From the perspective of the western church, conflict with Islam was ipso facto meritorious in a religious context. Whatever the reality of ambitious Italian trading cities, Norman bandits, Spanish lords or even Greek princes, churchmen, in particular successive popes, conceptualized the conflict, fitting it into a wider picture of cosmic significance and individual grace. Whereas in the ninth century, Christendom appeared genuinely threatened, the frontier skirmishing of the eleventh century was of a very different order, yet the rhetoric was conversely gaudier. This was of considerable importance as the attitude to wars against the infidel in the earlier eleventh century coloured the whole approach of Urban II. The motives for holy war were always ever only partly practical, those directed against Muslims often being only tangentially related to any military necessity in defence of Christendom. What counted for successive popes was the place of these wars in Christian history and the opportunity they afforded for a revival of religious enthusiasm, devotion and piety, essentially concerns internal to the church and Christian society.
This is not to say that religion played no part in these wars. Pisan raids on Palermo in Sicily (1063) and al-Mahdiya in north Africa (1087) were consciously placed in the context of Christian service. The Norman invaders of Sicily after 1060, supported by papal encouragement and banner, were regarded by some as champions of the Faith. Their troops took Communion before battle; their efforts were sustained by visions of saints; and one Italian chronicler (who died in 1085, so avoiding the hindsight of the First Crusade that infected others) had the Norman leader Robert Guiscard declare his wish to free Christians from Muslim rule and to ‘avenge the injury done to God’.37
Pilgrimage and war marched closely together. The Pisan al-Mahdiya campaign in 1087 included a pilgrimage to Rome. Frenchmen were habitués of the pilgrimage to Compostela as well as the reconquista. A grant of indulgences by Pope Alexander II has been variously interpreted, if genuine, as applying either to war or pilgrimage or both.38 Gregory VII’s enigmatic reference to the Holy Sepulchre in 1074 hinted at a fusion of ideas, unsurprising in a pope so concerned with the ramifications of confession and penance as well as war. Partly no doubt as a consequence of an increase in pilgrimages, especially to Jerusalem, attested by Muslim as well as western observers and itself a result of the increase in Byzantine power in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean under Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer (d. 1025), there was a distinct frisson of outrage at the arbitrary destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre by the unstable Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim, in 1009. Whether or not Pope Sergius IV (1009–12) encouraged the creation of a Christian relief fleet with a promise of indulgences, news of the outrage rang across the west. In a grim foreshadowing of the anti-Semitism of later Jerusalem holy warriors, a Burgundian chronicler, Ralph Glaber (d. 1046), recorded how Jewish communities in France were perversely blamed for inciting al-Hakim and were violently persecuted in consequence.39 Elsewhere, chroniclers saw those fighting wars of profit in Spain or in the Venetian defence of Bari against Muslims in 1003 as inspired by faith, as indeed may have been the participants themselves. In 1015–16, Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) openly approved a Pisan and Genoese raid on Muslim pirate bases in Sardinia. The Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes (d. 1034) not only recorded the Jewish libel over the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, adding gory details of atrocities against eastern Christians, but frequently mentioned campaigns against the Moors in Spain and, in describing a supposed Muslim attack on Narbonne c.1018, told of the Christian defenders receiving Communion before battle. Adam, who referred to his warlike lay uncles with pride, revealed a world in which religiosity and violence were as close as his lay and clerical relatives.40
From 1060, the reformed papacy applied their theories of justified war with even greater vigour and legal precision to campaigns against the infidel than they did to those against their Christian enemies. In Sicily, the ethos of holy war was carefully nurtured, extending to the eccentric but politically convenient expedient of appointing the military commander, Count Roger, Robert Guiscard’s equally bellicose younger brother, as papal legate, the pope’s representative in running the church in the newly conquered island. Although it appears that many holy war aspects of the reconquest of Muslim Spain resulted from the First Crusade rather than the other way round, the Iberian peninsula attracted interest from popes and French knights and fitted neatly and centrally into