The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  5. Giving the cross.

  The social reach of the crusade caught all sections of free society. The legally un-free were excluded by virtue of their lack of independent legal agency or ownership of assets, which prevented them from entering into voluntary contracts such as the crusade vow and meant they also lacked the property to support their commitment or enjoy the temporal privileges. Becoming a crucesignatus implied freedom; for a serf, it implied manumission. Of course, some, perhaps many, un-free went on crusade, but in service to the great: not all who followed the cross had necessarily taken the cross. Otherwise, crucesignati came from all walks of life and most regions of western Europe: lords, knights, merchants, artisans, servants, soldiers, minstrels, other support staff, clergy of all ranks, clerks, to write and keep accounts as well as to pray, and even converts from Judaism.12 Although highly gendered around the rhetoric of masculine martial valour, the crusade attracted women as active crucesignatae, as well as accompanying wives, civilian auxiliaries (e.g. laundresses) and army camp-followers. The crusade also directly affected them as relicts of departed crusaders, as financial contributors or as ideological devotees, expressed in many ways including through association with convents attached to military and preaching orders (see ‘Women and the Crusades’, p. 10).13 The crusade paraded across society in recruitment, funding and social rituals of support: blessing departing crusaders, their crosses, weapons and even their ships; processions; alms-giving; special religious services; preaching; and the public imagery of sculpture, frescoes, mosaics and stained glass.

  Crusading formulae also appeared outside canonically full-blown crusades. Different remissions of sins, associated with the Jerusalem war or not, could be offered, the terms varied by the scope or length of remission or the terms of qualification. Not all non-Holy Land campaigns that attracted indulgences also saw preaching and cross-taking or grants of temporal privileges. This ‘pick and mix’ flexibility eased the use of crusading forms across an expanding variety of conflicts from the twelfth to the seventeenth centuries. By the later fifteenth century, the crusade was commonly used as a mechanism to extract secular funding and clerical taxation. Few corners of Europe, the Mediterranean or western Asia entirely escaped the presence of crusaders, although not all minorities or fringe communities became formal crusade targets. There were no crusades against Celtic Christians of Ireland or Jews, although the latter suffered civil persecution and physical violence as victims of the extreme emotions inherent in crusading mentalities.

  The crusade did not conform to modern norms of inter-ethnic conflict. Although crusading propaganda, literature and popular responses (as recorded in Latin and vernacular verses and songs) were tinged with cultural supremacism, the crusades were not racist in origin or intent. Ideologically, the enemy was defined and demonised by faith not blood. Hostility was tempered by circumstance. In theory binary – ‘Pagans are wrong and Christians are right’ (‘Paien unt tort e crestiens unt dreit’) in the words of the contemporary French Song of Roland14 – in practice, when convenient or necessary, crusaders not only welcomed converts but negotiated with opponents, accepting tribute, protection money, surrenders and alliances, adapting to and taking advantage of local political and diplomatic realities. Thus in post-First Crusade Syria and Palestine cross-border treaties, alliances with Muslim rivals, even condominiums became regular. Within a few years of 1099, northern Syria witnessed battles between armies each composed of both Christian westerners, including First Crusade veterans, and local Muslim Turks.15

  The sequence of mass Holy Land crusades ended in the mid-thirteenth century. The western European outposts on the mainland of the Levant established after 1099 were finally extinguished in 1291. However, the final large-scale medieval attack on Egypt came in 1365, with piratical raids on the Levantine coast continuing into the early fifteenth century. Crusades against Muslim rulers in Spain lasted until the conquest of Granada in 1492. Crusades were proclaimed and regularly fought against the Ottoman Turks from the mid-fourteenth until the late seventeenth century, with people still taking the cross to fight them. The last formal crusade may have been the anti-Ottoman Holy League of 1684–99. Crusades against heretics, begun in 1208 to suppress dissenters in Languedoc, were still fought in Bohemia and Savoy in the fifteenth century and against Protestants in the sixteenth century. As papal weapons against political enemies, crusades continued sporadically from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Other legacies lasted even longer. Cyprus, conquered from Greek rule by crusaders in 1191, remained under westerners’ rule until 1571. The Hospitaller Knights of St John, founded in Jerusalem in the wake of the first great crusade of 1096–9, ruled the island of Rhodes between 1309 and 1522 and, from 1530, Malta, before being expelled by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798. The Teutonic Knights, founded c. 1190 during the Third Crusade, created German Prussia which, with Livonia, they ruled from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries.

