God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  In their determined pursuit of victory and consequent booty, the First Crusaders bear comparison with Viking armies of the ninth to eleventh centuries. A necessary esprit de corps was established though always operating in potentially hostile territory, dependent on constant success for survival, in the process establishing a micro-culture of militancy, community and purpose, which found expression in extremes of violence no less than in the drive for material profit or diplomatic gain. Like those of the Carolingians, the Christian army supplied the institutional context for social, political, material and religious exchange. Militarily and politically, the First Crusade exemplified a consistent feature of medieval warfare: the effectiveness of armies, not necessarily of massive numerical superiority, operating and dominating war fronts far from home. While a familiar feature of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, subject to regular incursions from the Eurasian steppes and dependent on foreign mercenary bands, western Europe supplied only a few analogous examples, such as the Catalan Company of the early fourteenth century, which successively terrorized Asia Minor on behalf of the ailing Greek empire and then occupied and ruled parts of Greece for themselves.58 But it was never remotely on the scale of the First Crusade. The nature of medieval warfare allowed for such campaigns as armies, wherever they found themselves, relied on self-sufficiency in food, equipment and horses rather than being dependent, as in modern wars, on home bases.

  That the First Crusade was able to achieve such results reflected the context for its operations. The expedition formed part of a pre-existing process opening the eastern Mediterranean to western adventurers, merchants, pilgrims and mercenaries. Pivotal was the role played in its inception and nurturing by the Byzantines, a debt that was soon to become embarrassing for commentators and politicians who preferred an adversarial model and the myth of an autonomous victory. Political chaos in the Near East denied their opponents unity while allowing the crusaders opportunities for diplomacy and alliances. The leaders of the western force adapted quickly not only to the diplomatic possibilities but also to the alien military tactics of their enemies.59 Although westerners were possibly familiar with siege techniques, in the west there were few pitched battles and fewer post-conflict massacres. The central elements of war in the west were cavalry and infantry, including archers, and it was characterized by the charge and the skirmish. In the east, in addition to heavy cavalry, the impetus in battle was provided by light armed cavalry, often archers, the massed charge being replaced by the rapid and fluid tactics of the feint and the ambush, which, by early 1098, the crusaders knew how to counter. The fighting march, unknown in the west, was a staple of Levantine warfare which the westerners perfected, the march from Ramla to Ascalon on 10–12 August 1099 providing a textbook example.

  Yet the political, material and military pillars of victory fail adequately to describe the structure of the First Crusade or alone explain its success. Although it is misleading to assume that all recruits and followers shared a similar intensity of religious motivation and zeal, without the element of ideology and spiritual exhilaration there would have been no march to Jerusalem, let alone a successful conquest. As the expedition shed its appearance of a Byzantine mercenary force in the winter of 1097–8, so spiritual leadership and direction came to the fore, visions, relics, liturgical ceremonies and the theatre of communal penitence binding the army together. There are contradictions here. The siege of Antioch appears in the retrospect of veterans to have been crucial to this process. Yet by then the mass of unarmed pilgrims and camp followers had been reduced to a rump, increasingly integrated into the military function of the expedition. At Antioch, too, the one acknowledged spiritual leader, Adhemar of Le Puy, died, not to be replaced, the response of the leaders appearing anything but spiritually inspired. Yet the fractured leadership after the Antioch triumph, the prospect of annihilation removed, created a vacuum of purpose that was filled by religious symbolism and exhortation expressed through increasingly vocal and organized popular elements. The language of participants from at least the early summer of 1097 points to fundamental and well-established attitudes, aspirations and beliefs that predated the crises of Antioch and Jerusalem.

