God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Politics as well as ritual lay behind Bernard’s oratory. In mid-1146, the tensions within the German nobility and between the empire and its eastern neighbours, especially Hungary, precluded Conrad’s personal involvement in the eastern adventure. Bernard’s visit was closely associated with attempts to engineer peace within the empire. Taking the cross could act as a focus for honourable resolution to domestic conflict under ecclesiastical supervision and guarantee. At Frankfurt in November, Bernard mediated a dispute between Count Henry of Namur and Albero of Trier, joining the crusade forming part of their reconciliation. On his visit to Constance in December, Bernard made contact with the circle of Conrad’s chief domestic opponent, Welf VI, a move that led to Welf taking the cross on 24 December. In the hyperbole of the chronicler Otto of Freising, ‘suddenly almost the entire West became so still that not only the waging of war but even the carrying of arms in public was considered wrong’.48 By the time Bernard reached Speyer for Christmas 1146, it may have been clear to Conrad that his involvement was required to complete this unifying process by providing him with a share in the honour and privileges of a crucesignatus.

  Conrad held a unique position among the monarchs of the west. By now in his fifties, an intermittently successful general and monarch caught in unpropitious times, he had previous experience of fighting in the Holy Land. His two military expeditions east, in 1124 and 1147–8, suggest, as with Thierry of Flanders’s four visits (1138, 1147, 1157 and 1165), a more than formal engagement with the needs of Outremer and the appeal of holy war. No other western medieval monarch campaigned twice in the Holy Land. The German empire possessed a strong tradition of holy war, on its borders, as part of internal feuding and, since 1096, in the eastern Mediterranean. Despite a lack of prominent settlement in Outremer, no cultural or emotional barrier needed breaching, no introduction to an alien concept was required. The German crowds that flocked to hear Bernard were as primed and receptive as those further west. Conrad’s elaborately staged assumption of the cross operated to a familiar pattern, a public ritual that emphasized a procedure of conversion and submission to the will of God, each participant following the choreography of a well-oiled religious ceremony. Ritual provided expression for religious and political messages as theatre. Even with interpreters in southern Germany, Bernard’s message transcended language, not least when, as at Speyer, it was delivered in the context of the Eucharist. During mass on 27 December, Bernard, ending his sermon by listing the material benefits bestowed on the king, adopted the voice of God: ‘O man, what is there that I should have done for you and did not?’ Responding to this familiar call to reject worldly priorities, amid loud cries of excited religious fervour, Conrad fulfilled the ceremonial fiction of sudden conversion, declaring: ‘I am ready to serve Him,’ before receiving from Bernard both the cross and a holy banner conveniently placed on the altar. Significantly, Conrad was accompanied in taking the cross by his nephew Frederick of Swabia.49 This was not a quixotic act. The old, dying duke of Swabia, Conrad’s brother, bitterly resented the king enrolling his son as his absence might jeopardize the family holdings. That was the point. Only if as many of the great feudatories of the Empire as possible accompanied the king or, by virtue of taking the cross, were compromised if they stayed behind, could Conrad ensure both the success of the crusade and the security of his realm.

  To confirm the political solidarity behind the enterprise, Conrad and Bernard’s representative, Abbot Adam of Ebrach, presided over another crusade mass at Regensburg in February 1147, where Conrad’s half-brother, Henry Jasomirgott, duke of Bavaria and margrave of Austria, and the bishops of Regensburg, Freising and Passau took the cross with a large press of recruits including notorious thieves and footpads, perhaps attracted by the prospect of legal immunity if not amnesty. One participant recalled the careful preparation, ‘all present had been aroused by previous report’, his subsequent insistence that everyone had taken the cross ‘of their own accord’ satisfying canonical requirements if not historical accuracy.50 The adherence of Henry of Bavaria revealed the irenic uses of the crusade: he was now a fellow crucesignatus with the disgruntled and dispossessed pretender to his duchy, Welf VI. Conrad’s crusade, like Louis’s, embraced family, friends and foes and offered support for a sometimes beleaguered status. During his stay in the east, Conrad, although never crowned emperor, added the imperial ‘semper augustus’ to his titles, perhaps in response to his association with the Greek emperor or, even, a nod to the revived interest in the so-called Sibylline eschatological prophecies of the Holy Land and the Last Emperor. The image of the tall, well-built Conrad rescuing the slight, frail Bernard from an adoring mob during the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147 by picking him up and carrying him out of the crowd provided a less cosmic but no less potent opportunity for royal association with the great forces of Christendom.51

