The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Similarly, while the ecclesiastical authorities and canon and secular law treated all crucesignati the same, social and economic reality determined otherwise. Most of those who served on crusade, even those who had taken the cross, fought for pay, often concealed as gifts.38 Armies were recruited and held together by networks of lordship, patronage, clientage, loyalty, kinship, employment or, occasionally, fraternities, formal associations of mutual assistance. From the later twelfth century, recruitment patterns adapted to increased royal government involvement and the availability and greater prevalence of central lay and church funds. Each campaign oper-ated an internal market of paid service. For those whose livelihood depended on service to a lord, the voluntary nature of the crusade commitment may have remained notional. While some of the crusades to the east appear to have been unusually reliant on the private commitment and enterprise of individual lords, those lords’ entourages included many who had little or no effective choice. Similarly, recruitment among the growing commercial communities and artisans ensured a diversity of motives, attitudes and experience. Peasants, artisans and clergy crusaders did not necessarily share the increasingly exclusive chivalric mores of the military leadership. Not all laymen would necessarily agree with or even understand the spiritualised vision of the enterprise promoted by the clergy. However, most of the surviving written evidence, inscribed and composed by clerics, emanates from the context of the knightly classes, the leaders, not the led. Most modern historical definitions of the crusade and crusading do the same. The appeal to women further exposes the hazard of generalisation. Crusading might appear strongly gendered, a masculine activity involving women only to the extent of consent, domestic and occasional financial support or, later, the proceeds from their redeemed vows. Did the crusade mean the same to the nuns who attached themselves to the Military Order of the Templars, or to those who abandoned their convents to join up, as to their knightly comrades? Like many male crusaders, women who followed the cross pursued occupations: servants, laundresses, prostitutes, but also, in one case at least, as a medical physician. Male anxieties about the differences in female responses surface in chronicle accounts that tacitly recognise contrasting gender experiences. Women are rendered as honorary men, supporting the war effort in labour or sacrifice, or confined to woman’s work, such as de-lousing the troops and their clothes, or as dangerous libidinous threats to masculine clerical constructs of sobriety and chastity. Within the domestic setting at home, women played significant roles – in protecting family property and in the process of memorialising crusading family members. On crusade they did not abandon agency.

  The sociology of crusaders suggests contrasting experience and perhaps understanding of the enterprise between volunteers and conscripts, leaders and led, the rich and the un-rich, men and women. Inevitably, in the cacophony of publicity, recruitment and response, the nuances of official messages could get lost, reducing them to ones of anxiety, excitement, reward, violence and salvation. Active crusading faced the perennial paradoxes of war: idealism and squalor; nobility and degradation; excitement and tedium; service and ambition. No definition can ignore the risk and sacrifices, the sheer awfulness of so many of the campaigns, disease and death. The immediate experience of camp life and combat may well have superseded ideological awareness. Nor can the suffering of victims be shunted to the margins. The crusade was a cruel act of religious devotion aimed at the violent suppression (i.e. killing and enslavement) or expulsion of opponents who, in many cases, only constituted a threat within the aggressors’ own invented belief system. Ironically, crusades against those who did pose a direct danger to western Europe, the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century or Ottoman Turks from the fourteenth century, attracted only disjointed and relatively modest support.

  The crusade was originally constructed as an act of charity towards fellow eastern Christians while it explicitly denied the equality of shared humanity with non-Christians. Of course, this did not make the crusade unusual or uniquely vicious in medieval Eurasia. Nonetheless, the strenuous idealism of much eastern Mediterranean crusading must be set beside the use of the crusade as cover for German conquest and lucrative colonisation in the Baltic; the crusade as sanctifying Spanish annexation of Moorish al-Andalus; or the crusade as offering entrepreneurial nobles novel opportunities to enhance status, prestige and dynastic profit both at home and abroad. By casting profane actions in a sacred setting, the crusade was defined as special, in war, penance and politics.

