From the late ninth and tenth centuries pilgrimages from western Europe increased as Mediterranean trade picked up and land routes became more accessible through Hungary’s conversion to Christianity c. 1000 and Byzantine territorial advances in the Balkans, Asia Minor and northern Syria. By the early eleventh century, pilgrimages to the Holy Sepulchre were more frequent and increasingly fashionable, the bellicose Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou (987–1040) even going three times ‘for fear of hell’, while the Holy Sepulchre itself attracted donations, such as 100 gold pounds from Duke Richard II of Normandy (996–1026).1 This was needed. In 1009 the church and edicule of the Holy Sepulchre were wrecked on the orders of the fundamentalist Fatimid Caliph Hakim. Both were rebuilt with impressive magnificence largely with Byzantine money and completed in the reign of Emperor Michael IV Paphlagon (1034–41). This was the church the crusaders found on 15 July 1099 and which they proved cautious in altering. The edicule was embellished but remained more or less the same, while the rest of the church was gradually remodelled and expanded in European romanesque style to accommodate the increased numbers and liturgical expectations of western pilgrims. The rebuilding was finished by the late 1160s. Despite conquest by Saladin in 1187 and sacking by the Khwarazmians in 1244, the crusaders’ main church structure still stands, while the edicule has been rebuilt twice, in 1555 and 1809–10.
2. Eichstätt model of the Edicule, twelfth century.
Pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, for all its popularity, was never a mass activity. To satisfy and stimulate popular desire to be associated with the Holy Sepulchre, replicas of the church or edicule were erected widely across western Christendom, a tradition that long pre-dated the crusades but which gained momentum after 1099, while churches and chapels were dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre. Some may have provided settings for liturgical dramas such as Easter plays. Others may have operated more generally as visual contexts for sacramental liturgy focused on the Passion and Resurrection. In such tangible ways, that ‘remotest place’ as it was described at the time of the First Crusade, became embedded in the daily devotions of distant western Christendom, visible reminders of what the crusades were originally all about.2
3. Aerial view of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today.
INTRODUCTION
WHAT WERE THE CRUSADES?
The crusades were holy wars fought, adherents insisted, in response to the will of God on behalf of the Christian faith in defence of lands, people or religion. The inception of this distinctive form of Christian warfare can be traced to Pope Urban II’s launch of a campaign in 1095 to help eastern Christians in the Byzantine Empire resist attacks by Turkish invaders and to recapture Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers. The subsequent successful war of 1096–9, known now as the First Crusade, established an indelible precedent. Wars fought for religion or with the approval of the Church were hardly novel. However, this war possessed two special properties. It was to be regarded as a unique penitential exercise, removing from participants all penalties for existing confessed sin. In the words of the original papal decree in 1095: ‘whoever for devotion alone not to obtain honour [i.e. office/estates/titles etc.] or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute the journey for all penance’.1 Popular perceptions soon translated this into a straight offer of salvation, with those who fell in this holy conflict regarded as earning immediate entry to heaven and the aura of martyrs. The second distinctive aspect, the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre, the supposed site of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection, defined an especially numinous territorial objective that remained a dominant, although not exclusive, reference even for wars of the cross fought far from Palestine.
The emphasis on the Holy Sepulchre, Holy City and Holy Land of Palestine tapped into the cultural familiarity of western European Christians with the scenes of Christ’s life, death and believed resurrection derived from scripture, legend and liturgical repetition in church services. Jerusalem provided a focus for physical pilgrimage and spiritual imagination, the temporal setting for the cosmic drama of human redemption and the promise of the Last Judgement, a location set between earth and heaven. Although Urban II did not necessarily use the language of pilgrimage, the easy equation with this increasingly popular devotional practice lent crusade warfare a familiar touchstone for its validity as a holy enterprise. The lasting magnetism of Jerusalem, as both physical goal and redemptive metaphor, found physical witness in the popularity of replicas of the Holy Sepulchre that dotted the devotional landscape no less than the obstinate ambition of ten generations of crusaders to capture the city despite increasingly prohibitive strategic obstacles. Unlike other Christian-led wars in defence of faith or territory, campaigns to Jerusalem addressed no urgent security necessity. Judea lay far from the frontiers of western Christendom. Nor was the crusade designed as a missionary war until its ideology became entangled with later European colonial conquests in the Baltic and the Atlantic.
Crusade armies were distinguished by troops who had taken very particular vows of service. Unlike monastic vows, which were permanent, crusade vows, like those of pilgrims, were temporary, operative until the specific commitment had been satisfied (when exactly satisfaction occurred – just setting out? journey’s end? death en route or before? – becoming a subject of later scholarly argument). Vows were signalled by the adoption of a physical cross, usually made of cloth or other textile, occasionally metal, and worn on the shoulder or other part of the recipient’s garments. The cross symbolised a transcendent obligation to adhere to Jesus Christ’s injunction to ‘take up your cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23). On departure, crosses were blessed in special liturgical ceremonies. During the fulfilment of the vow, the cross-bearer, the male crucesignatus or, in fewer but not rare cases, female crucesignata, assumed a privileged social and religious status under church protection. Authority for such privileges and the wars themselves came from the pope, acting in the name of Christ. Individuals’ crusade vows were validated locally by priests. The crusades formed part of wider papal efforts to assert jurisdiction over penitential, pastoral and ecclesiastical legal systems in western Christendom. In the first decades after 1099, spiritual privileges similar or equivalent to those offered by Urban II were promulgated by local clergy without papal authority, for example in Iberia, Germany and the Baltic, each with traditions of wars with non-Christians. However, by the end of the twelfth century, the papal prerogative to initiate crusades, with the attendant spiritual and temporal benefits for crusaders, had generally asserted itself (see ‘Taking the Cross’, p. 4).
