The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The wars of Christian rulers against non-Christians attracted special approval. This could be grounded in the need for defence, as Christendom in the early Middle Ages (c. 700–1000) faced attacks from Muslim rulers in Iberia and pirates in the Mediterranean, pagan Hungarian Magyars in central Europe and pagan Scandinavians from the north, while expansionist conquest could imply conversion. Although forced conversion remained theoretically invalid, in practice Christianity was regularly imposed on subjected peoples, apologists being able to employ Christ’s parable in Luke 14:23: ‘And the lord said unto the servant, Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled’, a favourite text with later popes faced with the missionary opportunities of an expanding Latin Christendom. The archetype of the new minted Christian warlord was the Frankish king and emperor Charlemagne (r. 768–814), ruler over most of western Europe, whose conquests, notably the brutal annexation of Saxony from the 770s, were robustly proclaimed as religious wars, attended by prayers, masses, fasts, litanies, processions and the bearing of relics into battle. For the conquered, religion became the test of loyalty and citizenship, a means of social control and colonial oppression.

  Charlemagne’s legend as a holy warrior grew to include campaigns to Muslim Spain (where he had campaigned briefly) and even to the Holy Land (where he had not). As invasions by non-Christians persisted, so his reputation continued to exert powerful influence among military elites. The earliest written vernacular verse epics (formalised from earlier oral stories in the twelfth century), such as the Song of Roland or the stories of William of Orange, featured Carolingian wars against Muslims of Spain. The involvement of faith and churchmen in war was taken for granted. The legendary figure of Archbishop Turpin of Rheims, companion of Roland in the final battle at Roncevalles in the Song of Roland, continued to split Saracen skulls in romance and epic into the thirteenth century.26 While the contrary tradition of pacifist escape from the world, realised in monasticism, remained prominent in ideal and practice, rhetorically it complemented the martial culture of lay society. The orders of monks were seen as battling the spiritual devil in parallel to the order of earthly warriors, the ordo pugnatorum, combating the devil’s material agents. The association of faith and justified violence became entrenched. Popes Leo IV (847–55) and John VIII (872–82) offered spiritual rewards to those who fought and died for the patria Christianorum, Christendom, against ‘pagans and infidels’ in Italy.27 Wars against invading Danes in France and Britain were cast by clerical observers in terms of faith. King Alfred of Wessex (r. 872–99) was eulogised as a religious warrior against the Danes, in some sources invariably described as pagans. Otto I of Germany (r. 936–73) bore a relic of the Holy Lance (the spear reputed to have pierced Christ’s side on the cross) when he defeated the invading pagan Magyars at the river Lech in 955. Saints continued to support the faithful in battle while St Michael, armed and fighting the dragon of disbelief and sin, looked down on the faithful from church sculptures and frescoes. The warrior was sanctified and the saint militarised.

  The eleventh century saw two political developments that defined a more distinctive form of religious war: the conquest by Christian lords of Muslim-ruled territories on the peripheries of western Christendom in Iberia, the western Mediterranean and Sicily; and the harnessing of Christian just war theory and practice in the cause of ecclesiastical reformist ideas centred on the Roman papacy. Both reflected and exploited the growing class of military entrepreneurs, specialists and trained thugs, later elevated to elite social status as knights: heavily armed horsemen, mobile in action and career opportunism, encouraged and sustained by the fractured competitive politics and expanding economic wealth of western Europe – princes, counts, lords and even bishops with armed retinues to put to use. The Church sponsored wars against infidels in Sardinia, Sicily, Tunisia and Spain. Some campaigns attracted papal remission of penances for sin, for example the Normans fighting in Sicily in 1076. When he conquered Toledo in 1085, King Alfonso VI of León-Castile declared it had been achieved ‘under the leadership of Christ’.28 Such religious militancy chimed with the assertion of clerical independence from lay control, led by a succession of popes from the late 1040s content to annex both the language and the use of force to secure what they described as freedom of the Church, libertas ecclesiae, in particular, the jurisdictional primacy of the papacy. In Italy and Germany, warriors for papal interests received blessings, banners and remissions of penance. The Norman invasions of Sicily and England in the 1060s were conducted under papal banners, as well as the Sicilian invasion attracting papal offers of spiritual rewards. Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) liked to quote Jeremiah 48:10: ‘Cursed be he who keepeth back his sword from blood.’ He attempted to recruit a network of armed supporters, the militia sancti Petri, during his struggle to unseat the German emperor Henry IV (1056–1106). In 1074, Gregory tried to raise an army to defend the eastern Empire of Byzantium and ‘to rise up in armed force against the enemies of God and go as far as the sepulchre of the Lord under his leadership’.29 The reference to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem added an aura of holiness to the military enterprise, as of a pilgrimage, but also more visceral implications of providential apocalyptic contest.

