The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  17. William of Normandy giving arms to Harold of Wessex as a sign of honour.

  The competitive dynamics of lords, landed knights and paid armed retainers stimulated aristocratic social and geographic mobility. The landed warrior classes were not farmers; like their Near Eastern counterparts, they were rentiers although, unlike Turkish emirs, western lords’ legitimacy remained tied, rooted in specific localities, by ancestry, adoption, appointment or acquisition. However, a lord could exercise lordship wherever he possessed retinues and income. While this usually imposed geographic limits, in a social context where enhanced profit, status and power could be gained by force or patronage, territorial constraints could give way to more distant career opportunities, whether in a neighbouring valley, province, kingdom or beyond: for German Saxon nobles, across the Elbe into the lands of Slavs and Balts; for French lords, into Spain to fight the Moors of al-Andalus or across the English Channel; for Norman knights, over the Alps into southern Italy, Sicily and Byzantium. The availability and capabilities of western knights joined with opportunity in the Near East and crisis in Byzantium to make the First Crusade possible. It also explains why Alexius I asked for their help in 1095.

  Continental Exchange

  This conjunction was not random. The image of the First Crusade devised by contemporary Latin sources emphasised its unexpected uniqueness, a divinely inspired irruption of the west into the east. Much of this involved deliberate mythologising. The leaders of the western armies that set off in 1096 knew where they were going and how to get there. The caustic monastic observer Guibert of Nogent’s sneering commentary on the peasant children who set out with their parents only to ask at each town they came to whether it was Jerusalem only works as the comic insult it was intended to be if it was assumed Guibert’s preferred elite knew better.16 The speed with which a sequence of large armies reached the agreed rendezvous of Constantinople in 1096–7 alone indicates cooperation with the Greeks and prior understanding of the eastward routes, knowledge available from pilgrims, diplomats, adventurers, mercenaries, merchants and exiles. At least one leader, Peter the Hermit, had been to Jerusalem, as had the father of another, Count Robert II of Flanders. The south Italian Norman commander Bohemund had intimate experience of fighting the Byzantines in the west Balkans in the 1080s. Other crusaders, such as Guibert of Nogent’s childhood friend Matthew, from the Beauvaisis, had seen service with Alexius I in the years before the First Crusade.17 The Latin narrative sources’ almost total avoidance of Alexius’s request for military aid in 1095 tells its own story. Even if not deliberate suppression, ignoring the Greek invitation elevated the role of the pope and gilded the autonomous agency of the faithful of western Christendom. Yet paradoxically these same sources reveal how the grand interpretation of a campaign into terra incognita misleads.

  On 7 June 1099 the armies of the First Crusade finally reached Jerusalem after, for most of them, almost three years on the road. That evening Duke Robert of Normandy, camped outside the Damascus Gate, received an unexpected visitor, Hugh Bunel, a fellow Norman and notorious celebrity murderer. Twenty-two years earlier, Hugh had decapitated Mabel of Bellême at her castle of Bures, ‘where she was relaxing in bed after a bath’. Fleeing Mabel’s sons, William the Conqueror’s agents, and bounty-hunters, Hugh had lived among Muslims for twenty years.18 Hugh was far from the only expatriate westerner the crusaders encountered. In Constantinople in the winter of 1096–7 they found settled western communities, the frangopouloi – ‘the Frankish people’. By the 1090s, these included Hungarians, Germans, Danes, Anglo-Saxons, Swedes, Venetians and Amalfitans as well as Frenchmen and south Italian Normans who had thrown in their lot with the Greeks after being defeated in the Balkans in 1085. Some joined the crusaders for the march across Asia Minor in 1097. Frangopouloi were not the only familiar faces in the east. When Bohemund’s nephew Tancred arrived at Adana in Cilicia in late September 1097 he may have been met by a Burgundian adventurer called Welf. More certainly, in the same month, another crusade leader Baldwin of Boulogne was joined at Tarsus by a privateer fleet of Flemings, Antwerpers and Frisians who, it was alleged, had been plying their piratical trade for eight years under the command of a certain Winemar, a former member of the Boulogne comital household. Winemar’s flotilla later seized the port of Latakia during the crusaders’ siege of Antioch.19 Whether these pirates had followed the crusade east, as other western fleets did, or had been preying on Mediterranean shipping before the crusade set out, is unknown. However, their presence and that of other convoys from the North Sea and Italy suggests that the Levant was far from inaccessible to western shipping by the 1090s.