There were a few exceptions. In the Baltic from the mid-thirteenth century, popes permanently delegated the power to summon a crusade against non-Christians or Christian schismatics in the region to the military religious order of the Teutonic Knights, who had conquered and were ruling wide tracts of territory in the region. During efforts to resist the Mongol invasion of central Europe in 1241, the archbishops of Mainz and Magdeburg in Germany proclaimed a formal crusade – taking the cross, protection of property, remission of sins – without prior papal authorisation. Occasionally, for example in the Netherlands around 1230, local clergy applied crusade privileges – chiefly indulgences – to campaigns attempting to impose regional ecclesiastical discipline or political order. More eccentrically, trappings of the crusade were appropriated by those opposing papally authorised crusades against political enemies, for instance in Germany in 1240 and England in 1263–5. Crusades against crusaders signal how deeply crusading motifs and institutions had by then penetrated habits and mentalities.2
Papal authority provided the crusade with the apparatus of an accessible and apparently coherent legal, political and ideological structure. Using the crusade as a tool in claiming to represent God’s purpose on earth, popes exercised a controlling share in the theology and formal mechanics of the enterprise. Lavish spiritual incentives were justified by the extreme penitential hardship, effort, dange
r and risk: full remission of penalties of confessed sins and the prospect of equal forgiveness in the afterlife. By the mid-thirteenth century this had elided into a plenary indulgence, remission of the sins themselves, absolving guilt as well as remitting punishment. Until the Jubilee indulgences of 1300 offered to pilgrims to Rome, the crusade indulgence offered the most generous relief available to the faithful. From the early thirteenth century the spiritual privileges became available to those beyond military recruits: partial indulgences (ideologically awkward: how can you divide sin?) proportionate to the giver’s means and the material assistance provided (men, money, materiel, etc.); full indulgences earned by taking the cross and then redeeming the vow for a cash payment; indulgences available to relatives and the deceased. Wide sections of the community beyond the combatants themselves were thus given access to the salvific benefits – the old, the young, the weak, the infirm, the sick, the indolent, the cowardly, the preoccupied – while simultaneously providing the crusade with finance.3 From the beginning, the Church had offered protection of family and property. During the twelfth century further legal and financial inducements were devised: immunity from civil lawsuits and repayment of debts; the ability to mortgage property, even if held as a tenancy or fief, and to receive interest-free loans; and escape from certain tax obligations. Involvement of direct Jewish credit was prohibited. Such measures, designed to encourage recruitment, exerted significant impact on the jurisdiction of law courts; the operation of land markets, commercial credit and public finance; and the scope of secular authority.
TAKING THE CROSS
During his tour of France in 1095–6, Urban II instituted a new ceremony for those who had vowed to undertake the military journey to Jerusalem. Recruits were to receive and wear a cross, usually of cloth or silk, which they sewed onto their cloaks or tunics, commonly on the right shoulder, distinguishing their status both from other laymen and from Holy Land pilgrims who carried the scrip and staff (although many crusaders also adopted these in addition). Customarily, crosses were coloured red, although during the Third Crusade (1187–92) regional styles were adopted: red for followers of the king of France; white for those of the king of England; green for those of the count of Flanders; crusaders against papal enemies in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries wore red and white two-toned crosses. Usually given by the clergy, crosses could be handed out by lay commanders, such as Bohemund at Amalfi in 1096. Women as well as men took the cross. Despite the initial assumption that crusaders needed to be of practical use to the enterprise, the only formal restrictions rested with status – technically only the legally free could undertake such a dislocating commitment – and conjugal rights, these requiring the acquiescence of wives for young married husbands (a condition dropped by Innocent III). By 1123, when taking the cross appeared in Canon 10 of the First Lateran Council, the ritual was well established. By the later twelfth century, liturgies of blessing the cross of departing Jerusalem-bound crusaders were being devised, displaying considerable local diversity.4 Such ceremonies confirmed the cross as symbolising this form of penitential warfare, recognised by victims as different as Rhineland Jews and Languedoc heretics and, by the 1180s, in various regional vernaculars (criosier, croiser, croisé, croisié or, in England, crusiatus, a Latin word derived from a vernacular; a generation later forms included crozada, crozea, crozeia). From the Third Crusade, crucesignatus – signed with the cross – became a near-ubiquitous description, although one not unique to crusaders: the Crutched Friars and reformed heretics were also termed crucesignati and members of the Military Orders, although not in a strict legal sense crusaders, wore distinctive crosses on surcoats and clothing.
