God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  Landholders for their part were subject to the pressures of their kindred: they had to struggle in order to provide for their sons and daughters, to gain plunder to satisfy their troops, maintain their weapons and support cavalrymen who were the best-trained and best-equipped warriors of the day and remained expensive. Multiple homage was usual, so that one lord had obligations to a series of other lords; conflict settled which homage was going to be the most important. Horizons were dominated by the struggles to retain lands, peasants and castles in this fluid and uncertain world in which the distinction between public and private war had virtually disappeared. Emperors also could be frustrated by recalcitrant landholders and by the problem of castle-breaking. The great duchies of the eastern Franks, where the Empire was reborn, had a tradition of independence and included leading families with allods, tracts of land which owed no homage to the ruler at all and which were virtually independent. Everywhere lords, both spiritual and temporal, were concerned to protect their lands and rights.

  Little wonder that there was much talk of peace. There is evidence of great men, such as the dukes of Aquitaine, using their resources to enforce a measure of order. Adémar of Chabannes wrote of crowds crying out for peace. The Emperor Henry III (1046–56) spoke of creating peace when he defeated the Hungarians. There is some evidence of influence emanating from St Martial in Limoges to popularise the use of an appeal for peace in the tropes of the Agnus Dei; ‘Lamb of God have mercy on us’ twice repeated, was followed by a verse appealing for peace: ‘Dona nobis pacem’, ‘Grant us peace’. As the century wore on, it was clear the attempts to bring peace to a warring world had not succeeded.

  It is against this background that we should examine the startling summary of a leading modern British historian, confessing with moving honesty to the problems he encountered in trying to understand the minds of those who went on the First Crusade and subsequent expeditions. ‘I have recognised’, he wrote,

  that the task I have set myself is in many ways an impossible one. We are too distant from the personalities concerned to understand them fully, and anyway we have to reconcile their bleak, obsessed, savage and religious world with ours and describe it in our own terms before we can comprehend them at all ... Their priorities often seem alien to us, and the movement in which they were engaged madness, because the basic religious elements common to Christians in any age were transformed in their case by adaptation to a society in which lordship, honour, family solidarity expressing itself at all times in vendettas, reputations and commitment to extravagant social generosity played powerful parts.

  ‘I do not suppose’, he concludes, ‘that I am alone in finding it very hard to stretch my mind to encompass the amalgam of piety and violence, of love and hate which was characteristic of their response to the call to arms.’‡ This grim assessment of the nature of the lives of arms-bearers and their men who formed the core of the immense numbers going on the journey to Jerusalem is borne out by the events of the crusade, which reveal a most daunting blend of internecine conflicts, needless vain display, savagery to opponents and distortion of Scripture both in the preparations for the crusade and on the great march to Jerusalem. Mixed in with this was much raw courage and endurance, plus an only fitful awareness of its religious aim. Inevitably, the crusaders carried with them the grievous characteristics of their turbulent world.

  * H. M. Schaller, ‘Zur Kreuzzugsenzyklika Papst Sergius IV’, Papsttum Kirche und Recht im Mittelalter, ed. H. Mordek (Tübingen, 1991), pp. 135–53.

  † J. France, ‘The Destruction of Jerusalem and the First Crusade’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 47 (1996), pp. 1–17.

  ‡ J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 6.

  4

  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  Urban II

  The pope who succeeded in 1088 and reigned for ten years, took office at a nadir of papal power after the short pontificate following Gregory VII’s death. Effectively Urban II was Gregory’s successor and heir and thought just as he did. He wrote to the German bishops who still supported Gregory’s cause, ‘Believe me just as about the most blessed Gregory. I want to follow in his footsteps: everything he abhorred, I abhor; what he condemned, I condemn; what he loved, I warmly embrace.’ He was as radical as Gregory in his acceptance of profound change in Church and society as a sacred duty and favoured armed action just as Gregory had done; but he was pragmatic and realistic where Gregory had not been.