the increasingly grandiose concepts of world destiny being peddled not just by papal apologists but by monastic reformers as well. Glaber, a Cluniac Benedictine whose order had a long and close interest both in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and in promoting pilgrimage, peppered his chronicle with accounts of pilgrimages to Jerusalem (which he feared had become abused as a fashionable accessory for those seeking prestige not penitence); Christian warfare against the Moors in Spain and, on one occasion, the Slavs beyond the Elbe; and the Peace and Truce of God movement. Glaber was in no doubt of the efficacy of all of them; even monks who broke their vows and in extremis took up arms, were seen as gaining salvation.41 In this context, papal approval and grants of specific spiritual privileges to warriors against infidels would have occasioned little surprise. It is likely that Alexander II offered a lifting of all penances and remission of sins to campaigners in Spain in 1064. Gregory VII advertised ‘eternal reward’ for recruits against the infidel (and others) in 1074. In 1089, Urban II himself urged the colonization of the devastated frontier city of Tarragona on the Spanish coast south of Barcelona as a penitential act. The rebuilding of the city was described in military terms, as providing a wall of Christianity against the Muslims; those joining the enterprise could substitute it for any planned penitential pilgrimage, including that to Jerusalem, later specified as ‘indulgence of your sins’.42
Theories and practices of morally just and spiritually meritorious warfare had developed unevenly in response to changing political circumstances, religious outlook and social behaviour. Many clung to older concepts of sin and spiritual war. Some feigned or genuinely felt shock at the unapologetic and unequivocal combination of war and penance proposed by Urban II in 1095. Yet the pre-history of the First Crusade was long and illustrious. Holy war against infidels who, by the late eleventh century, appeared if not in retreat then at least to be subject to attack on equal terms, provided one means of morally legitimate expression for a military aristocracy whose social authority and robust culture served to highlight their spiritual vulnerability. The detritus of legal justifications, scriptural, Patristic and classical, thrown into relief by actual experience in the Carolingian period and by romanticized echoes of it enshrined in vernacular chansons de geste, supplied material from which fresh theories of holy war could be constructed. The catalyst was as much the perspectives and interests of the reformed papacy as the external threats presented by Islam: together they set the stage for Urban II. Yet much of what was proclaimed as new by the call to arms in 1095 represented old wine in new bottles; the winepress from which it came was grimed with use and age.
2
The Summons to Jerusalem
The sermon preached by Pope Urban II outside the cathedral at Clermont in the Auvergne on Tuesday, 27 November 1095 has been seen as setting in train one of the most renowned sequence of events in the history of western Europe and Christianity. The story has resonated down the centuries; of how tens of thousands willingly uprooted themselves for the sake of liberating Jerusalem, a place of unimaginable physical remoteness yet ubiquitous immediate appeal; of how, suffering horrific losses and agonizing obstacles, they were painfully forged into an army that appeared to campaign as much in a war of the spirit as of the flesh; of how they surmounted seemingly fatal odds, of climate, terrain, local hostility and superior enemy numbers in repeated desperate battles and skirmishes; and of how, after three years on the road, the survivors stormed the Holy City, reclaiming it for Christendom, as one awed observer remarked, 460 years after its loss to Islam under the Emperor Heraclius.1 I
f the response to Urban’s appeal astonished all and shocked some, the outcome provided its own justification, creating a legend to feed the imaginations of western Europeans, to stir their emotions and haunt their nightmares.
The luminosity of the story of triumph over adversity in the cause of God, shining with epic, romance, adventure, excitement, glamour, heroism and the supernatural, casts shade as well as light. It suited promoters and apologists as well as the conquering heroes themselves, the proud Jerusalemites, to depict this holy war as a coherent narrative, of defined armies and a clear pattern of campaign. The story of the march to Jerusalem obscured much that failed to fit an acceptable and accepted literary and theological pattern, or challenged the embroidered reminiscences of the returned warriors of Christ. So far from a sudden clap of thunder or a leap in the dark, the devising and prosecution of what is now called the First Crusade, if unexpected, was not entirely unfamiliar, while much of the process remains unknown and unknowable.
