Capitolo 95
suppressed the effect of a change to assure the success. In 1249 he captured Damietta, and then it was standing in
need of every pound of money and every man that Christianity was able
increase; still to this crisis the Church mainly thought about doing that that it
it was able in cash out of the war, the inference that is that the hierarchy
suspected that even if Saint Luigi prevailed and occupied Jerusalem,
few would be earned by an ecclesiastical place of observation. To all the events,
Matthew Parigi has left an account, in his/her chronicle of the year 1249 of
as the pope and the Franciscan one preached this crusade of which it is one
the most suggestive passages in thirteenth-century literature:
"Around the same duration, from command of the pope that they implicitly respected,
the Preacher and the brothers of Minorite were industriously hired in
preaching; and to increase the devotion of the Cristiano, they went with
the great solemnity to the places where first it was their preaching
suitable, and many granted days of the indulgence to those that came to feel
them.... Preaching for the cross, they gave that symbol on
people of every age, sex and line, whatever their ownership or value, and
also on ill men and women and those from what you/they were deprived of strength
illness or the maturity; and in next day, or even directly later,
receiving again it from them, they acquitted them to them from their vote of
pilgrimage, for whatever sum they could get for the favour. What seemed
unfit and absurd it was, that days not very later, Earl Richard
picked up all these money in his/her treasury, from the agency of Bernard Master,
an Italian employee that gathered in the fruit; from what anybody disdains scandal
risen in the Church of God, and among the people in general, and the
the devotion of the believer evidently refreshed." [The footnote: Matthew Parigi,
_English History_, translated by the Turn. J. A, Giles, II 309.]
When the unlucky Baldwin II became Emperor of the east in 1237, the
relics of the passion were its better good. In 1238, while Baldwin was in