  When Stephen of Blois wrote in June 1097 of ‘the blessed journey’ of ‘the army of God’, he was doing more than parroting the cliché and slogans of the preachers and priests. He was expressing an understanding that the enterprise was especially holy, uniquely part of God’s purpose. By March 1098, Stephen was talking of the dead as martyrs, an increasingly common theme in accounts of the later stages of the crusade: the language, images and examples of celestial help suffuse the letters sent home by clergy and laity. In two surviving letters to the archbishop of Rheims, of November 1097 and July 1098, Anselm of Ribemont, who was to be killed in February 1099 at the siege of Arqah and was reported as himself having experienced celestial visions, emphasized the unique status of the army, calling on the clergy in the west to pray for the Christian host, conscious of fighting for Christendom as a whole, spiritually bound to the western church however far removed physically.60 The appreciation of a unique providential purpose marked out this holy war from previous conflicts with infidels in Sicily or Spain. As privations deepened and dangers grew, the awareness of the supernatural and a feeling of its proximity became more acute. This spiritual intensity did not derive solely from the conditions of the march; it was inherent from the start in the enterprise’s system of belief and understanding of failure and success in terms of sin and God’s favour. There was little or no perceived conflict between material and religious motives. Booty and land were justified as well as necessary reward for labouring in God’s service. The crusade encompassed the pious, the adventurer, the zealot, the thug, the tourist, the driven, the bored, the penitent, the professional and the desperate within its ideology of service, warfare and faith. Grasping opportunists such as Baldwin of Boulogne observed the proprieties. The conviction of leaders and led in the transcendent worthiness of their cause had been legitimized by Urban II and the recruiters and propagandists of 1095–6, but sprang from a deeper culture of militant piety. That their casualties appeared to them as martyrs and that their efforts were crowned with victory merely confirmed them in their sense of battered righteousness.

  Frankish Outremer

  5

  The Foundation of Christian Outremer

  On 15 July 1149, fifty years to the day after the Christian capture of Jerusalem, a service was held in the southern corner of the compound of the church of the Holy Sepulchre to dedicate a complex of newly constructed chapels encasing the rock designated as Calvary, the site of the Crucifixion. To mark the event, an inscription was erected near the spot that began:

  This place is holy, sanctified by the blood of Christ.

  By our consecration we add nothing to its holiness.1

  The formal pious humility of this sentiment concealed the revolution in the religious and political affairs of the church, city and region and in the attitudes and habits of all those elsewhere in Latin Christendom interested in their fate that had characterized the previous half-century. In the aftermath of a great, if unproductive, incursion of western help, now known as the Second Crusade, and on the eve of a major reconstruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, Patriarch Fulk of Jerusalem and his colleagues cannot have been unaware of the reconfiguration of western culture caused by the occupation of the Holy Land. Fulk himself, a pious, dogged ecclesiastical second-rater, had abandoned the awkward political compromises of an Angoulême religious house for the escapism, exoticism and opportunism of colonial Palestine. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem had become almost an obligation, certainly a mass habit, for the faithful of Europe, the image of the Holy Sepulchre a new model in art as much as for public and private devotion. Replicas proliferated across western Europe as well as symbolic representations in chapels attached to parish churches and cathedrals that played an important part in Easter rituals and liturgies.2 The holiness mentioned in the Calvary insc
ription had irradiated the west through the flood of relics that streamed from Palestine in the aftermath of 1099, in the process accelerating a trend towards a greater universality of cults and a closer concentration on the historicity of the Bible and hence the humanity of Christ. The traditional rhetoric and Gregorian standard of just and holy warfare were transfigured by the memory of the first Jerusalemites, fighting for the church in Spain, the Baltic, even within Christendom itself, now being assessed and rewarded in terms of the remission of sins gained on the first journey to Jerusalem. The glory of the victors of 1099 clung to them in name and fame, their deeds cited as periods in the lives and affairs of onlookers not themselves veterans. Just as in early twenty-first-century British conversation ‘the war’ invariably refers to the global conflict that had ended in 1945, so the ‘journey to Jerusalem’ for western Europeans of the early twelfth century meant only one thing. Beyond providing a benchmark of honour and service, ‘those men who obeyed the command of the pope, who left so many and so much and who, as loyal knights (boni homines), captured Jerusalem by arms and assault’, the Anglo-Norman baron Brian Fitz-Count recalled in the early 1140s, ‘established Godfrey, a good and legitimate king’.3