  That did not make crusading immune from criticism, entertainment, humour or satire. Rather the reverse. It is testament to how quickly the Jerusalem wars became embedded in western European culture that they quickly generated diffuse popular as well as elite commentary, from erudite scrutiny to ribald lampoon. It is hard to imagine, without the new focus on the history of Jerusalem, that a mid-twelfth-century lord of Montboissier in northern France would have called his son Heraclius, the name of the Byzantine emperor who restored the Holy Cross to Jerusalem in 630.39 Similarly, the appearance of St George and scenes from the siege of Antioch in 1097–8 on friezes and frescoes across the west demonstrates the free embrace of First Crusade legends and motifs and a general acceptance, at least by artistic patrons, of a fusion between the religious and the martial.40

  Yet beside acknowledgement and enthusiasm came criticism, a constant companion from the start. Critics fastened on the ideology and conduct of crusades and their associated institutions, from the Military Orders to the cash redemption of vows and sale of indulgences. The tension between religion and war continued to attract notice, the awkward alliance of self-indulgent warrior values with the puritanical selflessness of religious idealism, honour and glory embracing penitent self-abnegation. Repeated failures cast nagging doubt on God’s approval as well as on crusaders’ motives and behaviour. The triumph of the First Crusade in 1099 proved a toxic inheritance, insistent yet impossible to repeat. The material cost, human price and scale of violence provoked unease. By the later thirteenth century some argued that the crusade was actually impeding efforts to overcome Islam, a criticism later applied to crusades against Baltic pagans. The extension of penitential war to targets within Christendom stimulated concerted opposition, and not just from those targeted. Whereas crusading as a form of Christian expression remained widely popular, individual crusades were not docilely accepted. They had repeatedly to be sold, a process not without difficulty if surviving sermons are any indication. The apologist tone in public pronouncements and narrative accounts tells its own story. Charges of folly, hubris, hypocrisy, deceit, avarice and peculation swirled around all crusading ventures. Not all regions provided equally fertile recruitment grounds. Indifference marked much contemporary witness. The crusade never became a compulsory religious observance; active crusading remained a minority pursuit. Among the engaged, the tone of Latin chroniclers or vernacular versifiers spanned reverence, enthusiasm, admiration, objectivity, scepticism, irony, lament, cynicism and hostility, sometimes in the same work, as in the thirteenth-century English monk Matthew Paris’s massive Chronica Majora (to 1259).41

  Social engagement expressed itself in diverse vernacular settings: poetry, songs, plays, sculpture, painting, stained glass, sacred relics and commemorative objets d’art. Popular stereotypes of the crusader appeared. Romances of crusade heroics and images of great warriors gained wide currency. Frescoes of Richard I in fictional combat with Saladin adorned English royal palaces. Less exalted but perhaps no less familiar appeared the thirteenth-century French poet Rutebeuf’s descroisié, the self-justifying armchair crusader enjoying in comfort the benefits of his redeemed crusade vow, afraid of the sea and of risking his material possessions by actually going on crusade.42 The abuse of the crusade was a ripe topic in fiction. In versions of the twelfth- and thirteenth-century Roman de Renart the conventions of crusade narrative are subverted, for grimly comic effect. The crusader’s cross is described as a cheap cloth or valueless rag (a charge repeated less humorously h
alf a century later by a Languedoc heretic).43 The anti-hero, Renart the Fox, unabashed, takes the cross to avoid punishment, having no intention of fulfilling his vow, or uses the crusade as an excuse to rob and murder his supposed companions. The satire exposes the naivety of clerics and lords in trusting superficial crusade gestures. The insincerity of crucesignati represents a running theme of contemporary commentary, here deployed for comic effect. Renart pokes fun at the whole idea that Muslim rulers might be frightened of a crusade. However, as notable as the ridiculing of crusade piety, the Renart cycle closely mimics the themes presented by crusade promoters.44 The humour depends on the audience recognising what is being satirised, as it did in Jean Bodel’s play Jeu de St Nicholas (c. 1200), in which satire becomes farce, as a crusade is fought, crusaders are massacred, and Saracens improbably converted by a statue of St Nicholas that also proves handy at protecting their treasure.45