  Pope Gregory framed service in papal just wars as an imitation of Christ’s sufferings, a holy act directed against ‘the enemies of the cross of Christ’ (in this case other Italians).30 This was a short step to regarding wars fought for the Church as in themselves penitential acts, a view Gregory promoted towards the beleaguered end of his pontificate. This represented a marked shift. In church theory, just war was sinful but mitigated by circumstances, just cause, right intent, due authority. The victors at Hastings in 1066, despite fighting under a papal banner, were expected to perform penance for the slaughter of battle, even though a lighter one than for ordinary homicide. Now Gregory argued that certain sorts of fighting themselves constituted penance earning absolution and remission. This formed the ideological bedrock of the spiritual benefit of the war launched by Gregory’s protégé Urban II in 1095. The official accommodation of war and religion was almost complete, as the Jerusalem war rhetorically translated traditional Christian acceptance of war as a necessary evil into a holy obligation, a penitential observance in its own right. Contemporary intellectuals noticed the change. One commented that while previous wars in defence of the Church had been deemed legitimate (legitima bella), now God had instituted an expressly holy war (praelia sancta).31 Not a legal category, as just war was, the crusade was a devotional duty commanded through the pope by God Himself.

  Crusading in Practice

  The crusade was a category of war but also a lived experience, a pattern of behaviour and a cultural mentality. As such, it defies neat delineation. Much modern scholarship has attempted to discover a unitary definition of the crusade through its theology, law and propaganda. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, crusade promoters in papal circles, certain orders of monks, mendicant friars and the emerging universities, presented crusading as a coherent Christian exercise. However, in practice, uniformity was impossible in medieval Christendom. Central church authorities lacked the bureaucratic apparatus or executive power to impose it. As an example, the central moment of individual commitment, the votum crucis, showed wide variation. The votary received the cross as a sign of the vow in many different circumstances: after public sermons; as part of a pre-arranged ceremonial, perhaps associated with the Mass; or in private conclave with local priest or confessor. The wording of vows and specific rites on these occasions – if any – were ad hoc. Chroniclers and preachers seem to have taken the details of initial assumptions of the cross for granted, describing the settings and the act in general terms. Rituals were then developed for a subsequent ceremony, chiefly associated with departure, when the cross worn by the votary was blessed, by a bishop, abbot or other priest. In some rites the cross is given as well as blessed. Local variation dominated, in common with blessings for crus
aders’ weaponry apparent from the 1090s. Despite the existence in the thirteenth century of a papal formula for the blessing of crusaders’ crosses, distinctive local rituals persisted, for instance in northern France, southern Italy, or the English west Midlands. The surviving written texts of these rituals may conceal even more divergence in practice. As they are, they illustrate the crusade as a lived not just preached phenomenon, with little fixed consistency of form or language.32 Other more personal or demotic rituals may have attached themselves to the performance of commitment, such as the Irish crusader who cut off his hair (see ‘Splitting Hairs’, p. 22).