  PLANNING AND RECRUITMENT

  A flurry of conferences and assemblies early in 1147 settled the timing and routes for the crusaders. While at Regensburg securing the Bavarians, Conrad sent ambassadors to discuss plans with Louis and Bernard at Chêlons-sur-Marne in early February, prior to the French deciding on their strategy and arrangements for the king’s absence at a large council at Etampes beginning on 16 February. Conrad followed suit at a diet at Frankfurt on 13 March, also attended by the tireless Bernard hot foot from Etampes. By late March, a fresh round of meetings acknowledged the presence north of the Alps of the pope. Eugenius III, making a virtue of his expulsion from Rome by its radical commune, had set out from Viterbo in January, travelling via Lucca and Vercelli to Susa, where on 8 March he discussed the crusade with Louis VII’s uncle, Amadeus of Savoy, thence through imperial Burgundy to Lyons (22 March) and into France, reaching Dijon by the end of the month, where he was met by German ambassadors eager to arrange a meeting between the pope and Conrad in Strassburg. Rejecting the German overtures, Eugenius turned aside to Clairvaux (6 April), perhaps to relive his youth there, certainly to be fully briefed by his old master, before proceeding to Paris with King Louis, celebrating Easter (20 April) at St Denis. There, on 11 June, the pope presided over an elaborate ceremony marking Louis’s formal departure. From St Denis Louis marched towards his muster at Metz in late June. The pope, his role as diplomatic facilitator and legitimizing observer complete, remained in France and Lotharingia for another year. Conrad meanwhile spent Easter at Bamberg, a city especially associated with the recently canonized Emperor Henry II (1002–24) and his attempts to extend Christianity (and his empire) eastwards, before moving towards the Danube via Nuremberg and Regensburg, whence he embarked eastwards in late May.52

  The involvement of Conrad and the Germans may have influenced the French plans. After taking the cross in March 1146, Louis had explored different options for his journey east. Conrad, King Geza of Hungary, the Emperor Manuel of Byzantium and King Roger II of Sicily were each consulted over passage, supplies and support, suggesting that no immediate decision had been made between the land route via the Danube and the Balkans and a sea route via southern Italy. There was even talk of the French preparing their own fleet, perhaps to shadow any land army (as Richard I of England was to organize for his crusade in 1190), although as Louis controlled no ports himself this would have required negotiation.53 The response to French requests, received during the summer of 1146, appeared to be universally positive, leaving the choice of route open. The likelihood of active and substantial German participation delayed any decision until the assembly at Etampes in February 1147 just after Conrad’s arrangements had been communicated to the French at the Châlons conference. It is sometime argued that Louis had decided in 1146 to accept the offer of transport by sea from Roger of Sicily, only to be deflected by German involvement. Yet the Franco-Byzantine exchanges of 1146 indicated that no such decision had been reached. After a long and possibly heated debate, the assembly at Etampes decided on the land route via Byzantium.54

