God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Not all media of communication told a story. Liturgical chants, hymns and songs encapsulated moods, ideas and admonition, not narrative, as in the very early twelfth-century Jerusalem Mirabilis: ‘There we must go, selling our estates to purchase the temple of God and destroy the Saracens’.13 More subtly, increased contemporary elaboration of the mass focused attention on Christ and the cross, their transferred vocabulary and imagery helping define the mentality on which crusading depended. To work as a focus for action, diffuse verbal and visual references depended on knowledge of the Jerusalem campaign and the motifs of holy war or pilgrimage it encouraged. The elevation of the deeds of the Jerusalemites, as they were often described, to legendary status marched in step with the programme of the post-Gregorian church and the cultural assertiveness of the ordo pugnatorum, the warrior class. In the overt and, after 1099, increasingly uncontested alliance between the two lay much of the significance of the events of the First Crusade for later generations.

  RECEPTION AND RESPONSE

  The success of the Jerusalem campaign silenced critics of the Gregorian promotion of penitential warfare, encouraging the papacy’s branding of its enemies as fit targets for holy war. In 1103–4, Paschal II, in full Gregorian mode, offered unspecified remission of sins to Robert of Flanders and his knights in return for their deeds of ‘just knighthood’ against papal opponents in Cambrai as well as to southern German supporters against the emperor. Papal adherents in Italy were similarly encouraged: in 1135 the remission of sins granted at the Council of Pisa to those who fought against the anti-pope and the king of Sicily was explicitly equated with that decreed by Urban II at Clermont.14 Such an association became regarded as the most potent sign of holiness, justice and honour. Elsewhere, the popularity of penitential war proved useful in essentially secular conflicts. Repeatedly after 1100 the higher clergy of northern France invoked the language of holy war and grants of remission of sins for those engaged in policing the lawlessness of the region, even where the alleged malefactor, such as Thomas of Marle, attacked in 1115, was a crusade veteran destined to epic immortality in the Chanson d’Antioche.15 The distinction between brutal violence and valiant heroism lay in the eye of the beholder. For the clerics authorizing such campaigns they provided active demonstrations of the church’s direction of the laity for which the First Crusade provided the most striking model.

  Acceptance of the values legitimized by the Jerusalem expedition lay in reactions to the returning veterans, fêted on their homecomings laden with relics and other souvenirs from the east. One was reputed to have brought back a lion as a memento.16 Most were content with the palm leaves that marked their status as Jerusalemites. The aura of distinction clung to many for the rest of their lives. Some retired to monasteries; others continued their pious careers by endowing religious houses or donating relics. Careers were advanced by exploiting contacts made on campaign. Most, perhaps, picked up the threads of their lives as best they could, returning, in externals at least, to the lives they had left behind. Count Robert of Flanders’s crusade exploits earned admiration in chronicles and charters, his death by trampling in a skirmish in 1111 lamented as a sad fate for a ‘bellicosus Jerosolimitae’.17 Reputation could produce tangible benefits. King Henry I explained to Pope Calixtus II in 1119 that he had afforded his captive brother Duke Robert of Normandy good treatment because of his crusader status: ‘I have not kept him in irons like a captured enemy but have lodged him as a noble pilgrim in a royal castle’.18 Whether the hero of Antioch and Jerusalem appreciated such fraternal generosity over the twenty-eight years spent in his brother’s prisons must be debatable.

  Other veterans returned to their former lives largely unmarked. Thomas of Marle’s career of rapine, if less lurid than his political opponents and their tame clerical apologists portrayed it, exposed the myth that service in the papal holy war engineered a form of spiritual conversion. As numerous commentators observed, the qualities that produced mayhem in Europe had not been suppressed, merely channelled in a good cause. Thomas of Marle’s aggression had proved very useful in the desperate battles in the east. Not all crusaders attracted unrealistic sentimentality; Everard III of Le Puiset, viscount of Chartres, was accused by Abbot Suger of St Denis a generation later of having undertaken the Jerusalem journey out of pride, his evil reputation for violence in the Ile de France being in no way mitigated by the gesture. The centrality of the martial ethos in popularizing the Jerusalem expedition left some participants happy to pursue former habits. Resort to arms was forced on some: Hugh of Chaumont, lord of Amboise, faced with the loss of his inheritance, acted vigorously and violently; yet he returned east with Count Fulk of Anjou in 1128. Belligerent resolution to disputes still came naturally. Only a few years after his return, Raimbold Croton, a hero at Antioch and Jerusalem, where he lost a hand, had a monk castrated over some stolen hay. Despite a fourteen-year penance forbidding him to bear arms, effectively suspending his social status, Raimbold appealed successfully to Pope Paschal II on account of his bravery at Jerusalem, although he soon died in one of the interminable petty wars in the Ile de France.19