  Descriptive language showed similar fluidity and regional difference. Until the fifteenth century, there was no agreed or consistent word for the crusade in Latin or the European vernaculars. Unlike modern historians, contemporary savants appear reluctant to provide the wars of the cross with a distinctive name. Despite ever more elaborate canonical refinement of the attached rewards and institutions, the crusade occupied no independent sacramental or juristic category. Sermons on the crusade were collected with other non-crusading ones under the general heading of ‘penance’. The theology and operation of the crusade indulgence continued to perplex academics well into the thirteenth century before the formulation of the non-crusade specific idea of a universal Treasury of Merit, a celestial deposit account banked by Christ’s sacrifice, accessible to all repentant sinners. Into the thirteenth century, papal descriptions of crusade spiritual privileges lacked clarity, consistency or precision. The text of Urban II’s 1095 decree offering the Jerusalem war as substitute for penance only survives in a single late manuscript of possibly doubtful authority. From the beginning it was unclear whether remission applied to penances on earth or to penances due in the afterlife. However, the language of penance quickly evolved into the language of sin, perhaps reflecting popular understanding of the crusade simply as a bargain with salvation as the reward. The phrase remissio peccatorum – literally ‘remission of sins’ – appears to have been used freely by twelfth-century popes, but implying the narrower remission of penalties consequent on sin, not the guilt or the sins themselves.33 Neither compendia of canon law, such as Gratian of Bologna’s seminal Decretum (first redaction c. 1139), nor theological treatises offered a definition of the crusade; not even Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274), who consolidated categories of just war, did so. For an intellectual culture characterised by attempts to define categories in law, theology, natural philosophy and social status, the omission of the crusade is notable. Academic diffidence contrasted with the popular understanding of the incentive of remission of sins and reassurance of instant salvation for those who died in a crusade battle. Even here hesitancy persisted. Observers frequently afforded the glorious dead martyrs’ palm, yet there were no crusader martyr saints. Louis IX of France (r. 1226–70), who died on his second crusade, was canonised in 1297 as a confessor not a martyr, to the disgust of his friends.

  Language remained imprecise. Non-specific metaphorical euphemisms of travel were popular: iter, profectio, passagium, via, voyage, passage etcetera, combined with epithets of holiness or destination. Directly military vocabulary circulated in blessings, descriptions of the cross (as a vexillum or martial banner) and recruiting metaphors of military service, but was less common in general descriptions of the activity, although Urban II used the term expeditio, meaning a military campaign. The extension of crusade objectives away from Jerusalem and the Holy Land from the late twelfth century, and the integration of crusading into wider systems of religious observance, prompted the use of even less specific official language. The crusade became the negotium sanctum, holy business, or, in the case of the brutal early thirteenth-century campaigns against heretics in southern France, the negotium fidei et pacis, the business of faith and peace. As an obvious analogy, the language of pilgrimage was common: peregrinatio, pèlerinage. The liturgies for blessing the cross witnessed at once the umbilical association of crusade and pilgrimage and their distinctive characteristics; the pilgrim’s scrip and staff alone did not make a crusader even though the cross could, at least in the twelfth century, be borne by a non-fighting pilgrim. Taking the cross and receiving the scrip and staff remained separate acts even when undertaken during the same ceremony. As expressed in language, the understanding of the crusade as a pilgrimage persisted, not least in the Baltic crusades and their German recruiting grounds.

  SPLITTING HAIRS

  In common with other religious activities, going on crusade was attended by ritual, performance and gesture. Histrionic public ceremonials of accepting blessed crosses and pilgrims’ scrips and staffs or wearing penitents’ garb underlined the holiness of the undertaking. More private rituals of leave-taking and departure, at least in the eyes of clerical commentators, also assumed set patterns: the crusader painfully but steadfastly tearing himself regretfully from the comforts and lures of home, focused on his higher calling; his dependants, relatives and neighbours left behind suitably lachrymose and destitute. If less staged, the reality may not have been far removed. The departure of a local lord and his retinue would inevitably have been a public affair, as would that of any householder, while supportive even festive crowds have been the perennial accompaniment to troops marching off to war. Private attitudes may have been less celebratory or stoical. Recalling leaving for the 1248 crusade some decades later, John of Joinville, perhaps channelling a literary trope familiar in vernacular poems about departing crusaders, provided an emotional vignette: ‘I did not want to cast my eyes back towards Joinville at all, fearful that my heart would melt for the fine castle and two children I was leaving behind.’34 The solemnity of the undertaking could invite extravagant symbolic gestures. The Gaelic poet Muireadhach Albanach Ó Dálaigh, who went on the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), recorded in verse how he had grown his hair so that he could then offer it to God as a votive offering before leaving on crusade, a sort of crusader’s tonsure: ‘Great till tonight my share of sins/this hair I give you in their place . . . Four years has the whole head of hair/been on me until tonight;/I will shear from me its curled crop: my hair will requite my false poems.’35 Before the Second Crusade (1147–9) the Anglo-Norman Earl William of Warenne and his brother Ralph signalled the transfer of some property and rights to Lewes Priory ‘by hair from their heads’ cut with a knife by the bishop of Winchester. Whether the hair cut from Warenne’s head was linked, as in all likelihood the property deal was, to the earl’s impending departure for the east is tantalisingly unknowable.36 However, such idiosyncratic rituals of commitment may well have been common. The personal importance of going on crusade invited such significant gestures.

