ABSTRACT
Part of the urgency which impelled the various measures taken before, during, and after the Fourth Lateran Council stemmed from the concept that the military reconquest of the Holy Land and conversion of eastern Christians, Muslims, pagans and Jews to Latin Christianity would play an essential role in the end-times which were rapidly approaching. Although Benjamin Kedar has asserted that Joachim of Fiore’s views did not influence missionary efforts in the later twelfth and early thirteenth century,5 his apocalyptic vision of world history was in fact well-known to Innocent III and reformers from Peter the Chanter’s circle, including James of Vitry and Oliver of Paderbom.6 Joachim’s prophecies had been widely publicized in France and England during the Third Crusade and would have been freshly brought to mind by the condemnation of his Trinitarian theory at the Fourth Lateran during preparations for the Fifth Crusade. James and Oliver appear to have adhered to Joachim’s theory that only a combination of crusade and conversion could counteract Islam, viewed as the latest in a series of persecutions of the church by Jews, pagans, heretics, and Muslims.7 Their convictions were bolstered during the campaign of the Fifth Crusade, when eastern Christians revealed pseudo-Clementine and other prophecies which promised the collusion of eastern Christian kings in the extirpation of Islam. These prophecies profoundly affected the course of this expedition and, confirmed in part by the spread of a similar prophecy attributed to John of Toledo in 1229, preparations for the crusade of Frederick II.8