  10. Richard I jousts with Saladin: tiles from Chertsey, made for King Henry III c. 1250.

  In a different register, acquaintance with core elements of crusade ideas and propaganda is reflected in popular sacred songs and in vernacular verses of troubadours, trouvères and minnesingers where the competing loyalties of the lovelorn crusader, torn by loyalty to his beloved and obligation to the cause of the cross, provided a rich seam for poetic invention, the tropes of crusade, courtly love and chivalric duty playing against each other in lively tension. Vernacular poems and songs across western Europe reference motifs of the crusade message – cross, obligation, outrage, infidel insult, revenge, honour, collective shame, the hope of salvation, the celebration of violence, the conflict between secular desire and religious obligation – as staples of lay mentalities, adding varied context to the images of holy warriors in stone and glass.46 Liturgies for blessing the cross and sacred songs commemorating the triumph of 1099 shared emphasis on temporal battle, physical struggle. Stories associated with the sacred booty of relics or secular campaign trophies were of human adventure. The vernacular and Latin verse and prose epics and romances are drenched in blood, as are the equivalent accounts by participants. Associated manuscript illuminations dwell on images of the warriors of Christ. Stories of carnage and death pepper the uplifting anecdotes used by preachers. The qualities of the crusade heroes and anti-heroes were those of the warrior. The Church’s offer of penitential release and salvation supplied necessary reassurance for a duty cast in terms of death and glory.

  Not all were impressed. Henry II of England was reported as commenting acidly on attempts by the patriarch of Jerusalem to persuade him to go on crusade in 1185: ‘these clerks can incite us boldly to arms and danger (arma et pericula) since they themselves will receive no blows in the struggle’.47 This was slightly unfair. Many clergy, including Henry’s own archbishop of Canterbury, campaigned and died alongside the warriors they recruited. However, the king’s assessment was correct: ‘arms and danger’. Cast as a spiritual ideal, crusading became a pattern of social behaviour, but one derived from armed combat both as metaphor and fact. Despite the elevated promise of salvation, war defined the crusade.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE MEDITERRANEAN CRISIS AND THE BACKGROUND TO THE FIRST CRUSADE

  He attacked and broke into the city by force and sacked it. Large numbers were killed, even those who had taken refuge in the Aqsa mosque and Haram. He spared only those who were in the Dome of the Rock.

  . . . our men entered the city, chasing the Saracens and killing them up to Solomon’s Temple . . . They killed whom they chose, and whom they chose saved alive . . . After this our men rushed round the whole city seizing gold and silver, horses and mules, and houses full of all sorts of goods.1

  Both passages describe the capture of Jerusalem in the late eleventh century by foreign invaders. The first, by a thirteenth-century Arabic historian from Mosul using earlier sources, recounts the sack of Jerusalem in 1078 by Atsiz, a freelance mercenary commander of nomadic Turcomans originally from the steppes beyond the Caspian Sea. The second, from one of the earliest surviving Latin chronicle narratives of the First Crusade, celebrates the victory of the western European army at Jerusalem on 15 July 1099. The similarity between the two should give pause before assuming the uniqueness of the First Crusade. Jerusalem changed hands four times in the thirty years before the western armies’ arrival. The crusaders were relative latecomers to the violent piecemeal annexation of the cities and resources of Syria and Palestine by warlords from outside the region. The image sometimes presented of the First Crusade as a barbaric irruption into the irenic peace of a stable, sophisticated and tolerant Arab Muslim world misleads. The crusaders were just one among many bands of intruders on the make. It was precisely because the Near East was already a scene of violence, competition, disruption and dislocation that they prevailed at all.

