The sort of fears implied by Guibert and the Bergues author have been seized upon by critics to argue that lay religiosity in the Middle Ages was superficial and literalistic, nothing more than the culturally acquired gloss upon basic psychological and social impulses. But this interpretation can be called into question. The critics make the mistake of setting standards for what constitutes genuine religious conviction which are anachronistic, since they are based on how devout people behave in confessionally pluralistic societies in the post-Reformation world. Other critics cling to the idea that medieval people were indeed capable of deep religious impulses, but that these were satisfied by tenacious pagan survivals from the pre-Christian era— charms, talismans, sorcery, divination, and so on—which were more immediate and trusted than what the Church had to offer. Here the mistake is made of applying much later standards to judge the medieval Church’s capacity to translate its own beliefs into other people’s behaviour. People in the eleventh century were not historically exceptional in seldom being able to sustain one level of pious commitment throughout their lifetimes: illness, the onset of old age, changes in personal status, and domestic and communal crises have regularly prompted heightened devotion in many religious systems in many periods. This is the norm. What matters is the base level of religious sentiment which is shared by most people most of the time and so serves as a stable cultural reference point. If this standard is followed, western European society on the eve of the First Crusade appears thoroughly Christian.
Clerical sensitivity to what seems a something-for-something religious mentality can also be interpreted positively as a sign of the Church’s strength, since the sort of reciprocity anticipated by the faithful at Bergues was one, slightly aberrant, offshoot of a fundamental principle which the authorities actively propagated: the idea that the relationship between this world and the next was governed by cause and effect. At the time of the First Crusade the Church taught that sins could be remedied, at least in theory, by acts of penance. For lay people penances usually took the form of periods of sexual and dietary abstinence and a disruption of normal routine: penitents were not permitted, for example, to bear arms. Many pilgrimages were undertaken as penances. Attitudes, it should be noted, were beginning to change, as people wondered whether mere mortals were capable of nullifying their sinfulness by their own puny efforts without a helping hand from God’s infinite mercy. But the notion of treating penances as simply the symbolic demonstration of contrition to be undertaken after the sinner has been reconciled through sacramental absolution—the system which operates in the modern Catholic Church—was still undeveloped. In the closing years of the eleventh century the belief remained entrenched that penitential acts could suffice to wash away sin.
This does much to explain the potent appeal of the First Crusade, which Urban II conceived as an act so expensive, long, and emotionally and physically arduous that it amounted to a ‘satisfactory’ penance capable of undoing all the sins which intending crusaders confessed. Urban knew how his audiences’ minds worked. The son of a minor noble from Champagne, he had served in the cathedral of Reims and the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny before pursuing his career in the papal court. His background equipped him to understand the paradox at the heart of lay religious sentiment. Lay people offered ample proof of their awareness of their sinfulness, by undertaking pilgrimages, for example, or by endowing the monks and nuns who approximated most closely to the unattainable ideal of sinless human conduct. But their unavoidable immersion in worldly concerns meant that it was impossible for them to perform all the time-consuming and socially disruptive penances which could keep pace with their ever-increasing catalogue of misdeeds. The crusade message cut the Gordian Knot. Here at last was a spiritually effective activity designed specifically for lay people, in particular the warrior élites whose sins were considered among the most numerous and notorious. The laity could aspire, as Guibert of Nogent shrewdly expressed matters, to deserve salvation without abandoning its accustomed dress and by channelling its instincts in directions which accommodated its ingrained social conditioning.
The effect of a message framed in these terms was electrifying. The impact was doubled by Urban II’s tour of southern and western France between the autumn of 1095 and the summer of 1096. Moving as an imposing authority figure through areas which had seldom seen a king for decades, the pope drew attention to himself by consecrating churches and altars, honouring the localities through which he passed by means of elaborate liturgical ceremonial. (Once again the close relationship between ritual and communal religious excitement is evident.) The largest suitable urban centres were targeted as temporary bases: Limoges, Poitiers (twice), Angers, Tours, Saintes, and Bordeaux, among others. The particular merit of these places was that they were effectively clusters of prestigious churches which had long served as the focal points of their regions’ religious loyalties. They, as well as rural churches, now operated as centres for crusade recruitment. In the areas not covered by the papal itinerary other churchmen busied themselves in generating interest. Monks seem to have been among the most active recruiting agents: many surviving charters reveal departing crusaders turning to monasteries for spiritual reassurance and material assistance. Enthusiasm for the crusade was most intense in France, Italy, and western Germany, but few areas of Latin Christendom were entirely unaffected. As one historian memorably put it, a ‘nerve of exquisite feeling’ had been touched in the West. The proof was palpable, as between the spring and autumn of 1096 people in their tens of thousands took to the road with one aim—to free Jerusalem.
