by Jeffrey Lee
At sunset they were still sewing crossed strips of material to the shoulders of the new crusaders. A supply of cloth had been brought, in anticipation, but this soon ran out and, in their frenzy, people tore off their own clothes to be used. Bernard himself joined them, ripping up his habit for the cause. In the fading light the beautiful Queen Eleanor and her entourage of young damsels dressed up as Amazons and galloped around the fields, further whipping up the ecstatic crowds.
‘I opened my mouth,’ Bernard later wrote to the Pope. ‘I spoke; and at once the crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows whose husbands are still alive.’13
One of those dead men walking – and almost certainly among the passionate crowd at Vézelay that day – was a youthful knight full of zeal and ambition, but with meagre prospects, a certain Reynald de Chatillon.
Chapter 1
DEAD MAN WALKING
Edessa is taken as you know, and the Christians are sorely afflicted because of it; the churches are burnt and abandoned, God is no longer sacrificed there. Knights, make your decisions, you who are esteemed for your skill in arms; make a gift of your bodies to Him who was placed on the cross for you.
Troubadour song of the Second Crusade
Renown is easiest won among perils.
Tacitus
Reynald de Chatillon was born sometime around 1125. He was a younger son of Hervé II de Donzy, Count of Gien and Lord of Donzy, a Burgundian town less than thirty miles from Vézelay. Lying about a day’s ride from Donzy was another of the family dominions, the town for which Reynald was named, Chatillon-sur-Loing.1 The River Loing, memorably painted by the Impressionist Alfred Sisley, is a tributary of the Seine. It rises in Burgundy and winds down past attractive medieval villages such as Villiers, Moret and Grez-sur-Loing with its graceful twelfth-century bridge. Chatillon (the present-day Chatillon-Coligny) is not one of the most picturesque of the towns along the Loing and reveals few traces from Reynald’s time. The only vestige of the little castle is the ruined tower of the donjon, and this was built in 1180, long after Reynald had left for the Holy Land.
We don’t know exactly what Reynald’s connection with Chatillon was. He may have been born there or lived there for a while in his youth. He may have been assigned the town as a fief. Peter of Blois calls him ‘Lord of Chatillon’. Whatever his connection, it was not strong enough to keep Reynald in France. As for so many other young men in the Middle Ages, especially around the twelfth century, the call of the Holy Land – that almost legendary Outremer (‘beyond the sea’) – proved too strong.
In Western Europe at the time daily existence was harsh and living conditions rudimentary, even for the noble classes. Life expectancy was short, but then a long life might not have been much to gloat over. The climate was unforgiving and the winters chilled both peasant hovel and noble castle alike. Food was bland, monotonous and unhygienic, and water was often contaminated. Medicine was no more than base superstition, with treatment usually exacerbating any malady, often fatally. The economy was based on the hard labour of subsistence agriculture – a precarious existence on the edge of permanent poverty, catastrophic in years of famine and blight. The population eked out its days almost exclusively in villages that were isolated, even over short distances, by difficult, dangerous roads, local warfare and linguistic differences. Most towns were small, cramped and filthy behind their old walls, with embryonic levels of trade. The feudal system of serfdom left many peasants in complete thrall to their lords and masters.
In this rigidly hierarchical world, social mobility was virtually non-existent, and improvement by education was possible only via the Church. Literacy – indeed learning in general – was monopolized by the clergy, which ruled the souls of all Western Christendom, with power centred on the Papacy in Rome. In this time of profound, ubiquitous religious faith, the Church wielded wide temporal powers and the Pope claimed supreme spiritual authority, even over the greatest rulers, such as the German emperor and the kings of England and France. Bishops were mighty lords in their own right and even lowly priests held their parishioners’ uneducated minds in thrall. They dangled the carrot of everlasting bliss to those who followed their bidding, while terrifying their flock with graphic images of the tortures of hell.
