The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The pattern was repeated. The bulk of the other western armies arrived in Constantinople in June 1101. Leaving William of Aquitaine and Welf of Bavaria behind, William of Nevers immediately set out after the Lombard army. After reaching Ankara in mid-August, he changed course, turning towards Iconium (Konya) which he failed to capture. Pressing forward towards Cilicia, his army was destroyed by the Turks at Heraclea (Ereghli). Following an increasingly familiar scenario, the cavalry deserted the infantry, the leaders escaping to reach Antioch. A similar fate awaited William of Aquitaine. Setting out from Constantinople in mid-July along the 1097 route, in early September his army was also defeated at Heraclea, only some of its leaders, including Duke William, managing to flee to the coast or make it through to Syria. These disasters were not down to inadequate preparation or ignorance of local politics and conditions. Some accused the Greeks, most blamed the crusaders’ own sins, cover for over-optimism and incompetence. Despite Emperor Alexius providing material and logistical support, the experience of 1101 showed how difficult it was to sustain large armies in hostile terrain facing an undefeated united enemy. This highlighted the good fortune enjoyed by the First Crusade, gilding even further the lustre of the first Jerusalem journey.

  Western Aid for Outremer

  The failure of 1101 reshaped western responses. With the exception of what is now known as the Second Crusade (1145–8), subsequent armed assistance for Outremer before 1187 rested with smaller expeditions, whose numbers made travelling by sea possible, in rhythm with the increasingly popular bi-annual Levant marine passages of pilgrims and merchants. The timing of cross-Mediterranean sea travel was regulated by the prevailing Mediterranean winds and currents, which effectively restricted access to spring and autumn. Such military tours, usually lasting months not years, were attuned to the incremental needs of the Franks of Outremer not cosmic strategy. Occasionally, direct Outremer appeals elicited wider efforts at western recruitment, as during the crisis after the defeat and death of Roger of Antioch at the battle of the Field of Blood in 1119, which led to the Venetian crusade of 1122–4 and the capture of Tyre (1124); or in 1127–9, with the recruitment of an army to attack Damascus coinciding with the arrival of Count Fulk V of Anjou to become the future king of Jerusalem. Other expeditions appeared more speculative, offering service to whatever project the rulers of Outremer had in hand. In 1110, as part of an extended Mediterranean progress that took in Byzantium as well as a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, King Sigurd of Norway was persuaded to join Baldwin I’s siege of Sidon. Reputation came from physical presence in the Holy Land. Sending sums of money hypothecated on some future promised expedition instead, as Henry II of England (a grandson of Fulk V of Anjou through the count’s first wife and so the nephew of Kings Baldwin III and Amalric) discovered, earned few plaudits.5

  49. Countess Sybil of Flanders’s cross. She settled in Jerusalem 1157–65.

  The roll call of visiting western luminaries testified to the status a Jerusalem veteran could hope for back home: Eric I of Denmark (1102–3, though he died in Cyprus before reaching Palestine); Sigurd of Norway (1107–10); Charles of Denmark (1111, nephew of the First Crusade commander Robert II of Flanders and a future count of Flanders himself); Conrad of Hohenstaufen (c. 1124, the future Conrad III of Germany and leader of the Second Crusade, the only European crowned head to campaign twice in the Holy Land itself). Some, like Conrad, made more than one trip: Fulk V twice (1120 and 1128); Count Hugh I of Troyes thrice (1104–8, 1114, 1125); Count Thierry of Flanders four times (1138, 1147, 1157 and 1165); his son Philip twice (1177–8 and 1190–1). Crusading ran in families, such as the dukes of Burgundy; the counts of Flanders, Burgundy, Blois-Champagne; the Italian Montferrats or the English Beaumonts; or the minor French comital houses of Montléry, le Puiset, Lusignan, Brienne or Joinville and the upwardly mobile English Glanvills. The prestige of a Holy Land campaign reflected the glamour that clung to the heroes of 1096–9 whose reputations had quickly been transformed into legend. Those left out of the glory of the First Crusade appeared eager to gain some post hoc association, which may explain why Philip I of France, excluded by excommunication from a role in 1096, allowed his daughter Constance to marry Bohemund, the son of a parvenu Norman adventurer, during his 1106–7 tour recruiting for a new eastern enterprise. Such was Bohemund’s fame, witnessed by his starring role in the earliest narratives of the First Crusade, that men apparently flocked to get him as godfather to their children and Henry I of England had to ban him from entering England lest he signed up too many Anglo-Norman lords for his new via Sancti Sepulchri (in fact an invasion of the western Balkans designed to topple Alexius I, an expedition that met with dismal failure in 1108).6 Bohemund’s reputation survived failure, giving his name (originally a nickname; his baptismal name was Mark) to six successors as princes of Antioch and earning him a distinctively eastern-style domed mausoleum over his tomb at Canossa in Apulia that may have been designed to evoke the Holy Places. These micro-crusades helpe shape a tradition. Despite persistent uncertainties over crusaders’ privileged entitlements, by the 1120s taking the cross had become familiar.7 In the early years of the settlement, there was always some necessary campaigning on offer, to defend or expand the frontiers. This in turn attracted more permanent recruits in the shape of the Military Orders.