  Heavenly Jerusalem may have been brought closer by the Christian liberation of the Holy Places, but the terrestrial Holy Land needed its walls defending, its fields tending and its ports to thrive. The new Christian land overseas, Outremer, provided a fresh field for ambition, endeavour and settlement. In contradiction of the hindsight of history, those gathered around the rock called Calvary did not imagine the political enterprise as any more doomed than the religious. Although nervous westerners seeking to buy property in Palestine in mid-century might prefer land ‘around Jerusalem not near the border with the Turks’, appreciation of the providential nature of the 1099 victory, the ‘greatest event since the resurrection’ as one enthusiast had proclaimed it, imposed its own confidence and anticipation of permanence.4

  Obligation, adventure, status, profit, piety and confidence sustained the maintenance and expansion of the bridgeheads established in Syria and Palestine in 1097–9. Not all western visitors to Outremer came to fight or to pray; many arrived to settle, trade or seek preferment. In contrast to Spain, Sicily or the Baltic, as a region for western European political, social and economic colonization, Outremer was more remote. Given a mismatch of climate and cultural behaviour, notably in hygiene and diet, it faced a constant threat of demographic deficit, with high death rates, especially in infant mortality. It also had to accommodate the needs of transient pilgrims, adventurers and sightseers as well as settlers. The fate of lordships, including the very highest, could be determined by the vagaries of western politics and dynasticism. The requirements of tourism imposed particular constraints: in 1112, Arnulf of Chocques was hurriedly reappointed patriarch of Jerusalem so that there would be somebody to preside over Holy Week ceremonies for the expectant hordes of pilgrims. Pilgrims contributed to the local economy, through taxes paid at the port of entry or the flourishing trade in souvenirs: opposite the Holy Sepulchre ran the Rue des Paumiers, Palmers’ Street, where the pilgrims bought the palm leaves to show they had accomplished their vows (and saving them a trip down to Jericho, where the palms grew). By mid-century, a local Frank – as all the western settlers were called by the indigenous and immigrant communities alike – Rorgo Fretel of Nazareth, had produced a convenient guide book to the now carefully managed holy geography, which had been meticulously established since 1099.5

  Not all pilgrims ignored the military dimension of protecting this greatest of all Christian relics, many following their devotions at Jerusalem and the other Holy Sites with temporary service in the armies of the king. More lastingly, the needs of visiting pilgrims as much as local defence produced Outremer’s distinctive contribution to the Latin church, the military orders. The Order of the Hospital of St John, the Hospitallers, recognized by the pope in 1113, while acquiring martial functions, never lost its duty of care for the infirm and sick, mostly visitors; the Order of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, began c.1120 as a fraternity devoted to guarding the pilgrim routes from Jaffa to Jerusalem. While civilian settlement followed patterns familiar to other frontiers of Christendom, the exigencies of defence, demography and devotion lent Outremer inherently distinctive characteristics. The modest level of western settlement compared with indigenous communities contrasted with the ideological imperative that drew westerners to the Holy Land in the first place. Whatever accommodations were reached with native peoples and powers, the inspiration and justification for western rule was not social or economic or even conventionally political. Christian Outremer could never completely lose its quality of a garrison created to protect the Holy Places of its faith.

  THE EXPEDITIONS OF 1100–1101

  A recurrent complaint voiced by combatants throughout the campaign of 1097–9 attacked backsliding crucesignati for failing to fulfil their vows. The army of God’s need for reinforcements always appeared urgent as massive casualties left the enterprise emaciated and vulnerable. Without reinforcements, the crusade would have failed, at Antioch as at Jerusalem. In the west preaching and recruitment had not stopped, the narrative neatness of later accounts concealing that the so-called Princes’ Crusade of 1096–9 formed part of a process that slowly gathered momentum, stimulated in part by letters and news from the front. In April 1099, perhaps in response to the crusade leaders’ letter to him from Antioch of September 1098 calling for the despatch of all remaining crucesignati, Urban II authorized a fresh preaching campaign in Lombardy, conducted by Archbishop Anselm of Milan with considerable success, for what was soon regarded by a contemporary Norman chronicler as a distinct, second expedition to Jerusalem.6