By the twelfth century, however, the world was beginning to change. A spirit of adventure was abroad, and it was clearly strong in young men like Reynald de Chatillon. He lived in a time of questioning and searching, of pushing boundaries and breaking new ground. Sometimes this period is called the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, though the term goes in and out of fashion. Populations were on the move as new towns, outside the feudal system, were being founded and granted trading privileges. Cities like Paris and London were expanding fast and, encouraged by the crusades, international trade routes were opening apace, enriching maritime cities like Venice and Amalfi, bringing in new foodstuffs, materials, technologies, luxuries and ideas from the Orient. There was an explosion of artistic creativity; freed by new inspirations and technologies, architecture abandoned classical strictures and flowered into the spectacular, soaring ‘Gothic’ style. Music and literature threw up seminal works such as The Romance of the Rose, the songs of the wandering goliards and the poetry of the troubadours, leading to the remarkable discovery (or invention) of ‘romantic love’. It was also a time of enquiry; in the famous phrase of the twelfth-century churchman Peter of Blois, a new generation of scholars – like the radical Peter Abelard – was ‘clambering onto the shoulders of giants’. The ‘giants’ were the classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Galen, whose works were becoming known in the West. They fuelled the growth of the first universities in Paris and Oxford, the legal school in Bologna and the great medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier. This expansion in learning was facilitated by the crusades, which brought Christian intellectuals into contact with classical authors preserved by Islamic scholarship, and opened Western eyes to the relatively advanced Islamic sciences, philosophy and mathematics. These learnings were as fundamental as Arabic numerals (including the vital zero), which displaced the cumbersome Roman system. The enquiring minds of the day devoured the new knowledge with exhilaration.
The popularity of pilgrimages was another expression of this restless zeitgeist. Whether wending their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, following the route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, visiting St Peter’s in Rome or taking the long journey to the Holy Places in the Promised Land, twelfth-century roads were increasingly thronged with pilgrims on the move. And of course a crusade was, at its simplest, no more than an armed pilgrimage. The clearest manifestation of this outward-looking urge to spread Christendom was actual geographical expansion. The Second Crusade was far more than just another expedition aimed at Palestine; it was an early and emphatic expression of European colonialism. While King Louis VII of France and Emperor Conrad III of Germany led their armies eastwards, there were also crusading offensives in Iberia, one of which led to the capture of Lisbon from the Moors. Militant, expansionist Christianity pressed northwards as well, with the launch of the Wendish Crusade in the Baltic. In all directions, the frontiers of Christendom were being extended.2
Within Christendom, too, boundaries were being pushed back as the wilderness was tamed. Bernard’s own Cistercian order was at the vanguard of this muscular spirituality. The white monks reformed lax practices in the Church and represented a new purity in Western monasticism. They also embodied their ideals by building monasteries in remote locations, turning forests into tilled fields. Bernard’s personal quest for truth led him to find the Lord in nature; his monastery of Clairvaux was built in a ‘desert’, a wild, remote valley, which the labour and ardour of the monks transformed into fertile gardens and a prosperous abbey.
This was the energetic world of increasing opportunity into which Reynald was born. Nothing specific is known about his youth
, but this is not unusual, even for the most famous medieval figures. The same goes for the man who would become his greatest adversary, Saladin. While we have little information, we also have no reason to assume that Reynald’s upbringing differed from the typical upbringing of a male born into the knightly class. As such, almost everything he knew would have predisposed him to respond positively to the call for a crusade. The Pope’s bull, the king’s desire to make the journey, Reynald’s background, situation and education – all these would have made his decision quite straightforward.
