The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  26. Sicilian twelfth-century reliquary of the True Cross, possibly similar to that of the kingdom of Jerusalem.

  The month-long siege of Jerusalem prompted far less epic coverage than the drama of Antioch. Militarily it was very different. Conducted against the threat of the imminent arrival of a Fatimid army, the siege revolved around assault not blockade. The battle-hardened veteran army of a few thousand achieved a remarkable victory accompanied by the now familiar orchestrated religious enthusiasm – visions of divine favour, penitential processions, etcetera – and technical ingenuity – elaborate siege machines built with the help of professional engineers and material cannibalised from Genoese ships. The brutal exultation of success gave way to a final episode of political infighting as the leaders chose Godfrey of Bouillon not Raymond of Toulouse to rule the conquered city. There was no suggestion of handing authority to local Christians, not least because they lacked a suitable political elite. The conquerors quickly imposed their own secular and ecclesiastical hierarchy. A new fragment of the True Cross was usefully discovered that was to serve as the iconic totem of the new regime for the next eight decades. Divine support was immediately called upon, as the still fractious crusade leadership united for one last time to defeat the Fatimid relief army under al-Afdal himself at Ascalon on 12 August. As with the victory over Kerboga at Antioch in 1098, triumph at Ascalon was crowned in the eyes of those reporting it by the seizure of material booty: ‘the treasures of the king of Babylon’ (the crusaders’ name for Egypt): ‘pavilions, with gold and silver and many furnishings, as well as sheep, oxen, horses, mules, camels and asses, corn, wine, flour’.40 This victory marked the end of the First Crusade (see ‘Plunder and Booty’, p. 94).

  The improbable success of the First Crusade was a triumph of organisation, determination, morale, improvisation, military leadership and luck. Given its disjointed command structure, the crusade’s achievements appear even more remarkable. Yet the crusaders were quick learners. Following the near-disaster of a split army at Dorylaeum, the feuding, rancorous and competitive leaders thereafter united when confronting sieges, battle or political crisis. Funds were pooled at Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem. Bohemund assumed agreed tactical command during the siege of Antioch. The assault on Jerusalem was coordinated. This collective leadership challenged assumptions about optimum command structures while allowing for tensions between leaders and between the leadership and the mass of troops to be aired and defused without the army falling apart. Cut off for long periods from outside help, in constant fear of annihilation, the crusade’s unity came from circumstance: divided they were sure of failure. The leadership’s effective use of targeted spiritual interventions exploited the ideological imperative. The politics of conviction did not exclude the politics of acquisition; one led to the other.

  PLUNDER AND BOOTY

  27. First Crusade booty: the Shroud of St Josse, from the abbey of St Josse, Normandy; Persian embroidered silk allegedly brought back by Count Stephen of Blois.

  Writing a decade after the Council of Clermont, Abbot Baldric of Bourgueil imagined Urban II offering crusaders ‘the goods of your enemies . . . because you will plunder their treasures’.41 This was hardly a surprising promise. Crusades, like all medieval armies, relied on plunder and booty to incentivise troops and sustain campaigns. Violent foraging, seizure of food when access to markets failed, signalled the transit of notionally friendly regions in central and eastern Europe of the land expeditions during the First, Second and Third Crusades, while shaping the progress and prospects for armies in hostile territory. Every major crusade to the eastern Mediterranean sought re-endowment, by agreement (with Alexius I in 1097 or Tancred of Sicily’s 40,000 gold ounces in 1191), conquest (Thrace by Frederick I in 1190, Cyprus by Richard I in 1191 or Constantinople in 1203–4), coercion (the payment of substantial – 20,000 gold pieces – protection money by Tripoli and Jabala in 1099), or victory in battles or sieges (on the First Crusade alone, at Dorylaeum, Antioch and Ascalon, or at Iconium in 1190). Booty could feed directly to the troops who collected it or indirectly through endowing lords with fresh resources to pay their followers. Division of spoils formed a settled expectation among recruits both before and during campaigns. Formal sharing arrangements featured in agreements between crusaders at Dartmouth in 1147, Richard I and Philip II in 1190, and the crusaders and Venice in 1201. Anxiety, suspicion, competition and resentment over distribution of plunder marked the aftermath of successful operations, for example at Nicaea (1097), Ma’arrat-al-Numan (1099), Lisbon (1147), Acre (1191), Constantinople (1204) or Alcazar (1217). Despite the image and reality of reckless mayhem, and frequent appeals for restraint by commanders, plundering could also be chillingly ordered. Following the Genoese capture of Caesarea in 1101, booty was carefully allocated: the bulk of goods went to the commanders, ships’ captains and ‘men of quality’, with a fifteenth going to the galley crews; the remaining 8,000 troops received 48s of Poitou and two peppercorns each.42 At Constantinople in 1204, after an initial licensed free for all, collection and distribution were centralised. After the capture of Damietta in 1219, allocation was calculated according to status: knights; priests and local recruits; non-noble troops; wives and children.43