  Although with hindsight condemned by some as misguided, this opti
on presented a number of advantages. For the bulk of the French contingents, including the largest, from Flanders, and the king’s, the land route was the most accessible and the cheapest, as the troops could be supplied en route by local markets and, in enemy territory, by forage. Given the difficulties in raising cash from their property, this may have appealed to most crucesignati. Although the prospect of travelling in the wake of the large German armies raised concerns over inadequate local provisions, it offered certain benefits; on their march the French found a number of new bridges constructed by the Germans in front of them.55 Most French nobles had no experience of the sea, many would never have seen it, the logistics and finance involved in hiring a fleet being wholly unfamiliar. Transport of horses by sea presented further complications: those Rhinelanders, Flemings and English who did travel by sea via the Iberian peninsular in 1147 may have carried few if any horses with them, relying on local stocks when they fought on land. It is instructive that the count of Flanders chose to travel by land. Of those with access to Mediterranean sea ports, only some, like the count of Toulouse, sailed directly to the Holy Land; others, led by the counts of Auvergne and Savoy, travelled via Italy and the short ferry crossing from Brindisi to Durazzo before crossing the Balkans to Constantinople.56 The Sicilian offer presented political difficulties. Roger II threatened German ambitions in Italy and Byzantine power in the Balkans and the central Mediterranean. Even if his offer to Louis was not simply a cover for an assault on the Greeks, Roger’s participation risked alienating Conrad and arousing Manuel’s justifiable suspicion for no obviously overwhelming benefit, suspicions confirmed by the Sicilian refusal to take any part in the crusade once their offer of transport had been declined. Mindful of Roger’s disobedience to the papacy, the ubiquitous Bernard of Clairvaux may have tilted the balance against Roger. Despite his innovative taxation, Louis himself may have feared the cost of accepting the Sicilian proposal. By placing himself so completely into the hands of another ruler, one renowned for ruthlessly pursuing his own self-interest, Louis’s independence could have been compromised. The year’s delay in deciding meant the sea option would now have jeopardized coordination with the German armies. At root, perhaps, lay the fear that the sea route was too risky, too difficult for so large a landlubber army. By contrast, the land route was familiar in nature if not geography and, significantly for an adventure self-consciously undertaken in the shadow of past triumphs, had been sanctified by the heroic achievements of the First Crusade.57 The discussion at Etampes possibly concealed a decision already taken: negotiations with Manuel I had progressed far, the emperor, and possibly the pope, assuming the land route, although this may merely represent the success of French diplomats in keeping their powder dry. In this context, Louis’s much-derided decision appears thoughtful and pragmatic. Unlike his later critics, notably his crusade chaplain Odo of Deuil, Louis did not know the future.

  The assembly at Etampes concluded its business by appointing regents for France, led by Abbot Suger of St Denis, appropriate for the crusade’s leading critic, and fixing the muster for departure at Metz on 15 June to fit Conrad’s plans and the delays since Vézelay in organizing the French contingents. Louis’s formal leave-taking of his kingdom provided spectacular theatre. Held to coincide with the annual Lendit Fair at St Denis, 11 June, with the streets around the abbey church crowded with visitors, the ceremony began with Louis visiting a Parisian lazar house, a sign of humility, charity and, with its reference to the mystic royal power of healing, regality. On arrival at the recently rebuilt St Denis (parts of which still survive), before the pope, Abbot Suger, the monks and a crowd of family, courtiers and notables, and beneath newly commissioned panels of stained glass depicting the heroics of the First Crusade, Louis prostrated himself before the altar, kissed a relic of the patron saint, finally receiving from Suger the Oriflamme, the vermilion banner mounted on a gold lance that under Louis’s father, Louis VI, had become the official royal ensign, and the pilgrim’s scrip from the pope, visual confirmation of the three elements of his enterprise: penitential pilgrimage; holy war and national honour. Proceedings ended with the king and a few (male) companions dining with the monks in their refectory.58 This elaborate show paraded the special relationship of the French monarchy with the papacy and between St Denis and the king, providing a ceremonial expression of leaving the kingdom in the hands of the saint and the abbot, the king becoming an associate member of the monastic community. The personal and political meaning of Louis’s holy war was thus carefully spelt out for the crowds to witness and later to relate.