The traditional version, largely derived from contemporary chronicles reflecting the experiences and perspectives of contingents and commentators in northern and southern France combined with a distinctive view from Lorraine, describes a series of armies leaving the west from the spring to the autumn of 1096 in explosive popular response to the inspirational and novel preaching of Urban II and his agents; their rendezvous was Constantinople, which all had reached by the end of May 1097. The earliest contingents, some associated with the charismatic preacher Peter the Hermit, often misleadingly known as the Peasants’ Crusades, after engaging in destructive attacks on Jewish communities in France and the Rhineland, continued to display indiscipline as they were picked off by enraged locals during separate marches across the Balkans, those who eventually reached Constantinople being massacred in their first serious military encounter with the Turks of western Asia Minor in the autumn of 1096. The armies of the so-called Princes’ Crusade, with more discipline, military skill, diplomatic contacts and money, fared better. Led by great nobles such as the dukes of Lower Lorraine and Normandy, the counts of Toulouse, Boulogne, Flanders, Blois and the brothers of the king of France and count of Apulia, accompanied by important churchmen, including a papal legate, and large numbers of knights, dependent and free, as well as footsoldiers, servants, camp-followers and subsidized pilgrims, these armies coalesced at the siege of Nicaea near the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus in June 1097.
With financial and military assistance from the Byzantine emperor, this skilled but disparate army fought its way across Anatolia before crashing into northern Syria in October 1097. During an extraordinary siege of Antioch (October 1097 to June 1098), when appalling material conditions and fear of military vulnerability caused many to desert, and a near-miraculous defeat of a Syrian relief force, the western army found sustenance to their morale in visions, relics and a growing belief in their providential status. In the wake of this advance, parts of Cilician Armenia, some ports on the north Syrian coast and the city of Edessa across the river Euphrates in northern Iraq fell under western control or effective influence. After internal bickering over precedence and land following the death of the papal legate (August 1098), most of the leaders joined the final, largely unopposed march south into Palestine in May 1099, reaching Jerusalem on 7 June. After a desperate siege in arid high summer, with the threat of an Egyptian relief army ever closer, the city was bloodily stormed on 15 July, its occupation confirmed by a startling victory over the Egyptians at Ascalon a month later. Leaving a garrison established in Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon, most of the troops, their vows well fulfilled, returned home, mainly by sea, their deeds exciting immediate, if unsuccessful, imitation, in particular by armies from Lombardy, Bavaria and France (1100–1102), and almost universal praise. Judged on any criteria, the achievement of the expedition to Jerusalem was stupendous.2
By explaining these spectacular events in terms of divine will, contemporaries found neither need nor inclination to inquire too deeply into the gestation, purpose, timing or nature of Urban’s appeal. Still less were they able to produce a comprehensive view of all operations connected with the journey east. Although there was disagreement between local traditions over details (as in different provinces boasting one of their own as the first man over the walls of the Holy City), and at least one account, that of the Lorrainer Albert of Aachen (Aix), attributing the original inspiration of the whole enterprise to Peter the Hermit rather than the pope, the events themselves provided their own explanation and justification without causing anxiety over what occurred beyond the vision or hearing of the writer and his sources. Thus the direct and indirect accounts of eyewitnesses, many of which fed off each other, were partial and artificial, literary and didactic. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, is frank about his concerns, lest the deeds of the victors of 1099 be distorted by rumours spread by ‘misfits of war and cowardly deserters’. His openness may stand for all:
It is a matter of record that God’s army, although it bore the whip of the Lord for its transgressions, nevertheless triumphed over all paganism because of His loving kindness. But it seems too tiresome to write of each journey since some went through Sclavonia, others by Hungary, by Lombardy, or by the sea. So, we have taken care to write of the Count of Saint-Gilles, the bishop of Le Puy, and their army without bothering with the others.3
As a result, although the most famous episode of its age and place, there is much about the First Crusade that is confused and irrecoverable. It is not only private motives that elude scrutiny. After the first five identifiable groups of Jew-persecuting crusaders had left the Rhineland by the beginning of June 1096, further attacks on Jewish communities occurred in June and July to the north, in Xanten, Geldern, Neuss, Wiehr and Wevelinghoren, hitherto untouched by the pogroms. Who precisely the perpetrators were, who led them and what happened to them is wholly obscure. When Peter the Hermit arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, he discovered a large army of Italians already there; again their provenance, leadership, organization and route have left no trace in the sources. When the princes’ army arrived in the environs of Antioch in October 1097, they discovered that two nearby ports on the coast of north Syria, St Symeon and Lattakiah, had already been captured by western fleets that included Genoese and angli (literally ‘English’). These may have acted in concert with crusade leaders or the Byzantine emperor, or not. For the next eighteen months, western shipping appeared regularly in Levantine waters without any clear account of their origins, such as another fleet of angli that reached St Symeon in March 1098, having put in at the Italian port of Lucca en route. These mariners, numerous other groups and thousands of individuals who joined the ‘great stirring’ (motio valida) have little or no history.4 To generalize about their expectations and experiences is inherently futile and possibly distorting. The picture of the First Crusade is far from clear, well delineated or fixed despite the fierce attention it has attracted over more than 900 years. Its story can only be tentative and incomplete, the stuff of legend indeed.