  28. The most famous crusader booty: the Four Horses of St Mark’s, taken from the Hippodrome, Constantinople, after the Fourth Crusade, 1204.

  The importance of booty went beyond necessity, constituting in the minds of contemporaries and participants justified reward. The earliest narrative of the First Crusade combined the spiritual and temporal dividends of steadfast faith and success in recording the crusaders’ supposed morale-boosting battle cry at the battle of Dorylaeum: ‘today if it pleases God you will all be given riches – divites’. These could be massive: Tancred allegedly stripped 7,000 marks worth of silver from Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock alone.44 The diversion of the Fourth Crusade to Constantinople in 1203 was driven, one observer suggested, ‘partly by prayers and partly by reward – precio’.45 This could be taken for almost all crusades, from Palestine to Spain, from German merchants’ profits in Livonia to northern Frenchmen’s freebooting and land-grabbing in Languedoc. Provided the intent was suitably devout, material gain was not seen as a deplorable ambition, even in the original Clermont decree. Doing God’s will, crusaders were free to indulge in legitimate grand larceny, the fruits of force and victory, although their plundering was no more extravagant than that by any other contemporary armies. In inspiration and action, piety and pillage operated in tandem, as on the piratical Venetian crusade of 1122–5 that gained territory for the cross along with brutal plunder and stolen relics for Venice. Crusading treasure seized as booty from the Levant was enthusiastically welcomed home by Genoa between 1099 and 1101, as was Spanish crusade plunder by the citizens of Cologne in 1189. The most obvious and possibly most widely disseminated booty were relics (see ‘Sacred Booty’, p. 252). Temporal swag could include silks, gold, gems, precious rings, arms, military fittings, statuary and other exotic items from the Orient, sometimes – as in Genoa after 1099 or Venice in 1125 and after 1204 – in very large quantities: the plunder from Constantinople has been estimated as more than enough to fund a European state at the time for a decade.46 A Limousin lord, Gouffier of Lastours, was alleged to have befriended a lion during the First Crusade and more reliably to have displayed looted cloth hangings as mementos of his adventure. Fatimid linen, silk and cloth of gold embroideries obtained during the First Crusade, possibly loot from the Egyptian camp at Ascalon, came to be deposited in Cadouin Abbey in Perigord and Apt Cathedral in Provence, transfigured into objects of Christian reverence.47 Alfonso VIII of Castile claimed an Almohad banner after his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa (1212). John of Alluye, a French crusader in the 1240s, returned with a sword made in China, although this, like other souvenirs, may have been a purchase not a battle prize.48 Such trophies enhanced the prestige of the returning hero (John of Alluye’s sword is carved on his funerary gisant, p. 104) as well
as offering the chance of being converted into cash or property. The most famous crusade booty were the four horses from the hippodrome at Constantinople displayed from the 1260s on the west front of St Mark’s in Venice. Most plunder possessed more mundane nature and use, providing immediate subsidy for crusaders on campaign, pay for return passages or means to recoup initial capital outlay.49 Crusading could not have functioned without the reality of plunder and booty in a balance of military pragmatism, material attraction and spiritual inspiration that belies easy construction of conflicting motives or an unhistorical dichotomy of the secular versus profane.

  29. The defence of Jerusalem.

  Nonetheless, the crusaders’ success owed as much to the incompetence, ill-fortune and divisions of the polyglot city states of the region as to their own resilience. The campaigns of 1097–9 were played out against the regional aftershocks of the Seljuk invasions. Long a politically fractured region, the civil wars in Syria and Iraq following the deaths of Malik Shah and his dominant vizier Nasim al-Mulk in 1092 opened political space for foreign intrusion, an opportunity encouraged by the Fatimids, who initially saw the crusaders as useful allies. A notable feature of the First Crusade was how easily it surfed the shifting currents of regional politics and how quickly its leaders became politically acclimatised. Yet the crusaders’ capture of Jerusalem in 1099 bequeathed a costly legacy. The defence of the Holy City and the Holy Land became a totem of western Christian identity, a culturally defining obsession and an impossible political ambition.

