Crusade of the Poor
military expedition
The Crusade of the Poor was an unauthorised military expedition—one of the so-called "popular crusades"—undertaken in the spring and summer of 1309 by members of the lower classes from England, Flanders, Brabant, northern France and the German Rhineland. Responding to an appeal for support for a crusade to the Holy Land, the men, overwhelmingly poor, marched to join a small professional army being assembled with Papal approval. Along the way, they engaged in looting, persecution of Jews and combat with local authorities. None of them reached the Holy Land and their expedition was ultimately dispersed.
Preaching the crusade
The Crusade of the Poor was the first major popular expression of support for crusading after the fall of the Crusader states in the Holy Land. Acre, the last remaining city of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, fell to the Mamluks in 1291. In August 1308, Pope Clement V issued instructions for the preaching of a crusade to be launched against the Mamluks in the spring of 1309. This was to be a small, preliminary expedition led by the Hospitallers, a religious military order. The preaching of the crusade was to solicit funds and prayers, not direct participation on the part of the laity. In early 1309 the crusade was postponed until the autumn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q42376447. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1309, 1291 and 1308.
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This entry incorporates text from “Crusade of the Poor” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.