God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  At every stage and in every corner of the Afro-Eurasian region under discussion, the ubiquity of organized violence, of public and private warfare, has been inescapable. War provided the glue to cement together political institutions and assert governmental authority over areas. It supplied the pivot of civil and international disputes. It also provided occupation for nobles, aristocrats and the wider urban and rural population; by service for the upwardly ambitious, the physically suited or the otherwise unemployed; or by non-combatant engagement in the extensive social, economic and commercial networks that were required to sustain armies of whatever size. Across the whole region one of the most characteristic figures was that of the warrior plying his trade; the mamluk or Kurdish mercenaries who maintained regimes in the Near East; the Flemish and other mercenaries who supported kings and their rivals in northern Europe; the Varangian guards, northern European émigrés in the service of the Byzantine emperor. Some effectively professional fighting men did very well. The former Varangian Harold Hardrada (d. 1066) ascended to the throne of Norway; the Norman freebooter Robert Guiscard (d. 1085) became ruler of southern Italy; his great-nephew Tancred (d. 1112) rose from landless gentility to be prince of Antioch; the exiled Rodrigo Diaz, the Cid, of Castile (d. 1099), sold his sword and his soldiers to the highest bidders on all sides of the Christian–Muslim conflict before taking Valencia to rule for himself; after failed careers as a cleric and then Anglo-Norman noble, Baldwin of Boulogne (d. 1118) used his military and generalship skills to install himself as ruler of Edessa in the Jazira beyond the Euphrates before assuming the crown of Jerusalem; the Kurdish mercenary captain Yusuf Ibn Ayyub (d. 1193) became Sultan of the Near East: he is better known as Saladin.

  The increasing prominence given such men can be charted in their cultural profile. By the twelfth century across western Europe, lords and even kings were for the first time depicting themselves on their personal seals as mounted warriors, knights, no longer an image of mere soldiery but of social status. The image of the armed knight, in wax, painting, sculpture, stained glass, poetry and funerary effigies, became the standard iconic representation of the ruling military aristocracy. In Byzantium, not only were the martial qualities of Alexius I emphasized by eulogists and artists, but much attention and admiration was directed at the fighting characteristics of the hired mercenaries on which the empire depended, Turks, Slavs and western Europeans. In the Near East, political propaganda caught up with political reality. A political system that relied on hiring paid private armies unsurprisingly revived the theory of holy war, jihad, to which any ambitious leader had to aspire. A succession of ambitious parvenu rulers, culminating but not ending with Saladin, laid claim to the accolade of mujahid, holy warrior.

  One obvious practical reason underpinned such respect for the fighting man. The well-trained mounted fighter, even in small numbers, could dominate any battlefield and provide a decisive outcome usually in a modest period of time relative to the static slugging matches of massed, opposing, poorly armed infantry. In the Near East, these cavalrymen would be lightly armoured, using small horses, with the shorter bow as their main offensive weapon. The rapid attack, feint and ambush were their methods. In the west, archers tended to be infantry and, although useful in sieges and to control the tempo of a field battle, until the development of the great longbow were not the arbiters of victory or defeat. The western armed knight was the tank of the period; manoeuvrable; impervious to most of the fire power available to the opposing infantry. Arrows from short bows usually stuck irritatingly but harmlessly into the chain-mail coats worn over leather hauberks or tunics, so that during a long struggle knights were seen to resemble giant hedgehogs. Many famous knightly casualties to arrows came when the missile found an exposed, unprotected part of the anatomy, such as the eye or, most often, the neck when heat forced the mailed warrior to loosen his mailed neck-guard. With plate armour, arrows, even from the later longbows, tended to glance off carefully moulded front surfaces. While direct hits from spears and lances were a threat, the best chain-mail and plate armour were remarkably effective at deflecting sword-thrusts. The main use of swords, spears and maces against mounted knights was to unseat them; without the height and horse advantage, the armoured warrior became vulnerable.