  Another feature of the crusaders’ progress towards Palestine was revealed by their adaptability to Near Eastern politics and diplomacy. The Byzantine alliance provided the catalyst for negotiations with the Fatimids, spread over nearly two years before finally breaking down a few weeks before the assault on Jerusalem.20 Surviving crusaders’ letters and early narratives suggest they quickly grasped the divided circumstances of the Seljuk princes and how they had terrorised the indigenous peoples of the region. The crusaders could call upon Byzantine diplomats and their own interpreters who knew Arabic, probably from southern Italy (see ‘Interpreters’, p. 58).21 Bohemund himself probably spoke Greek, useful as it was also spoken by many Antiochenes and others in northern Syria. Close contacts with Armenians were forged by Tancred of Lecce and Baldwin of Boulogne during campaigns into Cilicia in the autumn of 1097. Baldwin soon after found himself ruling the Armenian city of Edessa beyond the Euphrates. Armenian sources reflect an initial welcome for co-religionists. A Provençal clerk appeared alert to relative eastern and western currency exchange rates in Syria in 1099.22 None of this is surprising, as it continues the tradition of contact and exchange between western Europe, Byzantium and, more remotely, the Arab world. The story of Peter the Hermit, the outraged Jerusalem pilgrim who in some accounts sparked the whole enterprise, epitomised the threads of contact, the movement of people and goods.

  The most apparent human links were elite exchanges. The chief agent was Byzantium, the commodity military service. Scandinavians and Russians had been in imperial service for generations, joined by the 1080s by Germans and Anglo-Saxons. From the 1040s and 1050s, recruits were actively sought from England and Normandy. From the 1030s and 1040s, companies of Normans from southern Italy, valued as heavy cavalry, were regularly hired to supplement Byzantine troops defending frontiers in the Balkans and eastern Asia Minor. Their commanders often secured imperial titles, grants of lands and political influence. From the 1070s, Norman regiments appeared in imperial service under Byzantine rather than their own command. Turks were also recruited, like the polo-playing Tatikios, son of a prisoner of war, who later accompanied the First Crusade to Antioch, having previously commanded a regiment against the Pechenegs in the Balkans in the 1080s.23 Good relations with the German emperor in the 1080s had produced German contingents. After 1089 a rapprochement with the papacy under Pope Urban II opened other opportunities. In 1090, Count Robert I of Flanders, a Jerusalem pilgrim a few years earlier, sent 500 troops to defend strategic areas of Asia Minor against the Turks. By the 1090s, western clergy, including Englishmen, were permanently settled in Constantinople.24 Until the early 1070s, Byzantium had been a territorial Italian power. In the 1040s it was sending expeditions to contest rule over Sicily (and recruiting Normans to help), while Italy was still viewed from Constantinople as within its sphere of interest and influence. Southern Italy and Sicily retained significant communities of Greek speakers and Orthodox Christians. Greek emperors continued close, if sporadically fraught, correspondence with the papacy and other Italian leaders, such as the abbot of Monte Cassino. Italian commercial cities established trading posts and workshops in Constantinople, and beyond. Silk, manufactured or shipped through Byzantium, was widely sought after in western Europe. The regular commerce of people produced an eleventh-century northern French Latin–-Greek phrase list for such useful
things as asking for food, drink, clothes, beds and transport.25

