The abbot is armed with spiritual weapons and supported by a troop of monks anointed with the dew of heavenly graces. They fight together in the strength of Christ with the sword of the spirit against the aery wiles of the devils. They defend the king and clergy of the realm from the onslaughts of their invisible enemies.20
The Carolingian aristocracy was convinced that the success of their earthly battles depended on their monks’ disciplined warfare, even though they fought only with “vigils, hymns, prayers, psalms, alms and daily offering of masses.”21
Originally there had been three social orders in Western Christendom: monks, clerics, and the laity. But during the Carolingian period, two distinct aristocratic orders emerged: the warrior nobility (bellatores) and the men of religion (oratores). Clerics and bishops, who worked in the world (saeculum) and had once formed a separate ordo, were now merged with monks and would increasingly be pressured to live like them by abjuring marriage and fighting. In Frankish and Anglo-Saxon society, still influenced by ancient Aryan values, those who shed blood on the battlefield carried a taint that disqualified them from handling sacred things or saying Mass. However, military violence was about to receive a Christian baptism.
During the ninth and tenth centuries, hordes of Norse and Magyar invaders devastated Europe and brought down the Carolingian Empire. Although they would be remembered as wicked and monstrous, in truth a Viking leader was no different from Charles Martel or Pippin: he was simply a “king on the warpath [vik],” fighting for tribute, plunder, and prestige.22 In 962 the Saxon king Otto managed to repel the Magyars and re-create the Holy Roman Empire in much of Germany. Yet in Francia, the kings’ power had so declined that they could no longer control the lesser aristocrats, who not only fought one another but had begun to loot church property and to terrorize the peasant villages, killing livestock and burning homes if the agricultural yield was poor.23 A member of the lower aristocracy—called cniht (“soldier”) or chevaller (“horseman”)—felt no qualms about such raiding, which was essential to his way of life. For decades French knights had been engaged in almost ceaseless warfare and were now economically dependent on plunder and looting. As the French historian Marc Bloch has explained, besides bringing a knight glory and heroism, warfare was “perhaps above all, a source of profit, the nobleman’s chief industry,” so for the less affluent, the return of peace could be “an economic crisis as well as a disastrous loss of prestige.”24 Without war, a knight could not afford weapons and horses, tools of his trade, and would be forced into menial labor. The violent seizure of property was, as we have seen, regarded as the only honorable way for an aristocrat to acquire resources, so much so that there was “no line of demarcation” in early medieval Europe between “warlike activity” and “pillaging.”25 During the tenth century, therefore, many impoverished knights were simply doing what came naturally to them when they robbed and harassed the peasantry.
This surge of violence coincided with the development of the manors, the great landed estates, and a full-fledged agrarian system in Europe, which depended on the forcible extraction of the agricultural surplus.26 The arrival of the structural violence that maintained it was heralded at the end of the tenth century by the appearance of a new ordo: the imbelle vulgus, or “unarmed commoner,” whose calling was laborare, “to work.”27 The manorial system had abolished the ancient distinction between the free peasant, who could bear arms, and the slave, who could not. Both were now lumped together, forbidden to fight, yet unable to defend themselves from the knights’ assault, and forced to live at subsistence level. A two-tier stratification had emerged in Western society: the “men of power” (potentes) and the “poor” (pauperes). The aristocracy needed the help of ordinary soldiers to subjugate the poor, so knights became retainers, exempt from servitude and taxation and members of the nobility.
The aristocratic priests naturally supported this oppressive system and indeed were largely responsible for crafting it, enraging many of the poor by their flagrant abandonment of the egalitarianism of the gospel. The Church denounced the more vocal of these malcontents as “heretics,” but their dissent took the form of a religiously articulated protest against the new social and political system and was not concerned with theological issues. In the early eleventh century, for example, Robert of Arbrissel wandered barefoot through Brittany and Anjou at the head of a tattered retinue of pauperes Christi, his demand for a return to gospel values attracting widespread support.28 In southern France, Henry of Lausanne also drew huge crowds when he attacked the greed and immorality of the clergy, and in Flanders, Tanchelm of Antwerp preached so effectively that people stopped attending Mass and refused to pay their tithes. Robert eventually submitted to the Church, founded a Benedictine monastery, and became a canonized saint, but Henry remained active in his “heresy” for thirty years, and Tanchelm set up his own church.
The monks of the Benedictine abbey of Cluny in Burgundy responded to the twofold crisis of internal violence and social protest by initiating a reform that attempted to limit the lawless aggression of the knights. They tried to introduce lay men and women to the values of monastic religio, in their view the only authentic form of Christianity, by promoting the practice of pilgrimage to sacred sites. Like a monk, the pilgrim made a decision to turn her back on the world (saeculum) and head for the centers of holiness; like a monk, she made a vow in the local church before setting out and donned a special uniform. All pilgrims had to be chaste for the duration of their pilgrimage, and knights were forbidden to carry arms, thus forced to contain their instinctive aggression for a significant period of time. During the long, difficult, and frequently dangerous journey, lay pilgrims formed a community, the rich sharing the privations and vulnerability of the poor, the poor learning that their poverty had sacred value, and both experiencing the inevitable hardship of life on the road as a form of asceticism.