  The Military Orders

  50. Bohemund’s tomb, Canossa, Puglia, Italy.

  The Military Orders provided crusading’s most original contribution to the institutions of medieval Christendom. Their combination of charitable purpose, religious discipline and armed violence tapped into aristocratic mentalities of aggressive piety and anxious self-justification. Their defining visual as well as institutional images of militancy, charity and the cross, as displayed for example on Templar seals, expressed the complexity of Christian teaching on the crusades. In retrospect appearing a logical extension to the militant religiosity that produced the First Crusade, originally the Military Orders were products of the circumstances of the Frankish enclave in Palestine and the plight of the increasing numbers of visiting pilgrims. After 1099, the countryside around Jerusalem and roads from the coast remained unsafe, especially for unarmed pilgrims now arriving in large numbers. In 1119 a group of pious knights, already attached to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, established a formal confraternity to provide military protection for pilgrims to Jerusalem and Jericho. Led by Hugh of Payns from Champagne and Godfrey of St Omer in Picardy, these knights followed the canons’ rule, swearing vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, and depended for income on alms. Recognised by the Council of Nablus (1120) and licensed by the patriarch of Jerusalem to defend pilgrims in return for remission of their sins, the knights were given quarters at the royal palace in the former al-Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount (Haram al-Sharif), known to the Franks as the Temple of Solomon. After the king moved across the city to the Tower of David a few years later, the knights took over the whole al-Aqsa site as their headquarters, providing them with their resonant name, the Order of the Temple of Solomon, Templars for short. After a successful European recruiting tour in 1127–9, Hugh of Payns received recognition of his Order at the Council of Troyes (1129), confirmed by subsequent papal privileges, and enshrined in a detailed rule. Lingering, and never wholly suppressed, disquiet at such a blatant confusion of the spiritual and the material, of the profession of a regular canon with that of a knight, elicited a famous polemical apologia from the leading preacher, pastoral theologian and ecclesiastical publicist of his day, Bernard of Clairvaux’s De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood, c. 1130). This wove traditional motifs of Christian self-sacrifice, martyrdom and salvation together with a conveniently radical refashioning of St Paul’s spiritual metaphors for fighting for Christ into literal exhortations to physical warfare for the faith, in Bernard’s catchy phrase, the Templars transforming sinful warfare, malitia, into God’s militia.8

  51. Templar seal.

  52. The al-Aqsa mosque, headqu
arters c. 1119–87 of the Templars.

  The Templars proved immediately popular, attracting international recognition, recruits and patronage in Outremer and across western Europe. Visiting pilgrims and crusaders could become temporary confratres (as did Fulk of Anjou on his first trip in 1120). Others joined permanently, some after long secular careers, bringing with them lucrative donations and further networks of family contacts. Rapidly, from the 1120s, the Templars built up a large pool of patrons and estates across western Europe as well as the Levant, supplying Outremer with troops and external funding, as a proportion of profits from Military Order holdings in the west was sent to the east. This cross-Mediterranean presence led to the Order becoming used by crusaders and others as bankers. By the time of the Second Crusade, the Templars were providing loans, military advice, leadership and a de luxe hotel service for western crusaders. In places, the Templars created lasting physical symbols of their calling in building round churches on their property, evoking the Holy Sepulchre or the al-Aqsa in towns and countryside across western Europe. Within Outremer, the Order was soon manning forts and castles, especially to protect strategic roads, as well as providing a standing military regiment.

