Siding with Henry in this conflict was none other than Robert of Flanders. In 1103, in a treaty negotiated between the two rulers, he pledged to provide one thousand warriors to the English king should he choose to invade Normandy. So fleeting and fragile did the ties formed on the road to Jerusalem prove to be. It was just one of many shrewd decisions made by Count Robert upon his return to his increasingly prosperous and urbanized homeland. Until his death in 1111, he proved himself a capable and effective ruler. He also drew upon the mystique of the crusade, occasionally styling himself “the Jerusalemite” on legal proclamations. From time to time, though, during the last five years of his life, as he thought about his pilgrim comrade imprisoned in an English castle, he must have questioned the decisions he had made after 1101 in the name of political expediency.3
Unlike Robert, Stephen of Blois and Hugh the Great were never able to settle comfortably back into Europe. These two men, who at varying times had harbored pretensions of leading the crusade, both returned home in disgrace, having abandoned the armies during and just after the siege of Antioch, respectively. Both men faced intense public pressure to return to the Holy Land and make right their cowardice. Stephen in particular became a popular figure of ridicule. A later poet writing an epic poem of the crusade chose to present Stephen as a pitiable weakling, trembling visibly before every battle and constantly trying to desert. A Norman monk named Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1120, liked to imagine Stephen’s wife, Adela of Blois, calling him a coward in the midst of their conjugal embraces. In 1101 both Hugh and Stephen joined a new crusade intended to shore up the gains of the first expedition. Hugh died of battle wounds in October 1101 in the city of Tarsus. Stephen at least made it to Jerusalem, but he died a few weeks later fighting alongside Baldwin I at Ramla. Despite their good endings, most knights in Europe never forgave them their character failures or the abandonment of their friends at Antioch.4
Some of the princes never returned to Europe, Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles among them. His reputation had obviously suffered toward the end of the crusade, owing to his connection with Peter Bartholomew, his constant wrangling with Bohemond over Antioch, and his inability to match the political and spiritual savvy of Godfrey of Bouillon at the fall of Jerusalem. Still, he might have gone home to Toulouse a hero had not the allure of a Middle Eastern principality maintained a hold on his imagination. After his encounter with Daimbert of Pisa at Latakia in 1099, where his chaplain wrote a letter proclaiming Godfrey “Advocate of the Holy Sepulcher,” Raymond sailed to Constantinople and stayed for a time with the Emperor Alexius. When word reached him in 1101 that a new crusade was coming from Europe, he decided to join it and spent the next two years sometimes fighting against Turks, sometimes fighting against Tancred, now based in Antioch. In 1102 Raymond’s attentions returned to Tripoli, the city whose wealth and prestige had first drawn his attention in 1099 in the final stages of the original crusade. In 1103, after capturing a couple of nearby coastal cities, he built a castle on a hill outside Tripoli and dug in for a long siege. It lasted six years before the city finally fell. Raymond himself died in 1105, his dreams of a new principality still unrealized.
Most puzzling of all is the case of Bohemond. The great hero of the crusade, the military genius who had led the Franks to a series of improbable or impossible victories over the Seljuk Turks, he withdrew from the campaign before its final chapter in the name of establishing a Frankish state around Antioch. It was to be an enduring political creation, lasting for 170 years. But Bohemond himself played little part in securing its survival. In August 1100, just two years after the defeat of Kerbogah, he made an ill-advised expedition to the north and was captured by a Turkish amir. He would spend the next three years in prison and would escape only by paying a massive ransom and promising military support to his captors against their Muslim rivals. A year later he would sail for Europe and with the blessing of the pope would begin organizing a new crusade, this one to be fought against his traditional enemy, the Emperor Alexius. As part of this new campaign, Bohemond traveled all over France and Flanders delivering sermons that condemned the Greeks, that celebrated the crusade, and that placed himself squarely at the center of things—securing his reputation to this day as the greatest hero of the First Crusade. The new expedition, however, fizzled. After a months-long siege of the Byzantine port city of Durazzo, through which so many of the Frankish armies had passed in 1096 and 1097, Bohemond surrendered to Alexius almost unconditionally, returning in quiet disgrace to his homeland in southern Italy. His remains lie today in the Italian town of Canosa di Puglia, just outside the cathedral. The mausoleum, which Bohemond surely designed for himself, was built in the style of a Greek imperial tomb. From the grave he thus continues to threaten the empire, long after it had finally, decisively, defeated him.
Of all the major crusade leaders, only Godfrey left this world with his reputation intact—perhaps because he died in 1100, less than a year after the victory at Ascalon. Like a medieval JFK, his followers were free to imagine the long reign that he might have had and to paint him as whatever sort of hero they wished him to be.
The lesser lords, Godfrey’s brother Baldwin and Bohemond’s nephew Tancred, were the only ones who put together truly lengthy and impressive careers as crusading princes. Baldwin, of course, established the first crusader state around the city of Edessa. Two years later, in 1100, he claimed the throne of Jerusalem immediately after his brother’s death. Within a year he also overcame whatever scruples his brother had felt about wearing a crown in the Holy City, proclaiming himself defiantly king of Jerusalem and governing from the Aqsa Mosque, or as he preferred to call it, the Temple of Solomon.