  Just wars and godly knights were not invented in 1095 or first consecrated in 1099. Not all subsequent accounts of war echoed the heroics in Syria. Orderic Vitalis’s description (c.1140) of the motives of Henry I’s troops in refraining from slaughtering their defeated French opponents at Brémule (1119) rested on accepted rhetoric of Christian wars:

  they spared each other… out of fear of God and fellowship in arms… As Christian soldiers they did not thirst for the blood of their brothers, but rejoiced in a just victory given by God for the good of the Holy Church, and the peace of the faithful.

  In fact Henry’s men thirsted for juicy ransoms. By contrast, in Orderic’s description of the fighting around Fraga in 1134 between Alfonso I of Aragon and the Almoravid Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco, the Aragonese wore ‘the cross of Christ’ (whether Orderic meant literally or metaphorically is unclear), their battle cries ‘in the name of Jesus’.20 In the account of the battle of the Standard (1138) by the contemporary English writer Henry of Huntingdon, the English soldiers facing the invading Scots received absolution before the conflict, which was declared ‘very just’ by a bishop present, who promised full remission of sins to any who died in the fight in defence of their homeland (‘patria’). The symbols of the church and the appeal to patriotism as well as martyrdom in this description may have been sharpened by the new holy war but in essence derived from older traditions. Similarly, although in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful but widely circulated Historia Regum Brittaniae (History of the Kings of Britain) of 1136, King Arthur’s troops at the battle of Bath have been ‘marked with the sign of the Christian faith’, i.e. the cross, they were only promised absolution from all sins if they perished in the fight. There is no explicit suggestion that fighting the pagans, however praiseworthy, was itself penitential.21 As with Charlemagne’s doomed paladins in the epic poem The Song of Roland, c.1100, paradise, where souls rested ‘amid the rose-blossoms’, beckoned only those slain in the good fight. Such conservatism embraced even the papacy: in December 1118 Gelasius II granted Alfonso I of Aragon plenary indulgences only to those killed fighting the Moors.22

  While memories of the First Crusade undoubtedly influenced the sharper confidence in describing and prescribing holy war, especially against infidels and pagans, the haphazard adoption of specifically new forms of penitential warfare by writers and popes alike points to a contingent appreciation of the significance of 1095–9. Even the rhetoric lavished on the new military order of the Templars by Bernard of Clairvaux in his De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) c.1130, for all its radical reworking of St Paul’s spiritual metaphors of fighting for Christ into literal calls to arms, dwells on martyrdom and the prospect of salvation, at once traditional and immediate anxieties of the fighting classes. The images, language and ideology specifically related to penitential holy war as coined by the preache
rs, leaders and led of 1095–9, distinctive by association as much as by any liturgical, juridical, ceremonial or semantic coherence, formed only one part of a wider articulation of holy war and militant Christianity. In no sense did the early twelfth century knowingly witness the dawning of a pervasive ‘age of the crusade’.

