Fulk of Neuilly

Fulk of Neuilly (French: Foulques de Neuilly) was a parish priest and itinerant preacher active in northern France in the late twelfth century. Little is known with certainty about his early life or family origins. He is associated with Neuilly-sur-Marne, a village east of Paris, where he served as priest; the designation of Neuilly refers to this pastoral charge rather than to a securely documented place of birth. Contemporary writers portray his first years in the priesthood as undistinguished. According to the account of Jacques de Vitry, who wrote within a generation of Fulk's death, the priest of Neuilly was initially poorly educated and worldly in his habits, a characterization that later chronicle tradition used to heighten the drama of his subsequent conversion to a life of evangelical preaching.

Seeking a more solid theological formation, Fulk went to Paris and studied under Peter the Chanter, the influential master of theology at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame and a leading figure in the moral and pastoral reform currents of the late twelfth century. Under Peter's influence Fulk underwent a marked change of life. He returned to his parish and soon acquired a wide reputation as a popular preacher. He traveled through the Ile-de-France and neighboring regions, denouncing usury, clerical concubinage and simony, luxurious dress, and the violence of tournaments. Chroniclers credit him with numerous conversions of usurers and of women living by prostitution, and with a reputation for miracles that enhanced his authority among urban and rural audiences. His preaching belonged to the same milieu of apostolic poverty and moral reform that produced other wandering preachers of the age, though Fulk himself remained a secular priest and is not known to have entered a religious order.

In 1198 Pope Innocent III, recently elected, launched the preaching of what became the Fourth Crusade and commissioned Fulk, among others, to proclaim the expedition in France. Fulk's sermons on the crusade drew large crowds and are mentioned by Geoffrey of Villehardouin and other participants as an important stimulus to recruitment in northern France. He is reported to have taken the cross himself and to have collected substantial alms for the support of crusaders. Hostile or skeptical voices, including some monastic chroniclers, later accused him of misappropriating funds raised for the crusade; whether these charges had substance or reflected the usual suspicions attached to popular preachers and money remains uncertain, and they were not the subject of a formal condemnation in his lifetime.

Fulk died at Neuilly in 1201, before the main crusading fleets sailed from Venice in 1202. He therefore did not witness the diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Zara and Constantinople. His memory survived in crusade narratives and in the writings of Jacques de Vitry, who treated him as an example of the power of preaching to reform both clergy and laity. He was not formally canonized, and he has no established feast day in the general calendars of the Latin Church. Modern historians regard him as a significant, if poorly documented, figure in the pastoral reform movement associated with Peter the Chanter's circle and in the popular preaching that accompanied Innocent III's crusading appeals.