At the same time, the reformers tried to give fighting spiritual value and make knightly warfare a Christian vocation. They decided that a warrior could serve God by protecting the unarmed poor from the depredations of the lower aristocracy and by pursuing the enemies of the Church. The saintly hero of the Life of St. Gerald of Aurillac, written circa 930 by Odo, abbot of Cluny, was neither a king, nor a monk, nor a bishop but an ordinary knight who achieved sanctity by becoming a soldier of Christ and defending the poor. To further their cult of this “holy warfare,” the reformers devised rituals for the blessing of military banners and swords and encouraged devotion to such military saints as Michael, George, and Mercury (who was believed to have murdered Julian the Apostate).29
In a related movement, the bishops inaugurated the Peace of God to limit the knights’ violence and protect Church property.30 In central and southern France, where the monarchy was no longer functioning and society was degenerating into violent chaos, they began to convene large assemblies of churchmen, knights, and feudal lords in the fields outside the cities. During these rallies, knights were forced to swear, on pain of excommunication, that they would stop tormenting the poor:
I will not carry off either ox or cow or any other beast of burden; I will seize neither peasant nor merchant; I will not take from them their pence, nor oblige them to ransom themselves; and I will not beat them to obtain their subsistence. I will seize neither horse, mare nor colt from their pasture; I will not destroy or burn their houses.31
At these peace councils the bishops insisted that anyone who killed his fellow Christians “spills the blood of Christ.”32 They now also introduced the Truce of God, forbidding fighting from Wednesday evening to Monday morning each week in memory of Christ’s days of passion, death, and resurrection. Although peace became a reality for a specific period of time, it could not be maintained without coercion. The bishops were able to enforce the Peace and the Truce only by forming “peace militias.” Anyone who broke the Truce, explained the chronicler Raoul Glaber (c. 985–1047), “was to pay for it with his life or be driven from his own country and the
company of his fellow-Christians.”33 These peacekeeping forces helped to make knightly violence a genuine “service” (militia) of God, equal to the priestly and monastic vocation.34 The Peace movement spread throughout France, and by the end of the eleventh century, there is evidence that a significant number of knights had indeed been converted to a more “religious” lifestyle and regarded their military duties as a form of lay monasticism.35
But for Pope Gregory VII, one of the leading reformers of the day, knighthood could be a holy vocation only if it fought to preserve the libertas of the Church. He therefore tried to recruit kings and aristocrats into his own Militia of St. Peter to fight the Church’s enemies—and it was with this militia that he intended to fight his “crusade.” In his letters he linked the ideals of brotherly love for the beleaguered Eastern Christians and liberatio of the church with military aggression. But very few laymen joined his militia.36 Why indeed would they, since it was clearly designed to enhance the power of the Church at the expense of the bellatores? The popes had blessed the predatory violence of the Carolingians because it had enabled the Church to survive. But as Gregory had learned in his struggle with Henry IV, warriors were no longer willing simply to protect the Church’s privileges.
This political struggle for power between popes and emperors would inform the religiously inspired violence of the Crusading period; both sides were competing for political supremacy in Europe, and that meant gaining the monopoly of violence. In 1074 Gregory’s crusade had no takers; twenty years later, the response from the laity would be very different.
On November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II, another Cluniac monk, addressed a Peace Council at Clermont in southern France and summoned the First Crusade, appealing directly to the Franks, the heirs of Charlemagne. We have no contemporary record of this speech and can only infer what Urban might have said from his letters.37 In keeping with the recent reforms, Urban urged the knights of France to stop attacking their fellow Christians and instead fight God’s enemies. Like Gregory VII, Urban urged the Franks to “liberate” their brothers, the Eastern Christians, from “the tyranny and oppression of Muslims.”38 They should then proceed to the Holy Land to liberate Jerusalem. In this way the Peace of God would be enforced in Christendom and God’s war fought in the East. The Crusade, Urban was convinced, would be an act of love in which the Crusaders nobly laid down their lives for their eastern brothers, and in leaving their homes they would secure the same heavenly rewards as monks who abjured the world for the cloister.39 Yet for all this pious talk, the Crusade was also essential to Urban’s political maneuvers to secure the libertas of the Church. The previous year he had ousted Henry IV’s antipope from the Lateran Palace, and at Clermont he excommunicated King Philip I of France for making an adulterous marriage. Now by dispatching a massive military expedition to the East without consulting either monarch, Urban had usurped the royal prerogative of controlling the military defense of Christendom.40
While a pope might say one thing, however, less educated listeners could hear something entirely different. Drawing on Cluniac ideas, Urban would always call the expedition a pilgrimage—except that these pilgrims would be heavily armed knights, and this “act of love” would result in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. Urban almost certainly quoted Jesus’s words, telling his disciples to take up their cross, and he probably told the Crusaders to sew crosses on the back of their clothes and travel to the land where Jesus had lived and died. The vogue for pilgrimage had already raised the profile of Jerusalem in Europe. In 1033, the millennium of Jesus’s death, Raoul Graber reported that, convinced that the end time was nigh, an “innumerable multitude” had marched to Jerusalem to fight the “miserable Antichrist.”41 Thirty years later seven thousand pilgrims had left Europe for the Holy Land to force the Antichrist to declare himself so that God could establish a better world. In 1095 many of the knights would have seen the Crusade in this populist, apocalyptic light. They would also have viewed Urban’s call to help the Eastern Christians as a vendetta for their kinsmen and felt as bound to fight for Christ’s patrimony in the Holy Land as they would to recover the fief of their feudal lord. One early medieval historian of the Crusades makes a priest ask his listeners: “If an outsider were to strike any of your kin down, would you not avenge your blood relative? How much more ought you to avenge your God, your father, your brother, whom you see reproached, banished from his estates, crucified, whom you hear calling for aid.”42 Pious ideas would certainly have been fused with more earthly objectives. Many would take up their cross to acquire wealth overseas, and fiefs for their descendants, as well as fame and prestige.