  53. Templar round church, Tomar, Portugal.

  The Order of the Hospital of St John began with a pilgrim hospice in Jerusalem founded in the early 1080s to cater for pilgrims and funded by Amalfitan merchants. In common with hospital institutions across western Christendom, the laymen who ran the hospital assumed the character of a religious community, with nursing as their vocational duty. After 1099, under its administrative head Gerard, the hospital and its community attracted lavish donations from local rulers and western patrons and, in 1113, recognition and protection from the pope. By the 1120s, the hospital had acquired extensive estates in Italy, Catalonia and southern France as well as lands and rents across Outremer. The Jerusalem hospital grew into a huge business, with hundreds of beds for patients of all religions and both sexes, providing a social service for exhausted and sick pilgrims, the local community, pregnant women, abandoned children and the destitute. Nursing remained an obligatory vocation for all brothers of the Order. Early military association may have come from its provision of field hospitals on military campaigns. The Order’s lay religious brotherhood may have acted as the model for the early Templars. The debt was soon reciprocated when the Hospitaller Order assumed direct military functions. As an increasingly well-funded private institution, a wider social and political role in cash-strapped Outremer was almost inevitable. In 1126 members of the Order were made responsible for units in the Jerusalemite army that attacked Damascus. In 1136 a castle built at Bayt Jibrin to resist raids from Ascalon was assigned to the Order, possibly the second to be so assigned. By the 1140s, the Order appears to have become militarised on the lines of the Templars, in the process becoming more aristocratic in recruitment, although not abandoning the formal obligation of nursing. With their military function came further responsibilities for manning (and funding) castles. The Jerusalem hospital continued providing an ecumenical service to the whole community, its local importance transcending politics as well as religion: apparently Saladin allowed ten Hospitaller brothers to continue to tend the sick in the hospital for a year after his capture of the city in October 1187.9

  The two Jerusalem Military Orders became leading political players in Outremer (and, indeed, the west). Although frequently at odds with each other, the Orders featured prominently in deciding military strategy. Jurisdictionally independent of all except the distant papacy, they could act as supposedly neutral arbiters in politics and financial management. As the costs of defence rose, decreasingly matched by the resources of the crown and local secular nobility, the Orders’ power and influence increased as they controlled more castles and frontier military sites.10 By the 1180s, the combined Templar and Hospitaller contribution of around 700 knights to the full muster of the kingdom of Jerusalem was roughly equal to that from all other sources. The Orders grew into large international corporations, their fighting knights an elite minority, supported by military sergeants, clergy, lay officials, servants. Some professed knights were more estate managers than warriors. There were even groups of nuns who wished to be attached to the Orders. Effective in channelling funds, faith, recruitment and property management, the Orders prompted imitation. As efforts to conquer Muslim al-Andalus gathered pace, local Iberian Military Orders were founded: Calatrava (Castile, 1164); Santiago (León, 1170), Alcantara (Castile, 1176) and Avis (Portugal, c. 1176). Within Outremer, the Order of Lazarus (1130s) was modelled on the Templars, mainly attracting knights with leprosy; in 1198 the hospitaller Order of St Mary of the Germans, founded at Acre in 1190, was militarised under a Templar-style rule, later known as the Teutonic Knights; so, in 1228, was the English Order of St Thomas of Acre, originally founded for canons in 1190/1. The institutional alliance of mission, holy war, ecclesiastical exemption and religious discipline proved popular on Christendom’s northern frontiers, with the Swordbrothers of Livonia (c. 1202) and the Prussian knights of Dobrin (Dobryzn, c. 1220).11

  7. The crusades of 1122–48 and the Second Crusade.

  Members of the Military Orders were not technically crucesignati. As brothers they did not take the cross, and, except for the temporary confratres, their commitment, like a monk’s, was for life. However, they shared the crusader’s purpose, idealism and spiritual privileges. They also shared a social and cultural milieu. Involvement in crusading and the Military Orders often ran in tandem through families. As striking, the Orders left tangible and lasting memorials to crusading, in castles and fortified headquarters in the east, in Iberia and the Baltic and, across western Europe, in their round churches evoking Jerusalem, the remains of their religious houses and manorial properties, or the preserved names of the places and estates they owned: the Rue du Temple in Paris; the Temple Church, St John’s Gate, Knightsbridge, and St John’s Wood in London; Tempelhof in Berlin.

  The Holy Land Crusades of the 1120s

  The Venetian Crusade, 1122–5

  A series of major crises in Outremer in the 1120s provoked the first concerted western military campaigns since 1101. Antioch was leaderless after the defeat and death of its prince, Roger of Salerno, at the Field of Blood in 1119. Baldwin II of Jerusalem, previously count of Edessa, acted as Antioch’s regent, having only assumed the crown after a divisive succession struggle following Baldwin I’s death in 1118. Baldwin II failed to impose as firm a grip on his factious nobles, some of whom still questioned his right to rule. Although attacks from Iraq had ceased after 1115, banditry and raids from the Fatimid garrison at Ascalon as well as the continuing threat from Egypt itself undermined security in the south, while in the north Aleppo and Damascus alternated between alliance and attack. Gloom was deepened by economic and environmental difficulties, such as earthquakes (1113, 1114, 1117) and plagues of locusts (1114 and 1117). The Jerusalem government appealed to the papacy and Venice for help. Pope Calixtus II responded by sending the doge of Venice, Domenico Michiel, a papal banner. The doge took the cross in 1122. The subsequent Venetian campaign (1122–5) demonstrated how enthusiasm for holy war operated in collaboration with a range of material and pious objectives while confirming the significance of sea transport’s increasing ability to convey substantial forces.

