The World of the Crusades
Page 20
BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX AND THE CISTERCIANS
The influence of Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) on the development of the ideology and practice of crusading ranks in significance beside that of Urban II and Innocent III. An early recruit (1113) to the new austere Cistercian monastic order (founded in 1098 at Cîteaux in Burgundy), from his position as abbot of Clairvaux, which he founded in 1115, Bernard became the dominant pastoral voice in western Christendom, promoting a distinctive theological message of intense spirituality and direct personal religious commitment. A spare, ascetic, charismatic figure, he pursued his advocacy of monastic rigour and the need for the laity to abandon luxury and materialism to transform their lives and secure salvation through his writing, preaching, public debate, political lobbying and formidable administrative skill. Coming from minor Burgundian nobility, he saw the potential of crusading and the new Military Order of the Templars in his programme of devotional renewal. In the 1130s his treatise De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood), composed in support of the Templars, decisively transformed the metaphorical New Testament language of spiritual conflict, such as employed by St Paul, into unequivocal religious justification of literal physical warfare in defence of the Christian faith, a task that invited salvation, the malitia of secular war transmuted into the militia of Christ. Bernard’s appeal combining spiritual and physical Christian militancy became central to the promotion campaign he led for the Second Crusade (1145–8). Recruited by his former pupil and fellow Cistercian Pope Eugenius III, his sermon at Vézelay at Easter 1146 to the French king and nobility, despite leaving no surviving record of what Bernard actually said, became iconic, as did stories of the power of his preaching and associated miracles. His orchestration of publicity, sustained by sending letters and well-briefed agents to those regions he could not visit personally and his use of the growing network of Cistercian monasteries, became a model for future organisers, as did the message he projected. His letters read like sermons, repeating central themes of vengeance, reward, duty, redemption and amendment of life. Despite the failure of the Second Crusade, acknowledged in Bernard’s own pained apologia De Consideratione (1149/52), his underlying emphasis on the crusader’s personal responsibility to and relationship with Christ and the cross became standard features of the preaching of subsequent crusades. Any squeamishness at the elevation of Christian violence was swept away as much by Bernard’s intense conviction, clarity of argument, vitality of imagery and power of rhetoric as by his startling reworking of scripture. The concentration on personal spiritual commitment in the context of communal religious responsibility sharpened the evangelic force of recruitment while allowing for the easy accommodation of different terrestrial military objectives. In 1147 Bernard himself authorised the application of crusade privileges to that summer’s campaigns against the Slavs in the southern Baltic, even suggesting that the pagans ‘shall either be converted or wiped out’, an extreme and canonically precarious view of Christian militancy.35
58. Bernard preaching.
The subsequent prevalence of Bernard’s language and his theology of Christian warfare rested on the rapid expansion of the Cistercian Order across western Christendom during and after his lifetime. Despite the Order’s original emphasis on isolation and the simplicity of the monastic vocation, it became a wealthy corporate power in church affairs, its members becoming bishops and many of its abbots acting as willing public promoters of ecclesiastical causes. The Order’s centralised federal structure, with regular general assemblies at Cîteaux, provided a convenient and dynamic network for the transmission of ideas, information and promotional material. Its close association with crusading was reflected in prayers for crucesignati within its liturgies. Cistercians played a central role in every major eastern crusade from the 1140s to the early thirteenth century. Apart from the Second Crusade, in preparation and leadership especially a Cistercian enterprise, preaching the Third Crusade was spearheaded by Cistercians such as Cardinal Henry de Marcy of Albano and Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury, who used local Cistercian abbots in his recruiting tour of Wales in 1188. The Order hosted promoters and leaders of the Fourth Crusade at Cîteaux in 1198 and 1201, provided preachers and a number of abbots joined the expedition (e.g. Abbot Gunther of Pairis, the abbots of Loos in Flanders, Les Vaux de Cernay and Luciedo). The militant Bernardine legacy found similarly vigorous expression in the assault on heretics in Languedoc, Henry of Marcy leading a military expedition there in 1181 and Arnaud Aimery, abbot of Cîteaux, with other members of the Order, playing a prominent active part in the opening stages of the Albigensian crusades. The alignment of institutional ambition and Christian imperialism found further outlet in the occupation of new Christian territories in the southern Baltic. After 1200, in Livonia, Cistercian entrepreneurs, such as Theodore of Treiden and Bernard of Lippe, himself a veteran former soldier, followed colonising German merchants and warriors under the banner of the cross. Unlike more traditional lavish Benedictine monasteries, Cistercian houses were cheap to found and relatively simple to operate, ideal as centres of missionary work and the expression of crusading ideology. They also, more widely, preserved collective corporate memory of Bernard and of their other crusade champions. The dominant role of the Order in crusading only diminished from the early thirteenth century when preaching and organisation increasingly fell to Paris-trained secular clerics and academics and then, from the 1220s, decisively to the mendicant Orders. However, the Bernardine vision remained an indelible element in crusade preaching and ideology.