  The modern fashion of regarding the military expeditions to the east of 1100–1101 as part of the First Crusade not only challenges twelfth-century and later historiography, it also appears to misrepresent the understanding and intentions of those concerned. While there continued to be a steady stream of westerners heading east, not least from the maritime cities of Italy, another Genoese fleet embarking in 1100, the 1101 expedition constituted a separate operation. Recruitment occurred in the clear knowledge that Jerusalem was in Christian hands. Even where many involved had taken the cross some time before, the armies only coalesced after a new call to arms by Urban II’s successor, Paschal II, in December 1099, followed by a series of special councils in the spring and autumn of 1100 and a preaching tour of France by papal legates, efforts supplemented by letters from the Holy Land. The various contingents led by princes and prelates only began to march from September 1100, some not until the following spring. All the main groups crossed into Asia from the European shore of the Bosporus between April and July 1101. These campaigns constituted a self-consciously fresh initiative by the pope, his legates and local diocesans, comparable in numbers of recruits with the efforts of Urban II and his agents in 1095–6. The one difference with its predecessor was the disastrous result, fortuitously highlighting the remarkable achievement of 1099.

  Recruitment in 1100–1101 appeared more regulated than in 1095–6, although this may reflect the evidence rather than the process: contemporaries were more alert to what was happening than five years before. Moreover, clear precedents had been set, to which was added the whip of unfulfilled vows. Paschal II’s threat to excommunicate defaulters in December 1099 was repeated by a synod of bishops led by the archbishop of Lyons at Anse the following spring. For those crucesignati who had never embarked and still more for those, like Stephen of Blois, who had deserted, official strictures lent weight to social and domestic peer pressure to redeem both vows and reputations. Victory in the east in 1099 made joining up attractive for new recruits and morally imperative for defaulters. Two papal legates reinforced the message in a tour of south-western France, in the footsteps of Urban II five years earlier, visiting Valence, Limoges and Poitiers in the autumn of 1100. The embrace of the recruiting drive stretched to Burgundy a
nd into Germany. The speed of assembly and journeys to Constantinople; the substantial quantity of money, transports and war materials assembled; and firm command structures suggested tight organization. The bishop of Nevers later complained that some of his men had been forced to go by Count William II of Nevers.7 The enterprise was dominated by princes of church and state. Archbishop Hugh of Lyons, a veteran papal diplomat, went as the pope’s chief legate along with at least eleven other archbishops and bishops. The parade of secular rulers at least equalled that of 1096, including the embarrassed veterans Stephen of Blois and Hugh of Vermandois; William IX, duke of Aquitaine; the count of Nevers; Duke Odo and Count Stephen of Burgundy; Welf IV, duke of Bavaria; and Conrad, constable to Emperor Henry IV of Germany.

  Motives appeared varied as much as before. Former deserters had experienced widespread public and private abuse. Most notoriously, Stephen of Blois’s strong-willed wife, Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror, waged an incessant campaign of bullying and moral blackmail, her nagging extending to their bedroom, where, before intercourse, she would urge her disgraced husband to consider his reputation and return to the Holy Land.8 Adela’s preference for being a hero’s widow rather than a coward’s wife cannot have been unique. Elsewhere, relatives of deserters attempted to expiate the family shame by joining up. With the deserters and vow-defaulters went those seeking penance, either with specific crimes to expunge, such as William of Nevers who had burnt the village of Molesme, or from a more general sense of the burden of sin. Eagerness to become associated with this new glorious enterprise combined with piety and devotion. As well as authorizing prayers and preaching to celebrate the new Christian enclave at Jerusalem, Archbishop Manasses of Rheims circulated copies of the letters he had received from Anselm of Ribemont in 1098 with their powerful evocation of spiritual excitement and martial achievement.9 Fame spurred the enthusiasm of William of Aquitaine. The cause of Jerusalem transcended the political divide of the Investiture Contest, in posthumous tribute to Urban II’s triumph. The disparate incentives were subsumed in ceremonies of taking the cross, now unequivocally associated with the notion of pilgrimage, which again provided the focal points of propaganda, commitment and recruitment. The earlier expedition had evidently failed to exhaust the supply of enthusiasts even in areas heavily represented in 1096, such as Aquitaine, although Burgundy, Lombardy and southern Germany loomed larger than before. Unfortunately for them, numbers and enthusiasm proved insufficient.