eugene III did essentially that.

The target was not some mythical pirate king, but the very real maritime threat posed by the Muslim rulers of the Balearic Islands “particularly Majorca” whose fleets were raiding Christian shipping throughout the western Mediterranean.

The result was one of the stranger crusades of the Middle Ages.

And, as usual, the story is considerably messier than the phrase “Pope declares war on pirates” suggests.

In the 1100s, the Mediterranean was not exactly a relaxing place to take a boat.

The western Mediterranean was divided among competing Christian and Muslim powers, and the Balearic Islands occupied a particularly useful position.

From their ports, Muslim fleets could attack Christian vessels, raid coastal settlements, seize goods, and take captives.

The islands had become an important base for maritime warfare and raiding.

To the Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, this was both an economic nuisance and a military threat.

To the people being raided, it was considerably worse than a nuisance.

And to the rulers of Pisa and Genoa, it was also an opportunity.

Because nothing brings people together quite like having a common enemy who happens to control extremely valuable ports.

In 1146, Pope Eugene III issued a papal bull supporting an expedition against the Muslim-held Balearic Islands.

The expedition became part of the broader wave of crusading enthusiasm that followed the disastrous loss of Edessa in 1144 and the preaching of the Second Crusade.

But there was an important distinction.

This wasn't simply a bunch of knights deciding to go treasure hunting in the Mediterranean and asking the Pope for a blessing afterward.

The papacy actively incorporated the expedition into the crusading movement.

Those who took part could receive the same sort of spiritual privileges associated with crusading elsewhere.

In other words:

The Pope was offering crusade status for an expedition whose immediate objective was to stop maritime raiders.

Medieval Christianity had apparently discovered the concept of an extremely holy coast guard.

The expedition was a joint effort involving the maritime powers of Pisa and Genoa, along with forces from the Christian kingdoms of Iberia.

The principal target was Palma de Mallorca, the major port and capital of Majorca.

The campaign began in 1114, several decades before Eugene III's papacy, and was therefore not literally launched by him.

This is where the story gets historically inaccurate.

The conquest of the Balearic Islands in 1114-1115 was an earlier expedition, supported by Christian powers and eventually resulting in the capture of Mallorca and Ibiza.

But the conquest did not last.

The islands were soon absorbed into the expanding Almoravid state, returning them to Muslim rule.

So when Eugene III later backed crusading activity against the Balearics, he wasn't inventing the idea from scratch.

He was giving papal support to a recurring Mediterranean struggle.

History, as it turns out, is quite fond of sequels.

This is the fascinating part.

Modern people tend to think of a crusade as something involving knights marching toward Jerusalem under a cross.

But medieval crusading was more flexible than that.

The papacy gradually extended crusading privileges to campaigns fought in other places and against other perceived enemies of Latin Christianity.

The Iberian Peninsula was one of the major examples.

Campaigns against Muslim powers in Spain and Portugal could receive papal authorization and spiritual incentives similar to those offered to people traveling east.

The Mediterranean expeditions fit into this expanding idea of crusade.

So the distinction between:

and

was considerably blurrier in the Middle Ages than it is today.

It would be a mistake to imagine that everyone involved was motivated exclusively by spiritual devotion.

The Balearics were strategically important.

So were their ports.

And so was the trade passing through them.

Pisa and Genoa were rapidly becoming major commercial powers, and controlling Mediterranean routes was extremely valuable.

There were also slaves and captives taken during raids, making the maritime conflict a brutal economic system as well as a military one.

So the expedition combined several motives:

religion, politics, commerce, territorial expansion, and revenge.

Medieval people were perfectly capable of having multiple motives at once.

This is inconvenient for anyone attempting to divide history neatly into “religious” and “economic” wars.

Perhaps the most amusing thing about the episode is how little the participants fit the modern image of a crusader.

There wasn't a single unified European army.

There wasn't one obvious commander representing “Christendom.”

Instead, there were competing cities, kings, nobles, merchants, sailors, soldiers, and churchmen, each with their own interests.

They could cooperate when those interests overlapped.

And then, presumably, argue about who was entitled to what afterward.

This was normal.

The medieval Mediterranean was a world of shifting alliances in which the same people could be trading with each other one year and attacking each other the next.

The word “crusade” makes it sound tidy.

The reality was anything but.

Sort of.

That is the irritating but historically responsible answer.

Pope Eugene III supported and promoted crusading warfare in the western Mediterranean, including campaigns directed against Muslim powers whose fleets conducted raids on Christian shipping.

But the famous conquest of the Balearic Islands had already happened decades earlier.

And calling the people involved simply “pirates” is also misleading.

The Muslim rulers of the Balearics were political authorities operating fleets, conducting warfare, controlling territory, and participating in the same interconnected Mediterranean economy as their Christian rivals.

Some of their activities absolutely looked like piracy to their victims.

But this was not a medieval version of the police chasing Captain Blackbeard around the Spanish coast.

It was maritime warfare, raiding, commerce, territorial politics, and religious conflict all tangled together.

Which is considerably more interesting.

History loves categories.

Pirate.

Crusader.

Pope.

King.

Merchant.

Enemy.

Friend.

The medieval Mediterranean was less cooperative.

A pope could support a military expedition against Muslim maritime powers. Merchants could fund wars because they were good for business. Cities could fight alongside kingdoms they normally distrusted. And people could sincerely believe they were fighting for God while also being very interested in who got the ports afterward.

None of these motivations necessarily cancels out the others.

People in the past were not simpler than us.

They were just operating with different vocabulary, different institutions, and considerably worse plumbing.

So the next time someone tells you that the medieval Church declared a crusade against pirates, the correct response is not quite:

“That's ridiculous.”

It is:

“Actually, it's complicated.”

Which, historically speaking, is usually when things start getting interesting.

Philosophically Inaccurate is a newsletter about the strange, messy, occasionally absurd stories hiding inside history.

Because the past was rarely as philosophically accurate as we like to pretend.