Tancred, meanwhile, beginning in 1100, ruled Antioch as regent after Bohemond’s imprisonment. His effective administration probably helps to explain why his uncle abandoned the Levant for Europe shortly after his release from captivity in 1103. The giant was a fine battlefield commander and an inspirational figure, but when it came to managing the day-to-day affairs of a principality, his nephew seems to have been better suited for the job. Tancred continued to rule Antioch, albeit as regent in the name of Bohemond’s infant son, until his death from ill health in 1111.
It is remarkable, and probably no coincidence, that the two men who first broke from the main armies in 1097 in order to explore political opportunities in Armenia were also the most successful rulers in the Latin East. Working in the shadows of more famous relatives, they learned the ruthlessness and cunning needed to survive in the frontier societies of eleventh-century Syria and Palestine. When the apocalypse finally calmed in 1100, Baldwin and Tancred were the men best prepared to impose a new order onto the madness they had helped create.
BALDWIN AND TANCRED’S careers also serve as a fitting symbol for the First Crusade’s historical legacy: a two-hundred-year saga of continual warfare, increasingly disastrous for Europe, a dark chapter in Western history that most would rather forget but that recent events in what we call the “war on terror” suggest we ought to remember. Given what we know of the eventual scope of the crusades, of their political importance, of the poisonous effect that their memory continues to exert on relations between adherents of Christianity and Islam, why should we concern ourselves with the failed and eventually forgotten prophetic dreams of those first unfortunate souls who set their culture onto this nightmarish path?
Apocalypses and history are, from any perspective, uncomfortable bedfellows. History is the study of what happened, and the Apocalypse, by definition, hasn’t happened. At least not yet. When it does, there will be no more history. People still believe in apocalypses. They still think one to be imminent. They have done so interminably, and they will probably always do so. Historians are only now learning to appreciate the importance of this recurring phenomenon. Thanks to the work of my colleague Richard Landes, for example, most historians now admit that some, and perhaps many, European men and women looked expectantly, either hopefully or fearfully, toward th
e year 1000 and then 1033 as likely times for the Apocalypse. We have seen in this book how thousands of German pilgrims felt similarly about the year 1064. In all three cases, the years passed, Christ did not return, and memory of those expectations largely, but not completely, faded from historical memory.
The First Crusade is different. It was an apocalypse that for a time worked. The grandest predictions were fulfilled. Christian armies marched east, they witnessed miracles, they bathed in rivers of blood, and they remade history. The crusade then became part of an ongoing Apocalypse. As late as 1120, many highly educated people still believed that they were witnessing the Last Days. Theirs was a shared Apocalypse, a lived Apocalypse, an Apocalypse without end.
History had been transformed, these educated observers would have sworn. And they would have been correct. Their world was in the process of being remade, although perhaps not because of what had happened in Jerusalem.
Every facet of life around the year 1100 was in the midst of some sort of transformation. Medieval historians have long written about the years 1050–1200 in these terms. It was the time of the twelfth-century renaissance, the age of medieval humanism, the era of the discovery of the individual. As tempting as it is to say otherwise, the First Crusade did not cause all of these changes associated with “the Long Twelfth Century.” In many respects it was a product of the early phases of this movement—a product of the economic, political, and intellectual revivals just gaining traction in the later eleventh century. But the First Crusade was a catalyst for all of the social, intellectual, and economic changes that followed. Western European Christians in the twelfth century believed themselves not just to be witnessing history but also to be remaking history, working in concert with the divine plan, serving as instruments of God’s will rather than suffering through life as objects of His wrath. And they believed this, I am suggesting, because for a time—in fact, for decades—they were living with an ongoing Apocalypse. They were God’s agents remaking the world in preparation not for history’s end but for its culmination. Let us consider for a few moments what some of the effects of this continuing Apocalypse were.5
One of the most famous, if troubling, formulations of what happened in the twelfth century is that of Colin Morris, who defined it as the time of “the discovery of the individual.” It is an esoteric idea, but one not without bases in the sources. As even a cursory reading of twelfth-century history will indicate, it was an era that developed a new fascination with questions of psychology, motivation, and internal spiritual life.