3
The Crusading Movement
1096–1274
SIMON LLOYD
FOLLOWING the Council of Clermont and his call to arms (described in Chapter 1), Pope Urban II remained in France until September 1096. The projected expedition to the East was not the only reason for his extended stay, but Urban was naturally concerned to provide leadership and guidance in the formative stages of what would become the First Crusade, very much his own creation. He corresponded with Bishop Adhémar of Le Puy, appointed as papal legate to the army, and with Raymond IV, count of Toulouse, the intended secular leader, whom he met at least twice in 1096. He urged various churchmen to preach the cross in France, and, as we have seen, he himself took the lead by proclaiming the crusade at a number of centres that he visited during his lengthy itinerary around southern, central, and western France in these months. He also dispatched letters and embassies beyond France, many in an attempt to control the response to his crusade summons.
Urban had intended that the crusade army should consist fundamentally of knights and other ranks who would be militarily useful. However, as the news of what he had proclaimed at Clermont spread through the West, so men and women of all social classes and occupations took the cross. Urban had lost control in the matter of personnel. One immediate consequence was the appalling violence unleashed against the Jews of northern France and the Rhineland, the first of a series of pogroms and other forms of anti-semitism that would become closely associated with crusading activity in succeeding generations. Many, but by no means all, of those responsible were drawn precisely from those social groups that Urban wished to keep at home, especially bands of urban and rural poor.
These bands, led by men like Peter the Hermit and Walter Sans-Avoir, were the first to form and the first to depart, as early as spring 1096. Collectively, they are known traditionally as the People’s Crusade, but in reality they were essentially independent groups of the poor, lacking supplies and equipment, though some contained or were even led by knights. Streaming from northern France, the Low Countries, the Rhineland, and Saxony in particular, they sought to reach Constantinople, but many failed to get even that far. Their foraging for food and lack of discipline, combined with their sheer ferocity, naturally alarmed the authorities in the lands through which they passed, above all the Byzantines. Many were killed in the inevitable armed clashes. Those who did get through to Co
nstantinople were hurriedly shipped across the Bosphorus in August 1096, after which they split into two groups. One attempted to take Nicaea but failed, the Turks surrounding and killing most; the other was ambushed and massacred near Civetot in October. The remnant fled back to Constantinople to join up with what has been identified as ‘the second wave’ of the crusade.
This, the backbone of the expedition, was formed of discrete contingents grouped around one or more great lords, representing the sort of effective military forces that Urban and Emperor Alexius had hoped for. The major contingents were those of: Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, numerically the largest; Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, and his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne; Hugh, count of Vermandois; Duke Robert of Normandy, his cousin Robert, count of Flanders, and his brother-in-law Count Stephen of Blois; and Bohemond of Taranto and his nephew Tancred, who led the Normans of southern Italy. Godfrey, Bohemond, Baldwin, and Raymond would become the first lords, respectively, of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, the county of Edessa, and the county of Tripoli. They began to leave for the East in late summer 1096, gradually mustering at Constantinople later that year and in early 1097. Their long trek finally ended in success over two years later when Jerusalem fell to the crusaders on 15 July 1099. It had been an incredible journey. Against all the odds, and despite fearsome suffering and deprivation, especially during the ghastly protracted siege of Antioch in 1097–8, they had managed to liberate the Holy Places. It is no wonder that many contemporaries regarded it as miraculous.
The astonishing achievement of the expedition partly inspired the departure of ‘the third wave’, the so-called crusade of 1101, but no one in these years could have predicted that what Urban had conjured up would prove to be only the First Crusade, nor that the crusade would come to be deployed elsewhere than in the Holy Land and against opponents other than Muslims—in short, that the crusading movement would emerge to become one of the most important components, and defining characteristics, of late medieval western culture.