  Byzantium stood at one corner in a much larger trading area that was transformed during the eleventh century, with the First Crusade as much a symptom as a cause. In 1000 the carriers of long-distance trade in the Mediterranean had chiefly been Muslim and Jewish shippers, working out of ports in Egypt, north Africa and Muslim Sicily: ‘not a single Christian boat floated on it’.26 By the 1090s, Italian merchants and Italian shipping had intruded and begun to dominate, especially Genoese, Pisans and Amalfitans, with Venice assuming a controlling interest in Greek waters. In part the reasons for this were political. The great fourteenth-century Tunisian historian and historiographer Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) argued that Christian conquests around the Mediterranean, combined with the decline of the Umayyads in al-Andalus and of the Fatimid Empire, had undermined Muslim investment and interest in sea power. This can be traced to the Genoese and Pisan naval competition with Muslim pirates over Sardinia in 1015/16 or the Pisan raid on Palermo in 1063, as well as the Norman conquest of Sicily (1060–91). Trans-Mediterranean commerce developed in parallel with the political disruption.27 The weakening of Byzantium, the disintegration of the Fatimid Empire in north Africa and the Norman conquest of Sicily damaged traditional trading networks, presenting fresh opportunities for western, particularly Italian merchants already embedded in international trade in slaves, gold and textiles, carried in the early part of the eleventh century mainly on Muslim and Jewish ships. Amalfitan merchants founded a pilgrims’ hospital in Jerusalem in the 1070s. Muslim commercial communities were settled in west Italian ports such as Naples, whose linen was probably exported in quantity to north Africa. Cheaper labour costs encouraged these exports to high wage economies of the Maghreb: Amalfi even shared a currency with Muslim Sicily and north Africa.

  INTERPRETERS

  The inevitable obstacles of language that confronted crusaders as they moved east, south and north out of western Europe were novel only in degree. Many regions in medieval Europe and the Mediterranean were linguistically heterogeneous. The unifying languages of religion, learning, law and government such as Latin, Greek or Arabic concealed extremes of divergent local dialects and different tongues, such as northern and southern French or High and Low German. French-speaking elites ruled English speakers in England, Flemish speakers in Flanders, Italian, Greek and Arabic speakers in Italy and Sicily, just as Germans increasingly ruled over Slavs and Balts. Turkish lords in the Near East ruled subjects speaking or worshipping in Arabic, Greek, Armenian, Syriac and Hebrew. Byzantine Greeks employed speakers of French, English, Latin, Turkish, Norse and Slavic. Politics, diplomacy, government, administration, commerce, even law relied widely on translation, multi-lingualism and, thus, interpreters.

  For crusaders, interpreters were important in promotion, during campaigns, in diplomacy, and in ruling conquests. While crusade sermons were often preached, and almost always recorded, if at all, in Latin, although at times with macaronic elements, audiences demanded the vernacular. Where, as often, the preacher was foreign, interpreters became essential, as in Wales and Germany in 1188 or England in 1267.28 Communication presented similar problems on campaign. When persuading the cosmopolitan crusaders of the North Sea fleet in 1147 to attack Lisbon, the Portuguese bishop of Oporto used Latin as a lingua franca so that interpreters could translate his words to each separate linguistic group.29 This cannot have been confined to formal occasions; few large eastern cities until the mid-thirteenth century were internally linguistically homogeneous and most at some stage had to deal with the different languages of locals, in central and eastern Europe, Byzantium, Sicily or Cyprus. Familiarity through previous trade or pilgrimage eased some of these contacts, as witnessed by an eleventh-century Latin–-Greek phrase book.30 Dealing with the different languages of the Near East during the First Crusade’s march to Antioch would have been facilitated by Greek and Armenian interpreters; Tatikios, the Byzantine general attached to the crusade, was a Christianised Turk. The necessary further translations from and into Frankish languages may have depended on the bilingual skills of western settlers in Byzantium or French settlers in southern Italy and Sicily. At Antioch, negotiations with Kerboga of Mosul were conducted by Herluin, possibly a southern Italian Norman, who ‘knew both languages’, implying Arabic but probably not Turkish (an ignorance shared by Arab emirs), his naming a rare event for interpreters who in the sources usually remained anonymous or unmentioned.31

  18. Woodcut from the Credo of the crusader John of Joinville showing crusaders and Arabs or Turks with an interpreter on crutches.