  Through genetics, training and diet, knights tended to be physically bigger than infantry. Mounted on increasingly well-bred, specially trained and larger horses, protected by armour and wielding heavy lances, maces and swords, a few knights could hold their own against scores of infantry. The repeated accounts of seemingly miraculous victories or escapes by hopelessly outnumbered bands of knights, while likely to be exaggerated, preserved a truth. Knightly losses in battle were modest except through the massacres that often ensued at the end of fighting. In the massed charge, lances fixed (or ‘couched’) or with swords and maces, western knights presented a most potent weapon. This depended for its effectiveness on the use of shielding ranks of infantry to commit the enemy so far as to prevent his withdrawal, escape or, as when faced with Near Eastern armies, feints and strong field discipline, to prevent a precipitate or piecemeal attack. The numbers involved in battles varied enormously. In the eleventh or twelfth century, an army of 10,000 was very large and difficult to handle over long periods, for obvious logistical reasons. Much larger forces were recorded, not least during the crusades, but these relied on the availability of plentiful forage or, in the invasion of England in 1066 or on crusade from the later twelfth century, the deep pockets and administrations of rulers to transport tens of thousands of troops by sea. Many battles and military forays were much smaller enterprises, consisting of a few hundred, even a few score. Some battles could feature a dozen or so knights. The nature of medieval warfare precluded the huge forces of the classical age, the mass national levies of the late eighteenth century, or the industrialized conscription of modern times.

  The cost of western and eastern warriors, men and horses was high. In Europe and western Asia, money payment for fighting on campaigns was common, as were longer-term rewards, such as land, titles and the consequent social privileges and status. This even applied to the mamluks, who technically were slaves; they ended by ruling Egypt for 250 years. Warfare did not comprise pitched battles alone. In fact, most generals tended to avoid such risky and expensive encounters, preferring skirmishes and ravaging to achieve usually limited political or economic objectives. The butchery in most internal warfare, where combatants came from the same cultural and regional milieu or even knew each other well, tended to be limited, unlike conflicts that involved strangers, such as foreign invaders like the Vikings or crusaders. In the absence of effective systems of social and legal arbitration, still less international law, war was endemic and only marginally mitigated in its effects by shared warrior values, later called chivalry in the west but equally recognized in essence in the Muslim world. The main victims of war were non-combatants caught in war and forage zones and the unskilled infantry who rarely enjoyed a fair share of victory (i.e. booty) while suffering incommensurately in fighting. Skilled, trained warriors were worth their reward because they could ensure the best chance of success in most forms of warfare: battle; foraging; defended or forced marches; skirmishing. As war so often was politics and vice versa, with rulers across the whole Afro-Eurasian region expecting and expected to campaign every year, their value was evident.

  However, in some circumstances, the mounted warrior was ineffective. Besieging cities or castles with stone walls neutralized him completely. Yet sieges played a central part in the successful prosecution of war, to annexe territory or force an opponent to come to terms. Here numbers, not equestrian panache, counted for all. Medieval warfare depended on muscle power, of men and women, horses, beasts of burden and drawers of carts. Muscle power was the medieval equivalent of modern electricity and petrol. Equally, if the besiegers either had to starve or storm a castle or a walled city into submission, the number of attackers was crucial. In addition to men, sieges required
timber to build giant throwing machines and engines in and beneath which attackers could scale or undermine the city’s walls. The technology of siege warfare appears to have been more highly developed in the eastern Mediterranean, especially perhaps in Byzantium where forests and cities were both in abundance. Although fleeting references exist to large wooden siege machines in western Europe before the First Crusade, only during that expedition were westerners extensively exposed to such engines, the use of which they very quickly mastered, probably with Greek help. Timber and carpentry also provided the vital accompaniment to shipping. Western European advances in shipbuilding and navigation supplied the sinews of Europe, where communications ran along coasts and up rivers. The different physical world of the Near East, where political power and much of the internal trade were landlocked and timber was in shortening supply, gave the western attackers after 1095 their one clear military advantage.