  54. Relics of St Isidore taken by Doge Michiel during the Venetian crusade. Fourteenth-century mosaic, St Mark’s, Venice.

  One Jerusalem witness put the Venetian fleet at 120 ships, carrying 15,000 Venetians and pilgrims, the latter presumably paying customers, and, significantly, for the first time, 300 horses. The fleet also carried timbers for catapults, ladders and siege machines, a precedent for future sea-borne expeditions.12 On their way eastwards, the Venetian crusaders plundered Corfu to put pressure on the new Byzantine emperor, John II Comnenus (1118–43), to confirm Venetian trading rights. The capture of Baldwin II by Balak, ruler of Aleppo, in April 1123 coincided with the fleet’s arrival at Acre. I
n May 1123 the Venetians decisively destroyed an Egyptian naval squadron patrolling the southern Palestinian coast, and captured Egyptian supply vessels with their cargos of weapons, siege timbers, gold, silver and spices.13 Except for the siege of Sidon in 1110, the Venetians had not previously played much of a distinctive role in Outremer, unlike Genoa and Pisa. Now they took the opportunity to gain a permanent stake in the increasingly lucrative Levantine trade. Over the winter of 1123–4 they negotiated a deal with the regency Jerusalem government for the capture of Tyre. In return for their assistance and a loan of 100,000 gold pieces to pay the Jerusalemite army, Venice would receive a third of the conquered city, free trade, legal autonomy, the use of their own weights and measures, and an annual tribute of 300 bezants. After a five-month siege, the Damascene garrison surrendered in July 1124. Returning to Venice in 1125, Michiel’s fleet terrorised its way through the Aegean and Adriatic, sacking cities and looting islands of booty and relics. The Venetians staked men, money and ships on a grand scale, a substantial investment risk from which they derived substantial capital return, holy relics and remission of sins: good business all round.14 The crusade’s benefits were material, enhancing Venice’s civic identity, not least in physical terms through the display of holy booty, such as the relics of St Isidore deposited in the treasury of the Cathedral of St Mark’s.

  The Damascus Crusade, 1129

  The capture of Tyre, the release of Baldwin II a few weeks later and the arrival in Outremer in 1126 of the heir to Antioch, Bohemund II, son of the First Crusade hero, seemed to promise greater stability. After besieging Aleppo in 1124 and defeating a Mosul army in 1125, Baldwin II now planned a major assault on Damascus, to follow raids towards the city in 1125 and 1126. An embassy sent to Europe in 1127, including the Templar leader Hugh of Payns, sought soldiers for the Damascus campaign; the securing of Fulk V of Anjou’s agreement to marry Baldwin’s heir, his eldest daughter Melisende; and papal recognition for the Templars. Crusaders came mainly from France: Champagne, Flanders, Normandy, Provence as well as Anjou, although equivocal evidence exists of Hugh recruiting in England and Scotland.15 Subsequent coordination betrayed inept strategic management. While Fulk arrived with the spring passage of 1129, Hugh, having to secure his Order’s recognition at the Council of Troyes in January, only reached Palestine months later, which may explain why Baldwin launched the attack on Damascus as late as November. The Frankish army penetrated to within ten miles of Damascus before bad weather, inadequate supplies, indiscipline among its foragers, and effective Turkish harrying tactics forced a retreat. One local chronicler stated that the Damascenes paid 20,000 dinars for the Franks’ withdrawal, with a promise of annual tribute to follow.16 If true, this was not what the western crusaders had come 2,500 miles to achieve. For Baldwin, while welcome, it would hardly shift the terms of Syrian politics decisively in his favour. Unlike the siege of Tyre, the Damascus campaign lacked the advantages of being able to invest the city closely from territory already held. Supplies, communication and mobility all presented predictable problems. Baldwin II’s political imperative to use the Damascus enterprise to assert his authority, newly upholstered by the presence of Count Fulk as an experienced heir, failed to mitigate the logistical shortcomings. Extending Frankish rule to the cities of the Syrian interior made political, strategic and economic sense. However, successful inland sieges usually came not by forced conquest but by military pressure producing political negotiation or diplomatic accommodation, as at Antioch in 1098, only taken through treachery. The Franks at Damascus faced an additional obstacle. A Damascene witness noted that the Turkish auxiliaries were eager to fight the Franks because they were infidels.17 The politics of the jihad soon became a public touchstone for the politics of Syria.