  Writing in 1945 Carl Erdmann, the pioneer of modern crusading history, said, ‘Gregory did not reckon with men as they actually are.’ But Urban did. He understood the political world and the making of alliances. In 1089 he arranged the marriage of the indomitable supporter of Gregory VII in Italy, the Countess Matilda of Tuscany, and Welf, son of Welf IV of Bavaria, leader of the opposition to the Emperor Henry IV in Germany. The alliance worked and eventually defeated the emperor, leading to the blocking of Alpine passes against him and the loss of prestige of his antipope, leaving Urban free to re-enter Rome in 1093 and restore the papacy’s authority. By calling the crusade to Jerusalem in 1095 Urban created a foreign policy for the popes giving them a prestige and spiritual power which lasted until the great clash between the king of France and Pope Boniface VIII at the turn of the fourteenth century.

  His realism sprang, in part, from his experience. Born Odo of Lagery in the arms-bearing class of north-eastern France at Chatillon-sur-Marne in Champagne, he took orders, studied in the cathedral school at Rheims and served as its archdeacon, thus coming into contact with the reforming zeal of Leo IX and with the Peace of God mechanism for restricting warfare and protecting clergy and the vulnerable from the effects of war. Then he was professed as a monk of Cluny and was influenced by its tradition, the discipline of its liturgy and its intimate links to Gregorian reform. He showed his administrative powers as he rose to become prior, second in command to the abbot. Released from the monastery to become cardinal bishop of Ostia in about 1080, he entered into intimate service to Gregory in his last, fraught years. It was an unusually wide experience. His greatest asset was nonetheless his origins in the aristocratic society of France, which gave him understanding of this noble world, the majority force behind the crusade.

  The Councils of Piacenza and Clermont

  The Council of Piacenza in March 1095 was the first great council of Urban’s pontificate, demonstrating the progress which he had already made in moving forward from the disaster of Gregory VII’s expulsion from Rome in 1084. Here he assembled higher clergy to debate Gregorianism, to denounce the sins of the simoniacs, the breaches of celibacy and the lay powers who abetted them. The enemies of reform were rejected; both Henry IV and Philip I of France remained excommunicate.

  The Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus, aware of not only the need he had to recover much of Anatolia from the Seljuqs but also the weaknesses of his own forces, sought outside help and accordingly sent emissaries to the Council. Alexius knew the quality of professional soldiers in the West and may well have looked for a mercenary force to help him recover Anatolia. Emperors practised sophisticated diplomacy, and Alexius may have thought that it was wise to plead the sufferings of Eastern Christians through his representatives to move pope and clergy, rather than plainly acknowledge his prime purpose – to recover ancient Byzantine lands.

  The patriarch of Constantinople, Symeon II, seems to have wished to end the split with the Western Church and may himself have given information on atrocities wreaked by the Saracens. It is a paradox that the two popes, Gregory VII and Urban II, who believed in the use of violence to force reform on the recalcitrant, nonetheless had as their overall aim a general peace, not only quelling the violence of warriors but also making a final end to the schism with Constantinople.

  Four months after Piacenza, Urban was in Provence at the start of a long tour within France, preaching, promoting peace, saying Mass, consecrating churches and altars, giving his blessing to the great wave of ecclesiastical build
ing that had taken place there. No doubt a moment especially dear to the pope was when he consecrated the high altar at Cluny in October 1095. For quiet country towns the appearance of this elderly man wearing the papal insignia of the time – a conical white cap with a circlet of gold and gems accompanied by the supreme relic of the True Cross – was a moving occasion and great crowds came to see him. This was the essential background to the Council of Clermont.