  WOMEN AND THE CRUSADES

  Despite the male-gendered military imperatives of crusading and entrenched clerical cultural misogyny, from the start women were closely involved: as fellow travellers, servants and companions; as spouses giving permission for a husband’s departure or for the mortgaging of dower lands; as wives and daughters either on campaign or as relicts attempting to keep the home fires burning and family property intact; as transmitters of dynastic memories and traditions of service; and as crucesignatae in their own right. Western chroniclers, who noted their presence on campaigns from the First Crusade onwards, stereotyped women on crusade into familiar gendered categories, as wives, servants, market traders, laundresses who doubled as de-lousers, or prostitutes; while Greek and Arabic sources noted the exceptional number of women in crusader forces, Arabic writers mixing prurient fascination at western prostitutes’ erotic skills, complete with breasts tattooed with crosses, with cultural disdain that many of the women fought and died in action. Women from all sections of free society took the cross. Crusade ordinances, in 1147 or 1190, assumed the presence of women, whose behaviour they sought to regulate. It has been estimated that 3 per cent of known participants on the Fifth Crusade were women, which may exclude servants and other menials. Women and children were afforded a separate tariff in the distribution of booty after the fall of Damietta in 1219.16 Some of these would have taken the cross, not all of them necessarily in partnership with husbands, indicating possibly independent agency and individual vocation.

  Crucesignatae appear in lists of non-noble Cornish crusaders after the Third Crusade and references to others are scattered across legal and administrative documents over the following century. In 1250, 9 per cent of a shipload of 453 crusaders were women, some travelling alone and unchaperoned or with other women. Aristocratic women could play significant roles. Ida of Austria led a military contingent on the 1101 crusade. Eleanor of Aquitaine conducted her own diplomatic if not domestic policies in Syria in 1147, and suffered gendered condemnation as a result. Queen Margaret of France presided over the ransom negotiations for the captive Louis IX at Damietta in 1250 – intriguingly opposite Shajar al-Durr, ruling sultana of Egypt, a unique example of women leading in the male preserve of crusade diplomacy. In 1200, Innocent III, in accordance with papal curial legal opinion at the time, suggested rich women crucesignatae could take paid troops on crusade.17

  Women clearly also fought, certainly during crises and in extremis when all members of the army, including non-combatants, were necessarily pressed into action. They also appear regularly in support roles, such as ferrying water and supplies to front-line troops. The story of Margaret of Beverley, an educated Cistercian nun, detailed her early career as a crucesignata, saw her in arms defending the walls of Jerusalem in 1187 and later involved in fighting around Antioch, as well as various hair-raising escapades with Turkish captors. As a virago (literally manlike female warrior), Margaret was assuming a masculine identity, almost as an honorary man; in other passages she reverts to cliché feminine roles: carrying drink to soldiers;
performing forced labour in captivity; and later earning money as a laundress. Although, like almost all accounts of crucesignatae, the narrative of Margaret’s life was written by a man, her brother, so hardly reflects unfiltered feminine perspectives, the variety of experiences recounted would not have been unfamiliar, not least Margaret’s devotion to the Virgin Mary, whose association with crusading as a patron and protector may have encouraged the participation of women.18