Events quickly spiraled out of Urban’s control—a reminder of the limitations of religious authority. Urban had imagined an orderly military expedition and had urged the Crusaders to wait until after the harvest. Nevertheless, five large armies ignored this sensible advice and began their trek across Europe in the spring. Thousands either died of hunger or were repulsed by the Hungarians, who were terrified by this sudden invasion. It had never occurred to Urban that the Crusaders would attack the Jewish communities in Europe, but in 1096 an army of German Crusaders slaughtered between four to eight thousand Jews in Speyer, Worms, and Mainz. Their leader, Emicho of Leningen, had presented himself as the emperor of popular legend who would appear in the West during the Last Days and fight the Antichrist in Jerusalem. Jesus could not return, Emicho believed, until the Jews had converted to Christianity, so as his troops approached the Rhineland cities with large Jewish communities, Emicho ordered that Jews be forcibly baptized on pain of death. Some Crusaders seemed genuinely confused. Why were they going to fight Muslims thousands of miles away when the people who had actually killed Jesus—or so the Crusaders mistakenly believed—were alive and well on their very doorsteps? “Look now,” a Jewish chronicler overheard the Crusaders saying to one another, “we are going to take vengeance on the Ishmaelites for our Messiah, when here are the Jews who murdered and crucified him. Let us first avenge ourselves on them.”43 Later some of the French Crusaders would also be puzzled: “Do we need to travel to distant lands in the East to attack the enemies of God, when there are Jews right before our eyes, a race that is the greatest enemy of God? We’ve got it all backward!”44
The Crusades made anti-Semitic violence a chronic disease in Europe: every time a Crusade was summoned, Christians would first attack Jews at home. This persecution was certainly inspired by religious conviction, but social, political, and economic elements were also involved. The Rhineland cities were developing the market economy that would eventually replace agrarian civilization; they were therefore in the very early stages of modernization, a transition that always strains social relations. After the demise of the Roman Empire, town life had declined, so there was virtually no commerce and no merchant class.45 Toward the end of the eleventh century, however, increased productivity had given aristocrats a taste for luxury. To meet their demands, a class of specialists—masons, craftsmen, and merchants—had emerged from the peasantry, and the consequent exchanges of money and goods led to the rebirth of the towns.46 The nobility’s resentment of the vilain (“upstart”) from the lower classes who was acquiring wealth that they regarded as theirs by right may also have fueled the violence of the German Crusaders, since Jews were particularly associated with this disturbing social change.47 In the episcopally administered Rhineland cities, the townsfolk had been trying for decades to shake off feudal obligations that impeded commerce, but their bishop-rulers had particularly conservative views on trade.48 There was also tension between rich merchants and poorer artisans, and when the bishops tried to protect the Jews, it appears these less affluent townsfolk joined the Crusaders in the killing.
Crusaders would always be motivated by social and economic factors as well as by religious zeal. Crusading was especially appealing to the juventus, the knightly “youth,” who completed their military training by roaming freely around the countryside in search of adventure. Primed fo
r violent action, these knights errant were free of the restraints of settled existence, and their lawlessness might account for some of the crusading atrocities.49 Many of the first Crusaders came from regions in northeastern France and western Germany that had been devastated by years of flooding, plague, and famine and may simply have wanted to leave an intolerable life.50 There were also inevitably adventurers, robbers, renegade monks, and brigands in the Crusading hordes, many doubtless drawn by dreams of wealth and fortune as well as a “restless heart.”51
The leaders of the First Crusade, which left Europe in the autumn of 1096, also had mixed motives for joining the expedition. Bohemund, count of Taranto in southern Italy, had a very small fief and made no secret of his worldly ambitions: he left the Crusade at the first opportunity to become Prince of Antioch. His nephew Tancred, however, found in the Crusade the answer to a spiritual dilemma. He had “burned with anxiety” because he could not reconcile his profession of fighting with the gospel and had even considered the monastic life. But as soon as he heard Pope Urban’s summons, “his eyes opened, his courage was born.”52 Godfrey of Bouillon, meanwhile, was inspired by the Cluniac ideal that saw fighting the Church’s enemies as a spiritual vocation, but his brother Baldwin merely wanted fame, fortune, and an estate in the East.
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