  Trophies and Memory

  The immediate impact on western Europe came with returning veterans laden with trophies, mementos, plunder, stories and scars: pet lions, luxury linens, loose chippings, lost hands and tall stories.50 Critics were silenced or won over. Survivors rapidly dictated or penned descriptions of the Jerusalem war, which were quickly refashioned by professional monastic writers into more crowd-pleasing literary accounts. Writing a generation later, a monk who had attended the Council of Clermont passed over the events of the crusade because he assumed his audience was already familiar with them through books, secular songs and sacred hymns.51 The memorialising literary genre reached from liturgical songs to monkish chronicles to more overtly secular Latin and vernacular poems, some of epic content and length. Reputations were made (and a few destroyed) by stories of the Jerusalem journey. Old soldiers’ tales were legion, as each area claimed their own particular heroes, such as who was the first man across the walls at Jerusalem: Raimbold Creton from Chartres, who lost a hand, or the brothers Ludolf and Engelbert of Tournai.52 Bohemund helped fashion his own heroic legend during a promotional tour of the west in 1106–7 and earlier when he shipped Kerboga’s tent to his home port of Bari.53 The exotic drew attention to the special status of returned crusaders, such as palm leaves from Jericho or the sensational legend of Gouffier of Lastours’ tame lion, which, after being rescued by Gouffier from a snake, followed him everywhere before drowning in pursuit of his saviour’s departing ship. Gouffier brought back more tangible treasures such as Muslim banners, textiles and rings.54 Families – like Gouffier’s – later played on their links to crusaders by curating and displaying war trophies. Other veterans sought to enshrine their crusade credentials by donating relics acquired on campaign to religious houses. Fame operated reciprocally. Robert of Flanders milked his status as a Jerusalemite in his donations of Holy Land relics and in his charters. Conversely, he and Robert of Normandy were luminously commemorated as crusaders in mid-twelfth-century stained-glass windows at the French royal abbey of St Denis.

  30. Commemorating the First Crusade in stained glass at St Denis in the mid-twelfth century.

  The rapid memorialisation crossed art forms. Carvings and frescoes in parish churches across western Europe alluded to crusading ideology, its Biblical context or directly to incidents on the campaign, the heavenly intervention of saints at Antioch proving especially popular. The twinned emphases on militant violence and religious conviction, on the agency of devout warriors and the immanence of Christ, were common across visual, aural and literary representations, the victories at Antioch and Jerusalem praised as acts of faith and feats of arms. Such transference could endow secular material objects with numinous quality, as in the case of two famous luxury Egyptian silks woven in the 1090s that survive at Cadouin in the Dordogne and Apt in Provence. The Cadouin silk has been associated from the thirteenth century with Adhemar of Le Puy. Both were perhaps acquired by crusaders either as part of gift exchanges with Fatimid ambassadors or as booty after the battle of Ascalon. While other bits of eastern loot preserved their crusading provenance, these silks were reinvented as sacred icons by the religious communities where they were housed: the Cadouin silk became the shroud of Christ; that of Apt the veil of his grandmother St Anne.55 In some ways such a transformation was appropriate as the crusade powerfully witnessed the physicality of Christian history, a process of literally getting near to Christ and to the events of the Bible, to tread in holy footsteps. Thus were crusaders lastingly transfigured into the new Maccabees and the new Israelites.

  31. Shroud of Cadouin.

  CRUSADE MEMORIALS

  Memory played a prominent role in medieval European culture. This took many forms: commemorative endowments of monasteries, churches and chapels; special liturgies and religious services; written ecclesiastical calendars memorialising events or the deaths of patrons; the collection of letters or creation of literary memory in chronicles, verse or family histories; the conservation of relics of past deeds or their portrayal in statuary, frescoes, mosaics or stained glass; the oral record in family legend, domestic story-telling and public performance, such as sermons. Such memorials promoted crusading and the reputation of crusaders. Past events framed present action and inspired future behaviour. The repeated appeals to the luminous example of the First Crusade, ‘the worthy deeds of our famous ancestors’, resonated for centuries.56 Liturgies and hymns celebrating the conquest of Jerusalem proliferated.57 The circulation of chronicle accounts of past crusades featured prominently in preparations for new enterprises, as did evocations of past triumphs (and disasters) in crusade preaching and propaganda.