  6. Women at a siege, from Histoire ancienne jusqu’à César, late thirteenth century.

  Male clerical disapproval of women on crusade expressed itself in moral judgmentalism and legal restrictions. Chronicle tales of illicit intercourse and lascivious women, such as the nun of Trier at Nicaea in 1097 who preferred sex with her Muslim captor to returning to her life of chastity, were fuelled by a belief that crusaders should be without sin or the stain of carnality (killing excepted), pointing to Christ’s injunction to those who would take up their crosses to follow him that they should abandon their domestic ties. Jerome of Prague blamed the failure of the Second Crusade on the presence of women.19 Wives could not go without permission of their husbands; unmarried daughters without that of their fathers; ideally, unattached younger women were not to go at all. Wives’ conjugal rights, which initially had allowed them formal control over their spouses, were swept away by Innocent III, permitting husbands to vow to go on crusade without their wives’ permission.20 Crusade preachers increasingly typecast women as obstacles to recruitment, symbols of carnal pleasure and domestic entanglements. The reality contradicted this: women in Genoa in 1217 and Marseilles in 1224, for example, materially assisted crusade promotion. Women attended crusade sermons alongside men. Countess Alice of Blois led her own regiment to Acre in 1287. Away from military campaigns, women were associated, through donations, legacies and, after 1213, vow redemptions, the offer of which potentially greatly increased women’s institutional engagement. Similarly, during the first half of the thirteenth century, church authorities determined that wives and children fully shared in a crusader’s plenary indulgence, although whether as recognition of family ties or an incentive to women not to take the cross themselves is hard to measure. What is clear, from active crucesignatae who travelled and died on crusade, to twelfth-century nuns who wanted institutional association with the Templars, to women who paid to redeem a vow or put money into a parish collecting chest, beneath the clouds of misogyny, the variegated appeal of the crusade reached across gender. Equally, women found themselves as victims, of legal and occasional physical perils of abandonment by husbands; of sexual exploitation or disparagement on campaign; and, among the crusaders’ enemies, subject to violence, slavery, rape and death.

  The Development of Christian War

  7. The iconic legendary Christian warrior Roland as a crusader.

  The ideological roots of the crusades lay deep in Eurasian faith traditions. All three Abrahamic faiths – Judaism, Christianity, Islam – developed ideologies of justified warfare when faith became synonymous with political communities: the Old Testament Israelites; the Christian Roman Empire and its successors from the fourth century AD; the Islamic Caliphate and its heirs from the seventh century. These polities fused the religious and the secular, in ways paralleled by some modern nationalisms. Classical arguments for just war were philosophical and legal. Aristotle argued that ‘war must be for the sake of peace’ (Politics VII:14), a just end that could encompass aggression as well as defence. The requirements of a supposedly virtuous state justified even genocide of opponents. Where classical public religion resembled a civic cult, the specific category of religious war hardly arose. Roman Law added just cause, a causa belli, to Aristotle’s just ends. Justification rested on upholding of contractual relations (pax, the Latin noun for peace, derived from the verb pangere, to enter into a contract). For jurists such as Cicero, this included right conduct in defence of the state, recovery of lost goods and punishment. As a form of legal redress, a just war required formal declaration by properly constituted authorities. Behind the legalisms lay the practical implications that all war against Rome’s public enemies, hostes, was just. Theories of just war tend to support established political power.

  Theories of Christian war only developed in response to Christianity becoming tolerated and then the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. When Christianity became an attribute of citizenship, it acquired necessary attendant obligations, including military service. Only the clergy, with their tenacious claims to immunity, were exempt. Laymen were encouraged to regard Christian Rome’s wars as Christianity’s wars, the empire and Church now providentially united to fulfil God’s purpose, a symbiosis promoted by the influential theologian and former imperial official Ambrose, bishop of Milan (d. 397). Enemies of the state were enemies of the Church and vice versa. With the erosion of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century, a more general theory justifying war by Christians based on first principles emerged, associated in particular with Augustine (d. 430), bishop of Hippo in north Africa, whose chief interest lay in the problem of sin and the more immediate threat of Christian dissidents. Although insistent on the separation of the secular from the divine, and never producing a codified theory of Christian just war (that had to wait for medieval canon lawyers and theologians, notably Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century), scattered throughout his writings Augustine suggested it might be legitimate to use a sinful act, violent war, to fight sin provided the act was performed with right intent, in a good cause – defence, protection or restitution of property or rights – and under legitimate authority. A key text was Romans 13:4: ‘for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil’. This could hardly be construed as wholly metaphorical, unlike St Paul’s martial metaphors (‘armour of God . . . the breastplate of righteousness . . . the shield of faith . . . the helmet of salvation’: Ephesians 6:11 and 11–17). For Augustine: ‘it is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging war’, and ‘the commandment forbidding killing was not broken by those who have waged war on the authority of God’.21 Later interpreters used Augustine to turn classical just war into something much closer to all-out religious war.