So far as crusading to the Latin East is concerned, it was fundamentally the political circumstances facing the settlers after 1099 that required the summoning and dispatch of further expeditions in their support. A pattern came to be established in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries whereby a setback in the East prompted calls for help from the West, which were then endorsed by the papacy in the form of crusade declarations, although not all aid was in the shape of a crusade and neither did easterners always ask for a crusade in their appeals. This pattern embraces most of the major crusades that have traditionally been numbered as well as a host of lesser and lesser-known expeditions shown by modern research to be as much crusades as their more famous siblings. (This renders the traditional numbering anachronistic.) The deteriorating position in the East led to at least one crusade summons being directed at every generation in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries— although by no means all were universal calls to arms—first to bolster the Latin settlements and then, beginning with the fall of Edessa to the Muslim atabak Zangi in 1144 and of Jerusalem itself to Saladin in 1187, to recover them. The crusades declared on behalf of the Latin empire of Constantinople (1204–61), created in the wake of the notorious Fourth Crusade which resulted in the sack of the city, also fit the pattern; but these crusades were chiefly directed against the Byzantines, now established in Nicaea and seeking to restore the losses of 1204.
A change in approach and strategy in crusading to the East, with considerable logistical implications, should also be noticed. The First Crusade took the overland route to Palestine through the Byzantine empire, as we have seen. So did the forces of the Second Crusade (1147–9) that went East, led by King Louis VII of France and King Conrad III of Germany. But the forces of Emperor Frederick I ‘Barbarossa’ on the Third Crusade (1189–92) were the last to attempt this. The future, with the benefit of hindsight, lay in the decision taken by his fellow monarchs Richard I of England and Philip II of France to sail across the Mediterranean to the Holy Land. Moreover, it is from the time of the Third Crusade that the idea of making Egypt the goal of crusade emerged as a serious alternative to campaigning in the Latin East itself. This was sensible, since the wealth and political importance of Egypt within the Ayyubid empire established by Saladin meant that if it could be weakened, even taken, then the Latin East could more easily be restored. The first crusade to depart apparently with this intention was the Fourth (1202–4), but it came to be diverted to Constantinople. The initial forces of the Fifth Crusade (1217–29) were the first to disembark in Egypt, at Damietta, but disaster struck as they advanced down the Nile towards Cairo. The same fate befell the first crusade of King Louis IX of France (1248–54). His second crusade, which proved to be the last of the great international crusades to the East before 1300, saw his death at Tunis in 1270.
Some other thirteenth-century expeditions did sail directly to the Holy Land, but, as has been shown earlier, crusading was never necessarily tied to that location. Indeed, it must be stressed that at the very time (1096) that the first crusaders were en route to Jerusalem, Urban II quite unambiguously permitted, or rather urged, Catalan nobles who had taken the cross for the crusade to the East to fulfil their vows in Spain. In return for aiding the church of Tarragona, they were promised forgiveness of sins. The crusade, then, at the very point of its inception, was being simultaneously applied by the same pope at both ends of the Mediterranean against Muslims. Given this precedent, it is not surprising that after the First Crusade Spain quickly became an established theatre for crusading expeditions, beginning with those of 1114 and 1118. The nature and pace of the Reconquista was fundamentally altered as a result of a series of crusades throughout this period and beyond.
Nor is it very surprising that the crusade also came to be deployed rapidly against other peoples on other frontiers of western Christendom. Particularly notable was its extension to the struggle between Germans and pagan Slavs to the north and east of areas of German settlement. The Saxons’ war with the Wends was first elevated into a crusade by Pope Eugenius III in 1147, although previous to this, in 1108, crusading rhetoric had been employed in an attempt to gain recruits. As the Drang nach Osten proceeded, so in time crusades came to be declared further and further beyond the Elbe, and along the Baltic: in Pomerania, Prussia, Livonia, Estonia, Lithuania, and Finland. Again, to the south, the brunt of the sudden, ferocious descent of the Mongols upon Europe in 1241 was borne by the hapless Poles and Hungarians, prompting in the same year the declaration of the first of a number of crusades against them. Attitudes would change in the later thirteenth century with the prospect of a joint alliance against the Muslims.