Traditionally young noblemen were sent by their family to be brought up in another lordly household. There they would serve as a squire and be prepared for knighthood. Whether Reynald was raised in his family seat at Donzy, or elsewhere, he would have been instilled with the same martial values and the ideals of chivalry. The ruling class was first and foremost a warrior class, and its most prized values were those of the soldier, capable of winning glory for himself and his lineage and of defending his lands, his womenfolk and his vassals with the sword. The draughty baronial halls of Reynald’s youth would have echoed to the sound of the chansons de gestes, songs of the great deeds of real-life heroes from the First Crusade, of semi-legendary heroes like Oliver and Roland, the soldiers of Charlemagne, and of Lancelot and the wholly legendary heroes from the Arthurian myths. Reynald would have known these stories for sure.
These were the early days of heraldry, before formal, inherited coats of arms, when nobles were choosing their own emblems for their shields, banners and personal seals. In a time of helmets, which obscured the face, these signs were vital for identification in battle. They were also powerful symbolic statements about the wearer. The symbol Reynald chose for himself was the swan, the chivalric bird par excellence, enshrined in the earliest known cycle of chansons, known as the Chevalier au Cygne (the Swan Knight). The first part of the cycle is the Chanson d’Antioche (the Song of Antioch), which sings of the First Crusade down to the capture of the great city of Antioch in 1098. It continues with the Chanson de Jherusalem, taking the story on to the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Both these songs were in wide circulation in northern France during Reynald’s youth. In choosing the swan as his emblem, Reynald was perhaps revealing a romantic streak and was consciously associating himself with this tradition, and with a real-life hero of these chansons, the greatest knight of the First Crusade, Godfrey de Bouillon. After the capture of Jerusalem, Godfrey was chosen as the leader of the Franks in the East. In a saintly rejection of worldly glory, he refused the title of king, agreeing only to be ‘Guardian of the Holy Sepulchre’. Legend had it that Godfrey was descended from a swan – the Swan Knight of the chansons.
The books of chivalry and the stories of the chansons reveal the pattern for the knightly ideal. Central to them were the fame and glory that a knight would win on the battlefield in the service of his lord. And if the battle was against heathens, on crusade, on behalf of Holy Mother Church, then even better. At the time the crusaders were seen as:
heroes who from the cold of uttermost Europe plunged into the intolerable heat of the East, careless of their own lives, if only they could bring help to Christendom its hour or trial… nothing to be compared to their glory has ever been begotten by any age.3
A knight would also win glory in the service of his lady, following the principles of ‘courtly love’, a twelfth-century fashion in romantic manners and verse that was closely intertwined with the Second Crusade, through Eleanor of Aquitaine. Wife of Louis VII, the queen controlled most of southern France in her own right. She was also a great patron of the arts, especially of the troubadours, the southern French singers of the chansons and lays of courtly love. The adventurous Eleanor accompanied her husband on crusade and, from the very start, her presence added a sheen of glamour, especially for a youthful knight. She made sure everyone noticed her, and while churchmen disapproved of her extravagant displays, no virile young bachelor, especially one – like Reynald – with a taste for the flamboyant and dramatic, could fail to have been enamoured by the Amazonian queen on that remarkable day at Vézelay, and further seduced by the attractions of the crusade.