  Yet even where their military training was of least use, the elite mounted warrior played a vital role. As social leaders, they provided the money, the command structures, occasionally military knowledge. Medieval armies were collected by coercion, loyalty, the incentive of cash and idealism. The knightly classes habitually provided the first three; with the crusades they supplied the fourth as well.

  The First Crusade

  1

  The Origins of Christian Holy War

  On 12 April 1096, a young castellan, Achard of Montmerle, pledged property to the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny in return for 2,000 Lyons shillings and four mules so that he could accomplish his intention to join ‘the journey to Jerusalem to fight for God against pagans and Saracens’. In a similar deal with the abbey of St Victor at Marseilles four months later the brothers Geoffrey and Guy were reported as wishing to seek Jerusalem ‘both for the grace of pilgrimage and under the protection of God, to exterminate the wickedness and unrestrained rage of the pagans by which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive and killed’.1 The experience of that campaign, which cost Achard his life near Jaffa in June 1099, convinced his companions that they were the army of God ‘fighting for Christ’, their casualties martyrs, their cause supported in battle by the saints of heaven themselves, George, Demetrius and Blaise, ‘knights of Christ’, their success assured because ‘God fights for us’. They were no more than pursuing the task given them by Urban II on his preaching tour of 1095–6, who, in his own words to the Flemish in December 1095, hearing that the Turks had ‘in their frenzy invaded and ravaged the churches of God in the east’ and ‘seized the Holy City’, had at Clermont ‘imposed on them the obligation to undertake such a military enterprise for the remission of all their sins’.2

  Fifty years later, in an account of the Second Crusade, an Anglo-Norman priest called Raoul aired a general theory of justified homicide: ‘He is not cruel who slays the cruel. He who puts wicked men to death is a servant of the Lord because they are wicked and there is ground for killing them.’3 By this time, such redefinition of Christian militancy raised few eyebrows. Some years before, the austere and massively influential Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux, a sort of one-man European moral ombudsman and one of the instigators of the Second Crusade (1146–8), voiced his approval of the union of the Militia of God and the Militia of the World in the creation of the Military Order of the Knights Templar:

  The knight who puts the breastplate of faith on his soul in the same way as he puts a breastplate of iron on his body is truly intrepid and safe from everything… so forward in safety, knights, and with undaunted souls drive off the enemies of the Cross of Christ.4

  Bernard, in his recruiting preaching and letters for the Second Crusade in 1146–7, showed intimate knowledge of the New Testament, not least the Epistles of St Paul. The Apostle was fond of martial metaphors, but his message was wholly contrary to the abbot of Clairvaux’s:

  Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against the flesh and blood… Stand therefore, having your loins girt about with truth, and having on the breastplate of righteousness, and your feet shod with the preparation of the gospel of peace… taking the shield of faith… and take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the spirit, which is the word of God. (Ephesians 6:11–17)

  Or, more succinctly, ‘No man that warreth for God entangleth himself with the affairs of this world’ (II Timothy 2:4) and ‘For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war after the flesh: for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds’ (II Corinthians 10:3–4).

  It is a measure of the pragmatism, sophistication (some might say sophistry) and sheer intellectual ingenuity of St Paul’s successors over the following millennium in expounding the doctrine of the Gospels that there was an ideology of Christian holy war at all.

  WAR, THE BIBLE AND CLASSICAL THEORY

  The most ringing modern verdict on the crusades has become justifiably famous. At the end of what has been described as the last great medieval chronicle, his three-volume History of the Crusades (1951–4), Steven Runciman delivered his judgement: ‘the Holy War itself was nothing more than a long act of intolerance in the name of God, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost’.5 Yet intolerance of the enemies of God has a long history in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For much of the last two millennia there have been scholars and religious propagandists, often a majority, who would have taken issue with Sir Steven just as there have always been those who would have agreed with him. What may appear today to many Christians and perhaps most non-Christians as an irreconcilable paradox between holy war and the doctrines of peace and forgiveness proclaimed in the Lord’s Prayer, the Sermon on the Mount and many other Gospel passages has not always been so obvious or recognized. This was certainly the case in educated circles around Urban II at the end of the eleventh century.