  Instead, the dynamic force of the idealized and physical Jerusalem provided the prime focus, for travellers, in arms or not, as for theorists. Pilgrimage not holy war proved the most immediate legacy of the Christian occupation of the Holy City. King Eric I of Denmark in 1102–3 and King Sigurd of Norway in 1107–10 went east as pilgrims as well as warriors, their martial intent an extension of traditional Scandinavian service for Byzantium, which acted as host to both monarchs; fatally for the Norwegians, many dying from excess of undiluted retsina. Eric died in Cyprus before reaching the Holy Land; his wife on the Mount of Olives. In 1110, King Sigurd only allowed himself to be recruited ‘to the service of Christ’ by Baldwin I for the siege of Sidon once his vows had been fulfilled at Jerusalem, where he may have received the cross.23

  Links with Jerusalem established the domestic respectability of lords, especially kings. In the winter of 1102–3, the German emperor, Henry IV, for a quarter of a century the papacy’s most hated and implacable enemy, voiced his intention to travel to the Holy City, probably as a pilgrim. The public announcement at a diet at Mainz in January 1103, accompanied by solemn masses and an exhortatory sermon by the bishop of Würzburg, attracted wide interest, cynics suspecting a trick. Privately, in a letter to his aged godfather, the enormously grand Abbot Hugh of Cluny, Henry made his desire to see where Christ had lived, conversed with mortals and died conditional on a peace settlement with the papacy over the Investiture dispute. No deal, no pilgrimage.24 In seeking to use the Jerusalem pilgrimage in helping resolve intractable secular conflicts, Henry was not alone. From England to Sicily, political outlaws, such as the would-be assassins of William I of Sicily (1160) and the actual murderers of Thomas Becket (1170), worked their passage back to respectability or found a nobler form of exile through the trip – or the promise of a trip – to Jerusalem.25 In 1102/3, Henry IV hoped a commitment to visit Jerusalem would expedite a deal with the papacy and pacify his kingdom just as St Bernard’s preaching and King Conrad III’s taking of the cross did in 1146–7. It may have been the failure of such a strategy to resolve family feuding in the Danish royal house that led to the murder of Duke Canute, Eric I’s son, by his cousin Magnus in 1131. Apparently, Magnus had vowed to go to Jerusalem, probably as a pilgrim, leaving his wife and children in the care of Canute, whom he then murdered as an alternative to clinching the deal.26 In 1128, on the death of William Clito count of Flanders, many of his followers not pardoned by his hostile uncle, Henry I of England, ‘took the Lord’s Cross and, becoming exiles for Christ’s sake, set out for His sepulchre in Jerusalem’.27 As a technique of resolving feuds, the Jerusalem journey became embedded into the public culture of western Europe: successive treaties between Henry II and his French overlords Louis VII and Philip II featured mutual commitments to go east. However, using Jerusalem (and other) pilgrimages for political ends, to re-establish respectability and authority or as a form of temporary exile, predated the twelfth century: notable eleventh-century pilgrims included the bloodthirsty Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou, Duke Robert I the Devil of Normandy and the Anglo-Danish murderer Sweyn Godwinson, older brother of the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

  The twelfth-century explosion of peaceful pilgrimages to Jerusalem stood in marked contrast to the occasional and, after the debacle of the Second Crusade, limited enthusiasm for holy wars to the east. Yet there developed a ready association between noble pilgrims and deeds of arms, highlighted by the creation in Jerusalem of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, in 1119 to whom visiting grandees, such as Count Fulk of Anjou in 1120, could temporarily attach themselves. The habit began earlier. In the first decade of the twelfth century, pilgrims were repeatedly pressed into military action by inducements from the Christian rulers of Outremer. Shortly after being knighted, some time before 1111, Charles of Denmark, a nephew of Robert II of Flanders and later count of Flanders himself, underwent a pilgrimage on which he fought against the pagan ‘enemies of the Christian faith’. In 1124, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future King Conrad III and leader of the Second Crusade, possibly after some sort of conversion experience, vowed to go to Jerusalem as a soldier for Christ, the only European monarch to campaign in the Holy Land twice.28 Charles and Conrad were not unique. In the generation after 1100, a steady trickle of affluent French nobles visited Outremer, a few of them First Crusade veterans revisiting as pilgrims the scenes of their youthful martial glory; one or two, like Stephen of Neublans from Burgundy in 1120 or Hugh of Chaumont in 1128/9, even signed up to fight again. Interest in the east ran in families, such as those of comital Burgundy – roughly modern Franche Comté – (which included Pope Calixtus II, who proclaimed a new holy war in the east in 1119), or of the French lordships of Montlhéry and Le Puiset, a concern that embraced fighting and settlement as well as pilgrimage. Such contacts spread unevenly across western Europe, with German speakers lacking established links in Outremer ‘as they… had no mind to stay there’, to the regret of John of Würzburg in 1170.29 Settlers’ relatives provided a conduit for interest, information and material help for the Holy Land. By the 1130s, these associations could find outlet in new, permanent institutions of holy war.