  Ambrose, Augustine and their contemporaries did not invent Christian violence. Christian scripture and theology demonstrated a complicated relationship with violence, at no time solely focused on pacifism. The Old Testament is shot through with accounts of violence explicitly condoned or commanded by God, which Christian writers such as Origen (d. c. 254) interpreted as temporal prefigurations of the spiritual struggles against sin embodied in the truths of the New Testament and the New Dispensation of the Incarnation.22 Christ in the New Testament preaches peace and forgiveness of enemies and a kingdom of heaven not of earth. The message of the Gospels, Acts and Epistles concentrated on moral and social not political hostility and violence, condemning envy, hatred and force against individuals, not communal aggression or defence. In the Latin translation of the New Testament most influential in the medieval Christian west, the Vulgate of Jerome (d. 420), the invariable word for ‘enemy’, as in the apparently unequivocal insistence to love one’s enemy (Matthew 5:43–4), was inimicus, a personal foe, not hostis, a public enemy. New Testament pacifism skirted the public sphere. St Paul urged prayers for secular rulers (I Timothy 2:2); the tribute Christ advised the Pharisees to pay to the Romans (‘Render unto Caesar’, Matthew 22:21) subsidised the army; John the Baptist accepted the occupation of soldiers (Luke 3:14) and Christ admired the faith of the centurion (Matthew 8:8–13). The Book of Revelation, a late addition to the canonical texts, provides an apocalyptic vision of Christ, at the head of a heavenly army, bearing a sword to smite the nations (Revelation 19:14–15), a favourite subject for medieval religious artists. With the emergence of Christianity as the official state religion of the Roman Empire, religious precept was forced to accommodate a public role. In Christian accounts
of Constantine’s conversion, Christ is shown as giving temporal military victory to believers. The new Christian empire required the faithful to combat hostes not just inimici. The solutions of Ambrose, Augustine and others established a legitimate form of Christian public war conditioned by temporal necessity, a legal category that did not contradict traditional Christian moral teaching on private violence and personal forgiveness. Physical warfare could combine a metaphor or imitation of the spiritual struggle against internal or external sin with necessary temporal protection of Christian lands and people.23

  8. Christ leading holy warriors dressed as crusaders, from an early fourteenth-century manuscript.

  This fusion, or confusion, of the physical and spiritual struggle, provided an emotional as well as ideological prop to the legal category of Christian just war. It also chimed with the beliefs of the newly Christianised warrior elites that dominated western Europe from the fifth century for whom war provided a central social institution and defining cultural activity, with its own aesthetics and moral code, the central proving ground for aristocratic personal virtue and public status as well as the prime mechanism for political power and economic reward. Christian missionaries thrived by promoting scriptural models sanctifying temporal authority and its associated violence, bestowing saintliness on martial Christian kings and kingship.24 The relationship was mutually beneficial. Secular warrior elites endowed and protected the Church. In return, clergy, mainly drawn from the same aristocratic milieu, sanctioned political violence through ritual: prayers; liturgies; blessings for warriors, banners and weapons. Clerically written eulogies, propaganda and chronicles justified the wars and conquests of favoured rulers. Soldier-saints made their appearance in devotions and on battlefields. Icons and relics of Christ, such as fragments of the cross, or the Virgin Mary, or dead saints habitually accompanied armies across Christendom.25 Violence became as embedded in western Christian culture as its antithesis, the monastic vocation.