  At Clermont in November 1095 there was a massive international attendance of higher clergy to engage in discussion of the great themes of Gregorian reform: ecclesiastical discipline, simony, clerical marriage, lay investiture and appointment. There was a call for a general Peace. These matters so occupied the churchmen that they kept record of them and not of the appeal for a crusade to Jerusalem which was made at the end of the long deliberations. The exception was the bishop of Arras who recorded one sentence. ‘Whoever,’ the text ran, ‘for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.’ This vital sentence offered hearers a means of expiating all their sins in one great act, fulfilling either all the imposed penances that they had been unable to complete or the penances that their consciences led them to think they ought to perform because of their sin and enabled them to do so by fighting. It has to be remembered that the machinery of confession and penance was very ill-developed at this time and heavy, cumbersome penances were demanded from penitents. There is an illuminating passage in a chronicle from the abbey of Monte Cassino after Clermont, describing the pope urging some arms-bearers to go on crusade. They explained to him that the penances they had to fulfil required them to be unarmed and in their locality that left them quite unprotected, liable in this violent society to be murdered. In going to Jerusalem, the pope urged, they were going to fulfil a penitential task in personal safety, using their arms against the enemy.

  It has been argued that we cannot know what Urban said at Clermont. Chroniclers, who described the scene and wrote well after the event in the light of the astonishing success of taking Jerusalem, were concerned to interpret the workings of providence that had enabled this to happen, or to give honour to their heroes in this great odyssey. Yet the bishop of Arras’s solitary report can be put beside other contemporary evidence to form a whole. The pope wrote to the reformed monastery at Vallombrosa, ordering the monks not to go on crusade; the fighting men who were going to Jerusalem, he said, were going to ‘liberate Christianity’ and restrain ‘the savagery of the Saracens’. In a letter to Bologna in 1096 he wrote similarly of the ‘liberation of the Church’ and of ‘total penance’ being remitted; in an appeal to Flanders one month after Clermont he denounced the Muslims saying, ‘the barbarians in their frenzy have invaded and ravaged the churches of God. Worse still they have seized the Holy City of Christ.’

  These letters show the pope was summoning men to fight in substitution for all penance, recruiting only arms-bearers and denouncing the maltreatment of Christians in the East and the alien occupation of Jerusalem. In support of the call he repeated stories of Muslim cruelties to Christians that had been commonplace in Christian sources well before the eleventh century.

  There is evidence that a call to liberate Jerusalem had been in the pope’s mind before he went into a meadow outside the cathedral at Clermont, that it had been broached with great men on some earlier occasions and that he had chosen certainly a spiritual and probably a lay leader before Clermont was called. Adémar, bishop of Le Puy, who had great resources and a reputation for skill with horses, was present at Clermont; he filled the role of leader on the spiritual side. Raymond, count of Toulouse, although not present, had clearly been informed and recruited beforehand and was the natural choice as lay leader because of his experience in fighting Muslims in Spain.

  The Call of the Cross

  On 27 November 1095, at the end of the Council, the pope went into the meadow outside the cathedral and launched the journey to Jerusalem with an extraordinarily potent set of actions. In a largely illiterate society gestures were of immense importance. He built on the existing symbolisms of pilgrimage – the napkin, satchel and staff – and added one more: the ‘taking of the cross’ as a symbol of an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The sculpture in the cloister of the priory at Belval in Lorraine gives us a rare glimpse of a crusader standing in pilgrim clothes with the cross on his chest, as his wife clings passionately to him. We see here that the cross was made up of strips of cloth measuring in all 6 inches by 6 inches (15cm by 15cm). The pope’s actions in the meadow were those of the organiser of a revivalist meeting in our own times, who puts together a team of supporters to set the ball rolling and encourage others to participate. We know that Baldwin, archbishop of Canterbury, did just this in his campaign in Wales in 1188 to preach the cross for the Third Crusade. At Radnor the arch-bishop preached and an interpreter translated into Welsh, whereupon, as earlier arranged, Gerald of Wales, chronicler and archdeacon, came forward to take the cross and so move others to do likewise. Thus, after Urban exhorted his hearers, pleading atrocities against Christians in the East and the wrongful occupation of Jerusalem, Adémar of Le Puy came forward to take the cross and sew it on his clothing, as arranged. He had thoughtfully provided a basket of textile crosses for others to do the same – and they did.