  MILITARY ORDERS

  Hugh I count of Troyes went east three times, 1104–8, 1114 and 1125; the final visit saw him enrolling in the new religious order of the Knights Templar; he was not alone. By 1131, when the childless King Alfonso I of Aragon (d. 1134) drew up a will in which he bequeathed his possessions jointly to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, the Order of the Hospital of St John (the Hospitallers) and the Templars, the two Levantine military orders, especially the latter, had established themselves as unique institutions within the Catholic church, combining charity with violence, religious vocation with fighting. Through attracting recruits and grants of property in the west, these orders established on a permanent footing the basic idealism of penitential warfare, a mechanism for its expression and a physical presence throughout Christendom reminding the faithful of the plight of the Holy Land.30

  The Order of the Hospital of St John, the Hospitallers, originated in an Amalfitan hospital established in Jerusalem by 1080 to provide care for poor and sick pilgrims. Originally dedicated to St John the Almsgiver, a seventh-century patriarch, after the conquest of 1099 its enhanced role and importance in coping with the new rush of western visitors, many ill, exhausted and impoverished, led to an elevation in status and patron saint, the local historical cleric giving way to the much grander, universally recognized John the Baptist. Receiving grants of property from King Baldwin, in 1113 the order acquired papal recognition as a charitable confraternity bound together into an order through the adoption of religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, in outline little different from other new orders such as the Augustinian canons. While the structure of the Hospitaller order may have provided the model for the Templars, the martial function of the latter influenced the Order of St John. While never losing its essential charitable hospital function, by 1126 Hospitaller brothers were serving in the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem on campaign against Damascus, and by 1136 the order was being entrusted with garrisoning frontier fortresses.

  The original function of the Templars was military yet, like the Hospital, its purpose derived from the needs of Jerusalem pilgrims. In 1119, a group of knights in Jerusalem led by Hugh de Payns from Champagne and a Picard, Godfrey of St Omer, established a confraternity to protect the pilgrim routes from the coast to Jerusalem and from there to Jericho. Licensed by the patriarch of Jerusalem and bound by the monastic vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, the knights received official ecclesiastical recognition at the Council of Nablus in January 1120. From its earliest day
s, although dependent on alms even for clothing, the order was lodged in and around the royal palace at the al-Aqsa mosque and elsewhere on the Temple platform, inspiring the name of the Order of Temple of Solomon (which the Franks identified with the al-Aqsa) and demonstrating the strong and consistent support of the king. The same year, their contacts were sufficiently illustrious to recruit the visiting Count Fulk of Anjou into their ranks, if only temporarily; on his return to the west Fulk endowed the order with an annual income of thirty livres anjou, setting an example followed by many.31 Between 1127 and 1129, Hugh de Payns toured western Europe to attract donations and members, as well as assisting in negotiations to persuade his former confrater Fulk of Anjou to return east and recruiting forces for a new campaign against Damascus. Travelling widely in France and visiting England and Scotland, Hugh’s success is reflected in the extensive grants made to the order in 1127–8 of land, rents, customs, war materials and, from the counts of Flanders, the proceeds from entry fines to fiefs, known as reliefs. Hugh’s contacts included some of the greatest lords in France. Apart from Fulk of Anjou, Hugh of Troyes was already a member of the order, and other patrons included William Clito and Thierry of Alsace, successively counts of Flanders, and Theobald count of Blois, while his welcome in England and Scotland testified to his status.32 His triumphal progress was crowned at the Council of Troyes in January 1129, presided over by a papal legate and attended by many from the elite ecclesiastical establishment, including the most influential of all, Bernard abbot of Clairvaux, who a few years later was to compose the famous paean of praise for the new knighthood and holy war on behalf of the new order, De Laude novae militiae. At Troyes, after hearing Hugh’s description of the principles and practices of the new order, the council confirmed its foundation and provided a systematic Rule.