Rulers involved in regional frontier conflicts with non-Christians quickly associated themselves with the greater enterprise. Alfonso VII of Castile rebranded his campaign against Almeria as a holy war, earning remission of sins before extracting a papal bull from Eugenius confirming its status in April 1147. A further papal grant of indulgences, harking back to Urban II’s offer in1095, supported an ultimately successful Catalan siege of Tortosa in 1148. Both these campaigns involved the Genoese. In Germany, a deal brokered by Bernard of Clairvaux allowed the dissident Duke Henry the Lion of Saxony and Saxon nobles to assume crusader status for the 1147 summer campaign against the pagan Abotrites and Wends across the Elbe along the southern Baltic shore (see Chapter 8). While the agreement reflected the need for political stability in Germany and suggested the usefulness of the crusade in notionally binding hostile factions together in a common cause, Bernard trenchantly urged the need for the pagans to ‘be converted or wiped out’.36 Once again the pope obliged with retrospective approval. Such dressing scarcely concealed the material motives of the 1147 Baltic campaigns, which in the event spent as much time harassing Christian cities as pagan recalcitrants. Spanish and German frontier wars had increasingly been promoted in terms resonant with the ideology of the Jerusalem holy wars, in Spain explicitly so for the previous thirty years. In 1146–8 the extensions of crusade institutions to Iberia and the Baltic were clearly not coincidental; but neither were they planned as part of some grand strategy. The process remained reactive not premeditated.
Eugenius had set no date for muster or embarkation. Despite an apparent flirtation with a Sicilian offer to carry the French army by sea, Louis VII decided to follow Conrad III along the land route of Godfrey of Bouillon to Constantinople. Others reached the Byzantine capital via Italy and the Adriatic crossing. Alfonso-Jordan, count of Toulouse, son of the First Crusade leader Raymond IV, born outside Tripoli in 1104, sailed directly from Provence. Sea transport of armies with horses and materiel, pioneered by the Venetians in 1122–4, now offered a viable alternative. A fleet gathered from around the North Sea that mustered at Dartmouth in Devon in May 1147 may have comprised 150 to 200 ships capable of carrying up to 10,000 people. This international force, which bound itself into a sworn commune for purposes of command, discipline and sharing booty, came from the rural areas of eastern England and the Low Countries but also the commercial ports of the region: London, Dover, Southampton, Hastings, Bristol, Ipswich,
Cologne, Boulogne. Sailing down the Atlantic coast, in June the armada was hired by Afonso of Portugal (1128–85) to help besiege Lisbon, then in Muslim hands (July–October 1147), the first of a number of opportunist attacks on ports in al-Andalus by passing crusaders over the next seventy years. Once the city was captured, many crusaders chose to stay. Others, mainly from Flanders and Germany, after winter refits to the ships, sailed into the Mediterranean, probably reaching the Holy Land the following spring where it is likely many were taken into service by Conrad III.
Although such disparate forces from so huge a geographical region cannot have been minutely coordinated, contingents assembled through forward planning. The North Sea fleet cannot have gathered at Dartmouth and then immediately agreed to form a restrictive commune by chance. Commerce, lordship and the Church provided regular conduits of communication to transmit crusade plans. Most forces departed between April and June 1147 and, despite contrasting fortunes, reached Outremer a year later, suggesting at least a general understanding of the timing of the mission, as well as of the determining factors of seasons, harvests and, at sea, winds, currents and, for those from northern Europe, the need for winter quarters. The precedent was known: it had taken the bulk of the first Jerusalem campaign between a year and a year and a quarter to reach Syria. The Second Crusade was slightly faster.
Not all lessons of the First Crusade were well learnt. Louis VII, despite raising money through special taxes, rapidly ran out of cash, having to seek substantial loans from the Military Orders. Militarily, the Germans suffered the same fate as the crusaders of 1101. Assembled perhaps in too great haste between the winter and spring of 1146–7, after reaching Constantinople in September 1147, the German army, possibly concerned about food supplies, refused to wait for the French army close behind, only to be severely mauled by the Turks near Dorylaeum. The army disintegrated as it retreated to Nicaea, where the battered survivors encountered the French forces. Unlike the Franks in Outremer, the Germans had not mastered the technique of a fighting march to counter the harrying tactics of the Turks. Conrad, who had been wounded in the withdrawal from Dorylaeum, retired to Constantinople for the winter before sailing to Palestine the following spring. The French fared slightly better in Asia Minor, battering their way to Adalia on the southern coast by early 1148 despite a bruising encounter with the Turks at Mount Cadmus (Honaz Daghi, January 1148). However, short of money and ships, in another echo of 1101, Louis sailed to Syria with his knights and cavalry, abandoning the bulk of the infantry to fight overland to Antioch: few made it. The Germans and the French had been undone by optimistic strategies, bad tactics, poor intelligence, indiscipline, failed logistics, canny opposition and bad weather. The Greeks, pilloried in the west as treacherous scapegoats, had not requested the crusade and were powerless to provide adequate surplus supplies even in Byzantine territory. By contrast, the Turks proved far more effective opponents than fifty years earlier.