For these widespread concerns we ought to consider the First Crusade a primary cause. The application of the crusade indulgence as proclaimed by Urban II required confessors all across Europe to sort through the intentions and personalities of warriors who had accomplished great things in the East but who were, on the face of it, wholly irredeemable. To understand the erratic violence of a man like Raimbold Croton (who lost a hand while trying to scale the walls of Jerusalem and who would later castrate a monk at home), the inexplicable cowardice of Stephen of Blois, or the myriad contradictions that together created Bohemond of Antioch required speculation and investigations of intention and psychology on a grand scale. If anything necessitated a discovery of the individual, interpreting the First Crusade did.6
The apocalyptic First Crusade could also be seen as playing a part in the establishment of national identities, particularly in France. The argument grows in part out of a habit of thought that by now is easily recognizable : the tendency to conflate the Israelites of the Old Testament with the Franks. This association was one of the “revealed truths” contained in Revelation. The new Judah, the true Chosen People, would step out of the allegorical shadows of the Jews and claim their rightful inheritance. The Franks, in this case, were the new Jews, but they also saw themselves as better than the Jews. It was a theological point that even Saracen characters—specifically, Kerbogah’s mother—understood: “What had been with the Jews was transferred to these nations by the gift of adoption.” And this idea could help to justify some of the crusaders’most questionable actions, such as the massacres at Jerusalem, which according to one observer did not grow from tactical necessity but from a desire not to repeat the mistakes of King Saul: “They spared neither women nor children, remembering, I think, King Saul, who spared Agag and thus incurred the wrath of God and perished.” For God had ordered Saul, the first king of Israel, to destroy the Amalekites completely, “man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.” Saul, however, spared their king, Agag, and preserved some of their most valuable possessions. As a result, God rejected Saul as king and promoted David in his place. Godfrey’s army avoided that error.7
This obsession with “Chosen People” is one of the most powerful catalysts toward the creation of national communities. It is strikingly apparent in the sermon of Urban II as imagined by Robert the Monk, where the pope addressed his audience as the “race of Franks . . . chosen and beloved by God.” The language was a deliberate gloss on Deuteronomy 7:6–8: “Since you are holy, the Lord your God has chosen you that you might be to him a particular people out of all those who are on the earth. The Lord is not joined to you and has not chosen you because you will conquer all peoples through numbers, for you are fewer than all other peoples. Rather, the Lord has loved you and He kept the oath sworn to your fathers and has led you with a mighty hand from the slavery and the domination of King Pharaoh of Egypt.”
The biblical passage recalls several scenes from the crusade. In particular, while fighting in the same deserts as the Children of Israel, the Franks were lifted by God in victory over numerically superior enemies, who were also by coincidence lineal political descendants of the pharaohs. Both the Israelites and the Franks had entered the Promised Land, taking as their leaders Joshua and Jesus, respectively—two names that, according to the rules of medieval biblical commentary, were allegorically the same.8 [Plate 12]
The Franks were not the first to claim this sort of affinity with the Jews, and they would not be the last. The books of the Old Testament, particularly the story of the Exodus and the return to the Promised Land, have proved enduring sources of national passions, continually appealing to religious groups who believed that they, like the Franks in 1099, were taking a lead part in God’s plans for history. The citizens of the Dutch Republic, the Parliamentarians of Cromwell’s England, and the Puritans who settled in America (to take three seventeenth-century examples) all conceived of themselves as an elect—a Chosen People like Israel—in order to strengthen their sense of community and purpose. The same ideology would inform the American experience, with its sense of Manifest Destiny and of the United States as “a shining city upon a hill.”
Similar rhetoric had played an important part in the history and politics of the early Middle Ages. Most notably, Charlemagne liked to style himself as a new David and his people the Franks, a new Israel. As a recent study by Matthew Gabriele demonstrates, the memory of Charlemagne in France and Europe more broadly may have played a part in the calling of the Crusade. But Charlemagne’s use of this Old Testament language in 800 would have looked very different from the Franks’ use of it three centuries later. Whereas Charlemagne’s “New Israel” centered on his personality as a new David, the crusaders did not get their David, Godfrey, until after they had arrived in the Promised Land. Their achievement belonged to the people as a whole, and they were encouraged to celebrate that fact, to see themselves as the bountiful and brilliant race whose accomplishment dozens of crusade chroniclers would extol.9
This shared Frankish identity went beyond France. It was an achievement that all Latin Christians could celebrate, and in doing so, they helped to forge a broader category of “Christendom.” The idea of Christendom, the subject of a recent book by Brett Edward Whalen, entered into common parlance in twelfth-century Europe. Expressed in the Latin word Christianitas, it can refer to the belief system of Christianity, to the people who subscribe to those beliefs, or,
sometimes, to a geographic entity.
The crusade chronicle of Baudry of Bourgueil used Christianitas in every one of these senses. As a belief system: “[The Turks] claim that they are descended of Frankish stock, but that their ancestors broke away from Christianity.” As a people: “In our times God called up almost all of His Christendom, from lands everywhere, to snatch Jerusalem, where He especially suffered, from the hands of the filthy Turks.” As a geographic entity : “There was [after the victory of Ascalon] unspeakable joy in all of Christendom.”
To create this sense of common Christian identity had been one of the major goals in Urban II’s crusade plan. Given the sense of triumph, celebrated throughout the European world in ceremonies and processions of thanksgiving, transcending the boundaries drawn during the continuing wars between pope and emperor, this aspect of his plan must be viewed as a success, but only a qualified one. The broader Christian world, Latin and Greek, was damaged, if not irreparably broken. Owing in no small part to ideas propagated in many crusade chronicles, the First Crusade engendered in certain learned circles an unrelenting hatred of the Greeks—an effeminate race, not only ungrateful for the military support that the Franks had given but also actively conspiring with the Turks against their fellow Christians. Rather than unite Western and Eastern churches, then, the crusade had only accentuated their differences. This sense of distinction turned out to be one of the crusade’s most enduring legacies .10
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