When Urban II stood before the crowd at the end of the council at Clermont neither was unprepared. In March 1095, at a council at Piacenza in Lombardy, ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, appealed for military aid against his hostile neighbours, the latest in a succession of such requests. A few years earlier, Alexius had asked Urban to organize help against the Pechenegs in the Balkans. Now, according to a western account, the enemy were described as ‘pagans’ who threatened eastern Christians and were menacing even Constantinople itself.5 Whatever the strategic validity of such claims, the combination of military danger and religious solidarity bore strong echoes of the schemes of the 1070s. Urban turned this opportunity to his own purposes. After years of defensiveness since Gregory VII’s expulsion from Rome by the imperialists in 1084, the papal party had begun to consolidate its position in Italy, France and Germany. The Council of Piacenza, a clear demonstration of papal power as the first international ecclesiastic
al assembly of Urban’s pontificate, witnessed Gregorianism in action, sitting in judgement on the state of the church and the morals of the clergy and debating the sins of emperors and kings, specifically the conduct of Henry IV of Germany and the adultery of Philip I, the Fat, of France. This latest Greek request could be incorporated into this new confident papal assertiveness. It was recorded that the pope exhorted ‘many’ to promise to help Alexius against the ‘pagans’ by taking an oath.6
To capitalize on the achievement of Piacenza, Urban planned his elaborate tour of France, the first by a pope for almost half a century. This was to culminate at the Council of Clermont, attended by at least thirteen archbishops, eighty-two bishops, countless abbots and a host of other clerics. The geographical embrace of this gathering was impressive, from the Anglo-Norman realms and Artois in the north to Upper Austria in the east to Italy in the south; the assembling of such a gathering was a matter of weeks if not months; its business neither random nor spontaneous but premeditated. However, the council provided only part of the pope’s business and itinerary. Urban arrived in Provence in July 1095. During the following fourteen months before returning to Italy in September 1096, he conducted a unique papal tour, covering much of southern, central, western and south-eastern France: Provence, Languedoc, the Rhône valley, Burgundy, the Auvergne, the Limousin, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, the Bordelais, his journey punctuated by theatrical ceremonies, assemblies and preaching in some of the most important religious and urban centres: Nîmes, Avignon, Lyons, Cluny, Mâcon, Clermont, Limoges, Angers, Le Mans, Tours, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Moissac, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, Arles. His avoidance of the territories under the direct control of the Capetian king, in the Orléannais and the Ile de France, and those of the feuding heirs to the Anglo-Norman lands, William II of England and Duke Robert of Normandy, was political and deliberate; the French king was to be excommunicated at the Clermont Council; the Normans were too successfully old-fashioned in their control of their clergy and too ambivalent in their loyalty to the Urbanist cause for comfort. Flanders and Lorraine were too far north and close to strong imperialists. The impact of the papal visit was great, the physical presence of such an august figure attracting special excitement in regions unused to such grand progresses.
God's War: A New History of the Crusades Page 9