4. Metal cross, similar to those adopted by some crusaders.
The symbol of the cross drew explicitly on the New Testament texts of Matthew 10:38 and 16:24, where Christ enjoined his followers to take up their crosses and follow him. It provided a pledge of penance and mortification, a sign of God’s leadership and favour, a pledge of redemption through suffering, an ensign of sacrifice and salvation, a banner for Christ’s militia, affirming the crusades’ Christocentric focus, the penitential journey both a duty and an imitation. After the loss of the Jerusalem relic of the True Cross at the battle of Hattin in 1187, the recruiting propaganda for the Third Crusade from pope to jongleurs became saturated with cross-centred rhetoric, evoking the Passion and Resurrection, suffering and reward, penance and redemption. The cross increasingly dominated the descriptive language of the crusade, by the mid-thirteenth century becoming canonists’ shorthand for the crusades as a whole, whether to the Holy Land (crux transmarina) or in Europe (crux cismarina). The metaphorical malleability even allowed one crusade preacher and veteran to declare ‘crux enim gladius est; the Cross is the sword’.5 Crusaders marked their physical passage by carving crosses on walls, whether in Holy Trinity Church, Bosham, Hampshire, or the Chapel of St Helena in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.
Taking the cross played more than an emblematic role in the crusading process. It conferred precise obligations and privileges. By acknowledging a sworn commitment, the crucesignatus became subject to ecclesiastical protection but also discipline. Unfulfilled vows risked penalties including excom-munication. Exemptions were deliberately hard to obtain as well as expensive until the system of payment for vow redemptions was introduced after 1213. The efficacy and exact nature of the spiritual privileges – remission of penance and/or sin, on earth and/or in heaven – and exactly when they became merited – on taking the cross, on departure, on death or fulfilment of the vow – remained subjects of academic debate. Yet the operation of the temporal privileges – protection of rights and property, immunity from credit interest and repayment of debts, delay in answering civil lawsuits – rested on public acceptance of status, which depended on knowledge of by whom and when the cross was taken. The status of crucesignatus could also afford tax exemption, as with the Saladin Tithe of 1188, which made backsliding appear as tax avoidance. For these reasons as well as for military preparations, by the end of the twelfth century and probably earlier, written lists of crucesignati were compiled by recruiters and civil authorities. As a thirteenth-century canon lawyer put it, ‘no cross, no obligation’. Taking the cross was seen as a formal contract with God.6 The ceremonies themselves provided neutral spiritualised spaces that became favoured occasions for otherwise delicate diplomacy or political posturing: Vézelay and Speyer 1146; Gisors and Mainz 1188; Rome 1220; Paris 1313.
The cross was both physical and personal. Preachers habitually used crosses as dramatic props, sometimes claiming they contained relics of the True Cross. Some crucesignati tattooed or even branded crosses on their skin. A famous manuscript illumination in a presentation copy of Robert of Rheims’ popular chronicle of the First Crusade produced in 1188–9 depicted the dedicatee, Frederick Barbarossa, surrounded by crosses, on his robe, his shield and a globe he is holding. The cross operated to the theoretical advantage of the crucesignatus on a number of levels, one English liturgy proclaiming it ‘an especial means of assistance, a support of the faith, the consummation of his works, the redemption of his soul and a protection and safeguard against the fierce darts of all his enemies’.7 More prosaically, a Somerset crucesignatus, arguing crusader privilege in court in 1220, insisted that ‘the crusade (crussignatio) ought to improve my condition not damage it’.8 The actual crosses handed out could act as talismans of protection in this life and the next. In 1250 the German emperor Frederick II, a crusader in 1228–9, was buried wearing his cross.9 Crucesignati unable to fulfil their vows bequeathed their personal crosses to the Holy Land or sent proxies carrying them; in 1183 the cross of the recently deceased Henry, eldest son of Henry II, sewn onto his cloak, was taken to Palestine by his companion William Marshal. The physical cross provided an intimate mystical union with Christ, a bond repeatedly emphasised by crusade preachers.10 Some suggested extensive benefits, from exorcising demons, curing deformities or easing childbi
rth to remitting time in purgatory for deceased loved ones (caros suos) and relatives.11 At least from the time of the Third Crusade, taking the cross became a metaphor for the Christian life incorporating devotion, obedience, penance, suffering, redemption and salvation. Combined with crusaders’ uniquely generous privileges, this evangelic force could hardly be restricted to the fit, healthy, well-funded or military. From 1213, confirmed in 1234, the cross could be redeemed by payments without hindrance to the exercise of the spiritual advantages: crosses for cash. Although later evolving into the straightforward sale of indulgences, such vow redemptions helped transform crusade financing in the thirteenth century and embedded crusading widely into Christian society. Taking the cross became a habitual, if sporadic, demotic aspect of pastoral management, church liturgy and ecclesiastical fund-raising, far removed from yet umbilically linked to its invention by Urban II in 1095.
The World of the Crusades Page 3