Despite these setbacks and the Lisbon diversion, the crusaders who reached Outremer in the spring of 1148 constituted a very substantial fighting force, many thousands strong, although the French army now mainly comprised knights. On arrival in Palestine, Conrad III, flush with Greek money, hired a new army from freshly arrived crusaders. With retaking Edessa ruled out as the city’s defences had been levelled in 1146 after a failed Frankish attempt to recapture it, a campaign in northern Syria, against Shayzar or Aleppo, was also rejected, ostensibly because of a diplomatic rift between Louis VII and Prince Raymond of Antioch (1136–49) attributed by gossip to an affair between Raymond and Louis’s wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Raymond’s niece. More certainly, assistance to Antioch invited complications with Byzantium whose overlordship Raymond had acknowledged in 1145. In any case, most crusaders had gathered in Palestine. Conrad III emerged as the dominant western voice. The crusaders and the Jerusalemite leaders, after debating whether to attack Damascus, as in 1129, or Ascalon, decided on Damascus, with Ascalon a second option.
COMMUNES ON CRUSADE
Crusade armies were held together through a combination of lordship, kinship, clientage, affinity, peer pressure, shared locality and language, enthusiasm, compulsion, necessity and pay. Frequently, these pressures and conditions encouraged the creation of agreed mutual associations, from ad hoc agreements to pool financial and material resources to formal communes and fraternities, bound by oaths, in which disparate or connected groups and individuals combined together outside or complementary to the other cohesive social forces on campaign. Some associations were agreed in advance; some freely entered into during operations; some enforced by leaders during periods of crisis or to impose discipline. Such mutual alliances were necessary in crusade armies that were gathered from multiple localities, different lordships and diverse rural and urban communities, and in which allegiances could shift through the death or impoverishment of leaders. The presence or absence of monarchs on crusade made little difference. Beneath the outward display of hierarchy, most large-scale crusades depended on communal cooperation and consent without which they could not have functioned.
The pattern of communal arrangements fell into four broad categories. First, exigencies of campaigning required leaders to cooperate in providing supplies or the military needs of troops across the army through common funds such as those established at the sieges of Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem during the First Crusade; at the siege of Acre in 1189 or at Damietta in 1219. Sometimes these arrangements, as during the siege of Antioch in 1097–8, were secured by oaths, the leaders entering into temporary formal confraternities. One of the more remarkable of these sworn fraternities was established by Louis VII of France with ‘common consent’ after his army’s mauling by the Turks at Mount Cadmus early in 1148 when he put his troops under the discipline and command of the Templars.37 The second general form of communal arrangements was similar in providing for discipline within armies at the instigation of commanders but secured by oaths. Beyond simply reinforcing martial order, such provisions were necessary as in any one large army crusaders came not just from different lordships but from regions with distinct legal systems and expectations. Such communal ordinances first emerged at the siege of Antioch in 1098. They were characterised by an agreed set of detailed rules for behaviour and dispute resolution backed by judicial processes armed with draconian penalties: Louis VII’s at Metz in 1147 (although these proved abortive); successive ordinances regulating the polyglot Angevin forces in 1188–90; or the stern regulations agreed by Frederick Barbarossa, his commanders and ‘sworn in every tent’ as he set out east in 1189. These ordinances could cover everything from theft and violent crime to sexual conduct, gambling, cheating, fraud, hoarding of supplies, food prices, disposal of property, division of booty, suitable dress and the treatment of women. Not all were imposed by kings.38
59. Collective decision-making on crusade, Jerusalem 1099.
In 1147 and 1217 similar regulations were agreed by fleets from the North Sea that organised themselves into the third category of public association, the communes and confraternities established by crusaders’ mutual agreement at the very start of a campaign. The most famous of these was the commune established in May 1147 at Dartmouth, a port on the extreme south-west coast of England, by a coalition crusade fleet drawn from across the North Sea region including west Germany, northern France and southern and eastern England. Besides the agreed regulations of behaviour and punishment, all significant decisions were reached by occasionally rancorous debate in open assembly.39 This model bore similarities to corporate civic institutions appearing in increasing numbers in towns and cities across western Europe. For urban crusaders pooling resources in such a communal arrangement made logistical and business sense. A shipload of Londoner crusaders in 1190 adopted Thomas Becket (a Londoner himself) as their commune’s patron. Sea travel encouraged such sworn associations as companies frequently possessed no previous formal social ties. In 1250 one such crusade company engaged a collective class action against their
cheating shippers. However, such associations were more normal than may appear: English crusaders in 1190 were generically described as coniurati, joined together by oaths.