  11. The Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem.

  The great Jerusalem expeditionary force of 1096–9 was made possible by simultaneous crises of political authority across western Eurasia. Over a couple of generations in the mid-eleventh century, the already ragged political map from the Atlantic to the Iranian plateau was further shredded as old and new empires were undermined, collapsed or replaced. Regional fragmentation of political authority increased competition for power. Foreign intruders proliferated: nomadic steppe Turks in western Asia; northern Christian warlords in Muslim Spain, al-Andalus; Normans in southern Italy and Sicily. Driving forces ranged from tribal searches for improved economic prospects to elite mercenary opportunism. The disruption to established political systems offered rewards to mobile groups around the Mediterranean basin: north African Berbers, Ethiopians, Nubians, Kurds, Armenians, Scandinavians, Normans and other ‘Franks’, or the tribes of the Eurasian steppes attacking or serving the armies of Greek emperors and Egyptian or Iraqi caliphs and sultans. Such dislocation prompted changes in commercial networks, demographic patterns, systems of economic exploitation and relations between established religions and civil society, from new legal emphases in Sunni Islam in the east to the assertion of ecclesiastical independence in the west. These transformations revealed strands of exchange between the three continents surrounding the Mediterranean in goods, objects, ideas, information, texts, fashions, mercenaries or slaves. Although such contacts could operate over long distances and across confessional and religious frontiers, societies in medieval Eurasia were inevitably constrained by geography and technology. For most, horizons were local; even on the vast Eurasian steppes locality was tribal. Yet the political eruptions of the eleventh century that produced the First Crusade exposed a connected world.

  12. Cultural exchange across geographic, political and religious frontiers: an eleventh–twelfth-century central Mediterranean ivory casket.

  The Fraying of Empires

  In 1000 the Mediterranean was circumscribed by four empires: the Abbasids of Iraq; the Fatimids in Egypt; the Greeks of Byzantium; the Umayyads in Spain; and a fifth of more evanescent aspiration, the Germans in Italy. By 1300, the Abbasids, Fatimids and Umayyads had gone; the German role in Italy had been reduced to transience; and Byzantium only survived in severely reduced circumstances. Even at the height of their strength, each empire concealed faltering or unrealised cohesion. In largely mono-faith European Christendom power and legitimacy rested on the exploitation of mainly agrarian societies, geographically rooted in local regions and confected tribal identities (Franks, English, Saxons, Flemish, Burgundians, Danes, and so on), making ideals of pan-European political unity inherited from the Christian late Roman Empire and revived by the Frankish empire of Charlemagne (768–814) victims of material localism. Islamic polities were different. Fusing belief, law and political authority within the conceptual universalism of a frontierless Muslim community (the umma) of shared language and culture, the original Arab empire created in the seventh and eight centuries inherited and maintained a more urbanised, commercially prosperous economic system from its Romano-Byzantine and Persian predecessors. Its assertion of supra-tribal and supra
-regional political legitimacy was matched by international exchange of commerce and learning. Merchants and scholars passed relatively freely across an Arabised society that stretched from the Atlantic to India. Below this internationalism, diversity of ethnicity and religious affiliation were recognised, as conversion to Islam was slow and regionally patchy. Significant Christian and Jewish communities remained. The heterogeneous culture of the Arab empire thus stood in contrast to more monochrome identities fashioned in the fragmented polities of western Europe.

  1. The Mediterranean powers in the eleventh century.

  However, Islamic absence of formal separation of religious, legal and political authority invited problems of legitimacy. While the caliphate embodied the inherited authority of the Prophet within the umma, providing a focus of political legitimacy, this did not necessarily imply an active caliphal role. Beneath the caliph’s theoretical authority, local political power could emerge in a succession of regional dynasties without disrupting the perceived theoretical unity of the Islamic system even when central caliphal authority was ignored or, by 1000, rejected, as in Spain and north Africa. Given a monetised economic system reliant on a taxpaying populace, ruling elites could be mobile, dependent less on long-standing local roots than on control of cities and access to urban and rural rents in order to recruit mercenary or enslaved troops. This structure of power reflected the Arab empire’s construction in the seventh and eighth centuries. It imposed a foreign ruling elite on existing Roman and Persian fiscal structures, buttressed by Arab migration and the military harnessing of nomads, such as the Bedouin and those from the steppes on the new empire’s peripheries. The system that emerged sustained diversity of regional power within a cohesive Islamic cultural polity that stretched across two continents.2 In contrast with the divisions in Christian Europe, in the Arab sphere political rivalry and dynastic ambition played out beneath a unifying cloak of a caliphal authority that bestowed legitimacy while wielding little direct power. The common western European insistence that title to power depended on its substance, seen in the anathematising of do-nothing kings, rois fainéants, belonged to a different political universe. However, medieval Islamdom was to change during the two centuries of the Near Eastern crusader interlude with the end of the traditional caliphates and the emergence of more recognisably unitary autonomous states.