  As it had developed by the beginning of its second millennium in western Christendom, Christianity was only indirectly a scriptural faith. The foundation texts of the Old and New Testaments were mediated even to the educated through the prism of commentaries by the so-called Church Fathers, theologians such as Origen of Alexandria, Ambrose of Milan, Augustine of Hippo and Pope Gregory I who, from the third to the sixth centuries, undertook the often tricky task of translating some inappropriate, obscure, incomplete, contradictory or idealistic apophthegms into an intelligible and satisfying system of thought and action within the context of the institutions of an active religion, a temporal church and the daily lives of believers. The Beatitudes had to be reconciled with human civilization, specifically the Graeco-Roman world, or, to put it crudely, ways found around the Sermon on the Mount. Being extravagantly well versed in the highest traditions of classical learning, the Church Fathers did this rather well. Beside these majestic exercises of the intellect, which extended even to manipulating the wording of some inconvenient biblical texts, Scripture attracted apocryphal additions and spawned a massive literature of imitative hagiography often supported by legends surrounding relics of biblical characters or events. The experience of the church over the centuries provided its own corpus of law, tradition, history, legend and saints that reflected neither the idealism nor experience of the first century AD.

  The church’s teaching on war early reflected this process of interpretation and exegesis. Negatively, the so-called charity texts of the New Testament that preached pacifism and forgiveness, not retaliation, were firmly defined as applying to the beliefs and behaviour of the private person. John the Baptist advised soldiers to remain in the army and draw their wages (Luke 3:14). As citizens, Christ told His followers to pay taxes to Caesar, drawing a clear distinction between political and spiritual obligations (Matthew 22:21). St Paul implied the same fundamental dichotomy of obedience in urging his disciple Timothy and his community at Ephesus to pray ‘for kings and all that are in authority’ (I Timothy 2:2). This distinction between the public and the private was reinforced by the Bible�
��s very language. In St Jerome’s Latin translation of the Scriptures (finished c.405), known as the Vulgate, which became the standard text of the Bible in the medieval West, the word for ‘enemy’ in the New Testament is invariably inimicus, implying a personal enemy. The Latin for a public enemy, hostis, does not appear in the New Testament. From this it could be argued that there was no intrinsic contradiction in a doctrine of personal, individual forgiveness condoning certain forms of necessary public violence to ensure the security in which, in St Paul’s phrase, Christians ‘may lead a quiet and peacable life in all godliness and honesty’ (I Timothy 2:2).

  While theoretically, in a perfect world, individual pacifism could be translated into political pacifism, the main thrust of Christian teaching assumed post-lapsarian sin and imperfection. The Old Testament bequeathed stories of legitimate war pleasing to God, from the Israelites, Joshua and King David to Judas Maccabeus. In contrast to modern Christians not of biblical fundamentalist persuasion, the medieval church placed considerable importance on the Old Testament for its apparent historicity, its moral stories, its prophecies and its prefiguring of the New Covenant. Bible stories operated on many levels (medieval exegetes distinguished as many as four), including literal and divine truth. In the Old Testament, the Chosen People of the Israelites fought battles for their faith commanded and protected by their God. Moses was told directly by God to enlist the Levites to slaughter the followers of the Golden Calf (Exodus 32:26–8). God ordered Saul to annihilate the Amalekites ‘men, women, infant and suckling’ (I Samuel 15:3). Warrior heroes adorn the scriptural landscape: Joshua, Gideon, David. In the Books of the Maccabees, recording the battles of Jews against the Hellenic Seleucids and their Jewish allies in the second century BC, butchery and mutilation are praised as the work of God through His followers, whose weapons are blessed and who meet their enemies with hymns and prayers. ‘So, fighting with their hands and praying to God in their hearts, they laid low no less than thirty-five thousand and were greatly gladdened by God’s manifestation’ (II Maccabees 15:27–8). Many Old Testament texts, especially those concerning Jerusalem, could be construed as providing casus belli: ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusalem on heaps’ (Psalm 79).