Two further species of crusade remain to be considered. Both were controversial at the time and continue to be so. The first involved the application of force against papal political opponents within western Christendom in the bid to remove them from power. It may have been Innocent II who first proclaimed such a crusade in 1135, in the course of his bitter struggle with Roger II, Norman king of Sicily. The evidence is not entirely conclusive, but it does indicate a direction of thinking and policy that had its roots in the holy wars declared by the reform popes of the later eleventh century against their enemies, notably Emperor Henry IV of Germany. Whatever the case, the first unambiguous crusade of this type was launched by Pope Innocent III in 1199 against Markward of Anweiler and his supporters porters in Sicily, who were opposing papal policy in Italy. The crucial precedent set, other ‘political crusades’ followed. In England, for example, a crusade was declared in 1216–17 against both the English rebels who had forced King John to concede Magna Carta and their French allies, under Prince Louis of France, who was chosen in late 1215 to replace John as king. Like Sicily, England had by then become a papal fief, and its king a papal vassal, following John’s submission to Innocent III in 1213, so action could be justified as force applied against rebellious papal sub-vassals. But of all these crusades, the most significant, s
o far as their momentous political consequences are concerned, were those declared against the Hohenstaufen emperors in Italy and Germany. So critical had the struggle with Emperor Frederick II become, in the pope’s perception, that a crusade was first proclaimed against him in 1239. By then, Frederick had control of southern Italy and Sicily and he had recently crushed the papacy’s north Italian allies. By early 1240 he was threatening Rome itself. Upon his death in 1250, further crusades were declared against his heirs until 1268, when the last of the hated dynasty, Conradin, was captured and executed.
The period 1199–c .1240 is an important one in the history of the crusading movement, since any inhibitions in papal circles had finally been overcome when it came to the application of the crusade against political opponents. The same period also saw diversification in another respect with the emergence of the crusade against heretics. Again there are clear indications that such action had been foreshadowed, not least by Innocent III, the pope who was finally provoked in 1208 to declare a crusade against the adherents of the Cathar heresy in southern France, by then very strongly entrenched. The notorious Albigensian Crusade, which failed to eradicate the heresy but destroyed so much of the cultural, social, and political fabric of Languedoc, would proceed episodically for the next twenty years. Once more, precedent set, it was so much easier to launch crusades against other heretics, for example those against the Stedinger heretics in Germany in 1232, and against Bosnian heretics in 1227 and 1234.
In sum, so far as applications of crusade are concerned, we can identify and plot a clear process of evolution from the time of the First Crusade. Urban II saw little distinction in the merit to be gained from seeking to rescue Christian people and places from Muslim oppression in Spain and the Levant, and he considered the crusade to be an appropriate instrument to that end in both theatres. His successors drew out the logic of that position and extended it to other opponents of the Church. The scope of the Second Crusade, as it evolved in practice, illustrates this graphically in relation to the West’s frontiers: simultaneously, crusade operations were being conducted in Spain and Portugal, and north-eastern Europe, as well as Syria. Under Pope Innocent III another major breakthrough occurred with the first deployments of crusading against heretics and papal political opponents. Both could be, and were, depicted as oppressors of Christians and Mother Church, and much the same justificatory framework, sentiment, and imagery that were used in papal bulls declaring crusades against Muslims, Slavs, or Mongols, were employed in the calls to crusade against Hohenstaufen emperors or Cathar heretics. Enemies within posed no less a threat than the enemy without; indeed, as popes and others frequently stressed, they were more dangerous. Crusades against these enemies were considered more necessary than those to the Holy Land accordingly. The crusade, the most potent weapon in the papacy’s formidable arsenal, increasingly emerged, then, as an instrument to be applied as and when popes saw fit, and against whomsoever and wherever its use was appropriate. By the middle of the thirteenth century, this was unquestionably the reality, but it should be stressed that by no means all contemporaries were content with each and every aspect of this broad development. Papal policy was one thing, public opinion another.
A History of the Crusades Page 5