  It was Urban’s master stroke. He had built on the increasing vogue of pilgrimage in previous years, with its established symbols and rights, and added to that a special armed pilgrimage to the East and to Jerusalem, with the symbol of the cross backing it. By this time the cross had become the symbol of Christianity, part of the potent world of relics. Urban skilfully associated three things: firstly the magic name of Jerusalem, known to all through sermon and liturgy and acknowledged to be the greatest target of pilgrimages; secondly, the act of sewing on a cross; and thirdly, linking that ‘taking’ of the cross with a vow and with the appeal of the wrongful taking of Jerusalem by alien people, the ‘pagans’, as he called them. To arms-bearers used to disputes over the rights and wrongs of occupation of land, the plea that Jerusalem had been occupied against all justice automatically had a resonance. They were also used to vows – to the promise of fidelity a vassal made to a lord and to the vow that a monk made on his profession in a monastery. Urban linked all three: Jerusalem, the sewing on of the cross and the vow, and created an act which went on moving the minds of medieval humanity for centuries to come. The revivalist atmosphere was completed by a pre-arranged chant by supporters with the cry ‘Deus lo volt’: ‘God wills it.’ That the providence of God was behind it all was the assumption to be conveyed to the laity by the pope’s backers.

  It turned out to be a revivalist meeting that fell flat. It all worked, but there were not enough arms-bearers present in the meadow to make up the number of warriors clearly desired by Urban to go to Jerusalem. The preaching of the cross had to go on, and not only by the pope but also by other preachers acting for him. It was a long-drawn-out affair, albeit a mightily successful one in the end, accounting for ‘the great stirring of hearts’ which moved the chroniclers and contemporaries. We can trace the pope preaching the cross again, for example, at Limoges at Christmas 1095, when he dedicated the basilica of St Martial; in 1096, just before Lent, he preached the cross at Angers and in mid-Lent at Tours.

  Charters issued by arms-bearers who went on crusade give us vital clues on the reasons why they went on this hazardous journey. In 1096 a certain Ingebald, for example, wrote about his sins as a reason for going. ‘Considering’, his charter ran, ‘that God has spared me, steeped in many and great sins, and has given me the time for penance ...’. The words will have come from the hand of monks, since the weak level of education of parish priests and their social class ruled them out as mediators between arms-bearers and the demands of the Church. The eleventh century was a great age of monastic vitality and of a new asceticism. In theory monks were not supposed to be in close touch with the secular world, but in practic
e they were and monks, reformed canons and, of course, truly Gregorian bishops all had influence to move men to go to take Jerusalem and did so. An established way to salvation was to enter the monastic life as death approached, accept celibacy, be buried in the monastery and receive the prayers of the monks. But death could not be accurately forecast. Little pilgrimages were one way of assuaging guilt and one that took the arms-bearer generally to relics. But the march to the Holy City came as a special outlet, a kind of monasticism for the moment, an assuaging of guilt in one act.

  Charters may show us acts of repentance by crusaders before setting off and one can surmise how this came about, as the would-be participant discussed the decision to go and an abbot would draw his attention to outstanding injustices to be done away with before the journey. Some of the most clear-cut examples come from families who went to Jerusalem to fight after the First Crusade, but they give clues as to what happened after Clermont and before the host set off. Monasteries had a vital role to play in securing the welfare of the crusader and his dependants by their prayers, and because they were landholders they could provide loans and mortgages to meet the extraordinary costs participants faced. With helpful financial arrangements could come hints and suggestions about acts of reparation. So Stephen of Blois, married to William the Conqueror’s daughter Adela, gave a wood to the abbey of Marmontier ‘so that God at the intercession of St Martin and his monks might pardon me for whatever I have done wrong and lead me on the journey ... and bring me back healthy and safe’.