  9. Departing crusaders.

  From the Third Crusade (1187–92), the cross appeared more centrally in promoters’ rhetoric and wider responses, as a banner and totem, symbol of Christ’s suffering, his offer of redemption and the command to defend his heritage. The term crucesignatus, although not new, became commonplace. From the early thirteenth century, related words emerged in northern and southern French and Catalan vernaculars (croisier, croiser, croisé, crozeia, crozea, cruzea, crozats, crozada, and so on). From 1190, Latinised vernacular crusiati/cruisiati appear in English government records. By 1300, the noun croiserie had gained currency in England and northern France, not least in advertising the chests for crusade alms in parish churches. Elsewhere crozada/cruzada (southern France and northern Spain) and crociata/cruciata (Italy and, later, the papal bureaucracy) became familiar. Some academics preferred the simplicity and suggestive universality of crux. From the fourteenth century, the Latinised vernacular word cruciata (later Spanish cruzada, French croisade) took on a technical meaning to describe the process and the proceeds of the sale of crusade indulgences, a term for a financial expedient, effectively a form of taxation, that deliberately harked back to the dignified origins of crusading. By the sixteenth century, this association of the crusade and fund-raising seriously compromised popular and political reaction to continued appeals to cru
sade. Throughout, linguistic variety and inconsistency remained, reflecting the diversity of local engagement and tradition in defiance of any imagined homogeneous conformity. At the same time, the distinct development of vernacular terms and the adoption of some of them by the Latin-writing elites reveal a non-hierarchical, non-deferential mutual exchange of ideas far from the one-way, top-down monolithic institution suggested by official pronouncements and some modern historiography.37

  The crusades were characterised by such processes of exchange, between church leadership and provincial custom, between ecclesiastical precept and lay response. Any definition must embrace the differences in reception as much as the consistencies in the core official message. Essential features of crusading included perceptions of external or existential threat; opportunities for spiritual and material gain; feelings of communal solidarity or collective and individual obligation, often fuelled by uplifting and exciting stories of crusading history and heroics or of atrocities and humiliations. Different regional or local experiences conditioned responses. Some local clergy adapted crusade appeals to suit their audiences, from overtly anti-Jewish hate campaigns in the commercialised Rhineland to using images of pole-vaulting over canals as a metaphor for attaining salvation in the waterlogged Netherlands. One of the greatest twelfth-century crusade polemicists, Bernard of Clairvaux, explicitly modulated his sales pitch according to his target audience (knights or merchants), a technique that later became standard in preaching instruction manuals. Clergy repeatedly resisted papal attempts to impose fiscal and administrative control. Local rulers modified or rejected provisions of papal offers of secular privileges for crusaders. The merchants of Lübeck, Cologne, London, Marseilles, or Genoa, while far from immune to notions of spiritual duty and reward, may have viewed the balance sheet of crusading in terms different both from one another and from recruits from rural, less commercial environments. While crusades may not have been inspired by material gain, they were sustained by material acquisition. Crusaders from regions that had frontiers with non-Christians – in Spain, Germany or the Baltic, for instance – held their own autonomous traditions of intercommunal war and material profit coloured by religious differences of identity to which the crusade merely added conceptual gloss. Beneath the equivalence of official formulae and the tropes and clichés of clerical commentators, the experience of the wars granted crusade status in Iberia and the Baltic differed from each other and from those fought in the eastern Mediterranean or within the rest of Latin Christendom.