POSTPRINT of Ritsema Van Eck, Marianne P. ‘Crusade Campaigning by Friars of the Observant Franciscan Establishment in the Holy Land,’ in The Defence of the Faith: Crusading on the Frontiers of Latin Christendom in the Late Middle Ages, edited by Paul Srodecki and Norbert Kersken (Turnhout: Brepols, 2024), 81-93.

Several Franciscan brethren played a substantial role in late medieval crusade propagation. Well-known examples include Friar Fidenzio da Padova’s recovery treatise and the preaching of the Observant Giovanni da Capestrano. This paper seeks to highlight a strand of Observant Franciscan crusade campaigning which has remained more marginalised: the efforts of the Franciscan custody of Mount Sion to incite a crusade to the Holy Land from the fifteenth century onward. Even though this Franciscan establishment had its headquarters in Jerusalem, it can arguably be described as geographically peripheral when compared to the main arenas of crusading action at the time: East-Central Europe and the Iberian Peninsula. From their marginalised, yet ideologically charged, position at the fines christianitatis, the friars of Mount Sion called for a crusade which differed from the Spanish Reconquista and the anti-Ottoman campaigns. While their activities were related to — and sometimes in contact with — these more eye-catching contemporary crusading movements, the campaigning of the custody of Mount Sion emerges as distinct, both in terms of its goals and its methods. Operating first under Mamluk and then later under Ottoman rule, the friars of this custody were compelled to voice their sentiments in different, often more subtle ways. In order to characterise the crusading interests and efforts of the Franciscan Observants at this religious frontier, this paper brings together various ideological, diplomatic, liturgical, textual, cartographical, and sermonical exponents. The combined picture will be placed in the context of, and differentiated from, the wider currents of crusading at the time, including — for example — Observant Franciscan crusade preaching and rapprochements with prominent crusade-minded monarchs and popes. In order to accommodate a full appreciation of the above, I will first offer a short sketch of the foundation of this Franciscan establishment and its main modus operandi from the later Middle Ages onward.