Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Middle Ages
conscientiously to prayer and exhortation, teaching the crusaders
both by word and example’ and the clergy were to donate onetwentieth
of their income for three years. The Pope also ordered
an end to civil strife within Christendom for four years.
Such was the thoroughness of the propaganda campaign orchestrated
on behalf of the Fifth Crusade that the Pope also appointed
special officials to preach ‘with great care and attention to detail’
the messages in the guidelines: ‘You must promote the cause of
Christ with such zeal and vigilance that you will share in the many
and great benefits we believe will result from it.’
Yet the Fifth Crusade took place amidst great changes in
medieval warfare. Improvements in State administration and
increased centralization enabled kings to raise armies on a more
regular basis, permanent professional armies whose pay and
recruitment were organized througkh indentures. A distinction
was now being made between ‘private war’, waged between
individuals with as little damage as possible to the general
community, and ‘public war’ in which prisoners could be taken
and held for ransom, enemy property seized as booty, and
reparations exacted from the local population. The emerging
nation-states of western Europe began to utilize more effectively a
peasantry that could be brought to the battlefield at a reasonably
low cost, thanks to the crossbow and longbow, although the
aristocratic knights initially resented this development which
placed more emphasis upon collective rather than individual
combat. But the Normans and the Saracens had demonstrated the
value of archers and the value of defence over attack. Stone castles
and fortified towns built by the Normans throughout Europe in
the eleventh and twelfth centuries demanded the development of
siege warfare and tactics and the introduction of gunpowder in the
late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries helped to inaugurate a new
era for both warfare and propaganda, symbolized by the concept
of guerre mortelle in which both the property and the lives of the
conquered lay at the mercy of the conqueror.