  Once established in the Levant, western conquerors and settlers constantly required translators, to conduct fiscal, commercial and legal business and diplomacy: treaties, surrenders of castles and cities, and ransoms. Accounts of detailed discussions across linguistic divides are either formal inventions or suggest the availability of sophisticated language skills. Until the dragomen (from the Arabic tarjuman, interpreter) who shepherded later medieval Levantine pilgrim-tourists, it is hard to find servants of Arabic- and Turkish-speaking rulers with mastery of western tongues, so it appears much of the translation work – oral and scribal – rested with Syrian and Palestinian subjects of the Franks or increasingly with bilingual Franks themselves, such as Reynald of Sidon and Humphrey IV of Toron who appear as translator-negotiators with Saladin in 1191–2. The precision of diplomacy required deeper knowledge than demotic Arabic, French, or the lingua franca of port and marketplace. Parallel difficulties were encountered in the Baltic. When the German conquerors staged a Christian morality play for new Lettish converts at Riga in the winter of 1205/6, interpreters were needed to explain what was going on to no doubt bemused locals.32 Despite sharp cultural and religious divisions, prolonged settlement and rule extended the network of bilingual and multi-lingual officials, although identifying formal interpreting roles has proved elusive, in Outremer and elsewhere. Two remarkable features remain: the apparent ease of contact across linguistic divides and the absence in sources of a ubiquitous presence without which no crusade beyond western Christendom could have functioned.

  19. Byzantine silk in the west: the cope of St Alboinus, Brixen, Italy.

  The main driver of increasing western involvement in cross-sea trade lay in huge economic inequalities. Monthly shop rentals in Egypt may have matched entire annual royal revenues in some northern European kingdoms. Payment in gold for goods and slaves from the north made southern markets attractive for northern exporters, encouraging aristocratic investment, especially in cities that lacked an extensive rural contado or hinterland, such as Genoa, Venice or Amalfi. Subsequent economic and political problems in north Africa, Egypt and Byzantium then encouraged Italian shippers to cut out the Muslim and Jewish middlemen by building their own fleets and increasing the capacity of their ships. After the Norman conquest of Sicily, ports such as Palermo resumed their position as commercial hubs for the whole Mediterranean and facilitated plundering the north African coast, such as the Pisan raid on Tunisia in 1087. While perishable food remained restricted to local traffic, grain, olive oil, wine, sugar, timber, pottery, ceramics, as well as slaves, gold, ivory, silk and other textiles, began to circulate. As northern wealth increased, so did the import to Europe of higher-value goods from Egypt: ivory, rock crystal and spices. Trade knew few denominational boundaries. Eleventh-century Pisans decorated their churches with north African ceramic pottery. By the mid-twelfth century, Genoa’s combined trade with Egypt and north Africa made up about 45 per cent of the whole, while its largest market (30 per cent), Latin Syria, acted as the entrepôt for the Muslim interior.33

  Growing commercial links opened new channels of transmission, some unexpected. In 1076, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) was engaged in diplomatic exchanges with an-Nasir, emir of eastern Mauretania (in modern Algeria). Commending two papal associates to the emir, Gregory indulged in an uncharacteristic burst of ecumenism: ‘we believe in and confess, albeit in a different
way, the one God, and each day we praise and honour him as the creator of the ages and ruler of this world’.34 Such knowledge of Islam in the west was extremely rare – at least in public – but ever more available. Both the Norman conquest of Sicily and the northern Spanish advances into al-Andalus (Toledo fell in 1085) placed significant Muslim populations under Christian rule. The lords of the Maghreb in north Africa, controlling one of the supply lines of gold and ivory from sub-Saharan Africa to the north, were clearly worth cultivating. By the twelfth century, permanent Italian trading posts dotted the north African littoral, in one of which, Bugie in Algeria, the Pisan merchant and mathematician Leonardo Bonacci, better known as Fibonacci (c. 1170–c. 1240/50), encountered Hindu-Arabic numerals, which he later popularised across western Europe. Similar protected and privileged status was afforded to Italians around the Mediterranean, from Algeria to Alexandria to Constantinople, a process in places accelerated but not initiated by the First Crusade. Cultural exchange flowed in the wake of commerce and conquest, such as Norman Sicily entertaining Fatimid art, architectural design and administrative practices, or the language skills of south Italian Normans. Generations before the First Crusade, the links between western Christendom, Byzantium and the Muslim world had been tightening, a process the great expedition to Jerusalem reflected, disturbed, but ultimately strengthened.