And of course if a knight did not go on crusade, far from winning the regard of a beautiful lady, there was the risk of the reverse. Just as women in the First World War handed shaming white feathers to non-combatants, so it is said that Eleanor and her ladies distributed spindles and distaffs to those reluctant to take the cross. It was clearly a knight’s honourable duty to defend the faithful in the East. This obligation was accentuated because the recently captured city of Edessa had been the first city to turn Christian, a fact stressed by the crusade’s promoters, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. Further spurring a good knight into action were the lurid reports of the sufferings of Edessa that filtered back to the West. The Lament on Edessa, for instance, was a contemporary poem on the catastrophe that Zengi’s armies inflicted on Edessa’s people:
Like wolves among a flock of lambs [they] fell upon them in their midst
They slaughtered indiscriminately, the martyrs let out streams of blood,
They massacred without compassion the young and the children
They had no mercy on the grey hairs of the elderly or with the tender age of a child.4
Not to avenge the venerable city’s destruction would be dishonourable. As Pope Eugenius put it, in his crusading proclamation:
It will be seen as a great token of nobility and uprightness if those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers are vigorously defended by you, their good sons. But if, God forbid, it comes to pass differently, then the bravery of the fathers will have proved diminished in the sons.5
Certainly those who took the cross, but then returned without completing the pilgrimage, suffered shame. Count Stephen of Blois was one of the chief knights of the First Crusade, but he deserted during the excruciating siege of Antioch and fled in disgrace to France. His wife Adela, the steely daughter of William the Conqueror, was humiliated by her husband’s cowardice. She made her feelings clear to Stephen, even in the most intimate of moments:
Being frequently reproved by a variety of persons for this conduct, Stephen was compelled both by fear and shame to undertake a fresh crusade. Among others, his wife, Adela, often urged him to it, reminding him of it even amidst the endearments of conjugal caresses.6
Goaded by Adela’s cruelly timed taunts, Stephen returned to the Holy Land to make amends. This time he fought through appalling hardships on the journey and completed his vow of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Hopefully both he and Adela were satisfied that he achieved final redemption when, hopelessly outnumbered, he died bravely in battle against the Egyptians at Ramleh in 1102.
In any case, the quest for glory and the avoidance of shame are two sides of the same coin. As one Muslim adversary of the crusaders put it, bravery results from ‘contemptuous disdain of being considered a coward and acquiring ill repute’.7 Reynald would have seen it no differently.
And if the promise of glory on its own was not enough, then the example of the astonishingly successful First Crusade would have provided further motivation, which both Bernard and the Pope actively exploited. The participants had won glory in their lifetime, and immortality in the chansons. They also won earthly wealth and power: new counties, principalities and kingdoms were being created in the East, and new men were being raised in rank, becoming counts, princes and kings. There was property to be had too, especially in cities like Jerusalem, where the Muslim population was killed or expelled. A poor crusader – even the lowliest commoner – could suddenly find himself the owner of a palatial mansion. And there was booty: sacks of it. Along with the knowledge of the ages, stories – together with hard golden and silver evidence – of the fabled wealth of the East spread quickly back to Western Europe and acted as sparkling lures for those eking out a subsistence living. Writers such as Fulcher of Chartres, working in the newly formed crusader states, painted a glowing picture of life in the Holy Land, to t
empt new crusaders to leave their hand-to-mouth existence and stake their claim to the cornucopia of riches:
Those who were poor [in the West], here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless bezants;* and those who had not a villa, here, by the gift of God, already possess a city8
Fulcher was exaggerating, but from a general truth. Life in Outremer was dangerous and uncertain, but it was also wealthy. People lived in cities famous since antiquity, splendidly built in stone by the ancients and enriched by centuries of international commerce. Floors were covered in carpets, not strewn with reeds. Levantine towns had pure, running water, sewers and public baths. Food was varied: savoury, spiced and sweet. To the conquerors, however lowly, luxuries unimaginable in the West, such as silk clothing, sugar and oranges, were easily affordable. For those bridling in Europe under the feudal yoke, there were also clear social benefits. In Outremer the lowest Frankish peasant was immediately superior to the vast majority of the conquered (Muslim and native Christian) population. Still, most crusaders preferred to return to their homes after visiting the holy sites or campaigning for a season against the heathen. This made for a relatively small number of permanent expatriates and plenty of opportunities for ambitious immigrants of whatever class. Indeed, the crusaders suffered from an endemic manpower shortage in the East. This was something the Church well understood, which was why propaganda like Fulcher’s was so important. The Church needed to emphasize the rewards of crusading. The general message of Christian preaching may have been non-violence and the holiness of poverty, but when it came to the crusade, there was no contradiction between worldly and spiritual enrichment. As Fulcher put it, ‘God wishes to enrich us all.’9