  Crusade memorialisation assumed concrete forms. Some were ostentatious, such as crusaders’ ceremonial presentation to churches or religious houses of plundered eastern sacred relics, often in lustrous reliquaries, a habit especially noticeable after the First and Fourth Crusades; the secular loot displayed as symbols of dynastic or corporate achievements; the First Crusade Levant textile hangings in the Lastours family museum at Pompadour in the Limousin or the public display of Venetian trophies from Constantinople; or the programme of First Crusade stained-glass windows at the abbey of St Denis in the 1140s.58 More private, if also designed to be seen, were statues, such as that of the returning Lorraine Second Crusade veteran Hugh of Vaudemont at Belval; or the Joinville family epitaph at Clairvaux, composed by the crusader John of Joinville in 1311, which expressly honoured his many crusading ancestors.59 The crusader John of Alluye was buried at the abbey of La Charité-Dieu, near Tours in northern France, around 1248. The monks remembered him in their prayers. His stone effigy conveyed a subtle message commemorating his crusade (1241–4) as it shows him, in full armour, wearing a sword whose elaborate pommel indicates a Chinese origin. At the very least visitors to the abbey might have been impressed by the exoticism of the carving.60

  32. Crosses carved on the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  33. Statue commemorating the return of Hugh of Vaudemont from the Second Crusade.

  34. The tomb effigy of crusader John of Alluye, c. 1248, showing his Chinese sword.

  Generically, the path of the crusader was the path of Christ, the path of the cross, an act self-consciously following the commands to ‘take up the cross’ (Matthew 16:24; Mark 8:34; Luke 9:23) and to ‘do this in remembrance of me’ (Luke 22:19). It was not only the rich for whom these injunctions held power. The less wealthy could participate in memoria
l ceremonies and liturgies or brag of their exploits with equal vigour and imagination. For concrete memorial, they had fewer options. However, one habit may reflect a common desire to leave a mark: the crosses carved on church walls from the chapel of St Helena beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre to parish churches like that in the English village of Bosham on Chichester Harbour, each testimony to an instinct for recognition and record.

  CHAPTER THREE

  ‘THE LAND BEYOND THE SEA’: LATIN CHRISTIAN LORDSHIP IN THE LEVANT, 1099–1187

  Looking back a century later, the Mosul historian Ibn al-Athir described the appearance of western reinforcements in the Levant in 1104: ‘There arrived . . . from the lands of the Franks ships carrying merchants, troops and pilgrims and others.’ He used the same formula in an account of the westerners’ attack on Damascus in 1129: ‘They all gathered, the king of Jerusalem, lord of Antioch, lord of Tripoli and other Frankish [rulers] and their counts and also those who had come by sea for trade or for pilgrimage.’1 Military strength, commercial opportunity, religious magnetism, sea power and links with the west established the Franks (as the settlers were universally if ethnically misleadingly known; ifranj in Arabic), in their settlements in Syria and Palestine that came to be called Outremer, the land beyond the sea.

  Settlement

  The lands occupied by the western invaders were never very extensive. At their greatest extent, they stretched from Cilician Armenia and the Upper Euphrates valley in the north to the Negev and Gulf of Aqaba in the south, a distance of some 600 miles. Except for the isolated enclave of Edessa beyond the Euphrates to the east, the conquests were physically limited by chains of mountain ranges running north/south, with only a few rivers (such as the Orontes and Litani) and natural gaps (as at Homs, the Biqa valley and the road from Acre through Galilee to Damascus) allowing access from the coast to the interior. Beyond the mountains to the east, agrarian plateaux gave way to the fertile valleys of the Jazira in the north and arid scrub leading to desert in the south. Cutting north/south through this region, the great rift valley of the Jordan led to the Dead Sea. The narrow fertile coastal plain, interrupted by hills in the Lebanon and around Haifa, and flanked in Palestine by the dry Judean hill country, opened out in the south towards the intractable Negev desert between Palestine and Egypt. Failure to annex the great cities of the Syrian interior, Aleppo and Damascus, or extend control to the Nile valley, let alone challenge the Seljuks in Iraq, left the invaders without the major economic and political centres of the region. They were restricted to an area of immense cultural significance for all three Abrahamic faiths, but of patchy economic productivity, embracing fertile valleys and constricted plains, arid hillsides, semi-desert and parched wilderness, an inconveniently configured territory not much larger than modern England or a medium-sized state of the USA, such as Alabama.