  Conrad III also faced tricky decisions, mainly provoked by his fissiparous nobility. A general, formal peace to which all the nobility were committed by oath lay at the centre of Conrad’s political strategy for the crusade. At a crowded Imperial Diet at Frankfurt on 13 March, Conrad’s ten-year-old son, Henry, was accepted as heir and crowned as joint king to legitimize the regency government headed by Abbot Wibald of Stavelot, later of Corvey. The land route for the crusade was announced, the muster fixed at Regensburg in May, the presence of Bernard of Clairvaux easing agreement. Henry the Lion, the young duke of Saxony and nephew of the disgruntled crucesignatus Welf VI, claiming his lost Bavarian patrimony, allowed himself to be fobbed off by Conrad who ‘postponed a decision until his return and persuaded him to wait peacefully’.59 Other nobles from Saxony were less easily brushed aside. Refusing to join the eastern expedition, they saw an opportunity to elevate political expansion across their frontier with the Wends into a holy war by incorporating it into a general scheme of anti-infidel militancy, ‘to take vengeance on the pagans’, in Bernard’s words, an argument not far removed from that used against the Jews in the Rhineland a few months earlier. Given Conrad’s main aim of political harmony and his penchant for seeing the crusade as reflecting honour on his realm, the Saxons received a sympathetic hearing. Binding Saxon expansionist raiding into the larger holy war and its penumbra of sworn peace offered the added advantage of providing occupation for Henry the Lion. Using his legatine authority, Bernard accepted the Saxon proposal as legitimate, granting the participants all the trappings and privileges of the Jerusalem journey, except that the crosses they wore ‘were not simply sewed to their clothing, but were brandished aloft, surmounting a wheel’. The other difference lay in the objective, again according to Bernard, of the ‘wiping out or, at any rate, the conversion of these people’.60 Neither genocide nor forced baptism was canonically legal. However, some argued that these regions had accepted Christianity from missionaries in the previous decades and so could be regarded as apostates, thus action against them was, as in the Holy Land, a matter of reclaiming lost Christian territory, theoretically defensive. To erase any doubts, during his stay at Clairvaux in April 1147, Bernard persuaded Eugenius III to issue a bull legitimizing the Wendish adventure, conversion and all, and the grant of Jerusalem privileges, conveniently placing it in the somewhat wishful context of both the Holy Land expedition and attacks on the Muslims in Spain.61 As far as Conrad was concerned, the Baltic campaign did not materially weaken his eastern force, while it directed some otherwise possibly troublesome nobles into taking out their acquisitive instincts beyond the empire’s frontiers. The importance of this was underlined by the presence in one of the raiding parties of the regent Wibald of Corvey. Despite the official ecclesiastical gloss, and the presence of a gaggle of bishops, there was little edifying in the motives or conduct of the war against the Wends and, as Wibald confessed, it failed.62

  King Conrad’s crusade mobilized or neutralized the power brokers of the German empire. With him were staunch supporters based on his family and household: his half-brothers Duke Henry of Bavaria and Bishop Otto of Freising; his nephew, Duke Frederick of Swabia; and his chancellor Arnold of Wied; and allies such as Frederick of Bogen, advocate of Regensburg. Alongside them was his arch-enemy Welf of Bavaria. No less impressive was the geographic spread, not only men from Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria, but Saxons, such as Count
Bernard of Ploetzkau, and Lorrainers under the bishops of Metz and Toul (brother of the count of Flanders) and the count of Monçon, and the contingent led by the bishop of Basel, the fruits of Bernard’s visit in December 1146. Joining this German coalition came the kings of Bohemia and Poland as well as the counts of Styria and Carinthia. Although the Lorrainers defected to, for them, the more congenial French at Constantinople, this gathering represented the firmest practical demonstration of the reach of German imperial power north of the Alps for almost a century.63 The wider context of the king’s leadership of Christendom in alliance with the pope was witnessed by the papal legate, Theodwin, Cardinal of St Rufina, the Curia’s German expert who had helped engineer Conrad’s election as king in 1138.64 In recruitment, leadership and organization, Conrad’s expedition received important support throughout the German church. Viewed in the perspective of German and imperial politics, Conrad’s eastern adventure temporarily resolved domestic political tensions while making manifest his grander claims to world leadership. The febrile optimism of the summer of 1147 contrasted with the subsequent dull disillusion of defeat was well captured by one of the campaign’s leaders and close royal ally, Otto of Freising:

  And so, when the rigour of the winter cold had been dispelled, as flowers and plants came forth from the earth’s bosom under the gracious showers of spring and green meadows smiled upon the world, making glad the face of the earth, King Conrad led forth his troops from Nuremberg, in battle array. At Regensburg he took ship to descend the Danube and on Ascension Sunday (1 June) he pitched camp in the East Mark near a town called Ardacker… He drew after him so great a throng that the rivers seemed scarcely to suffice for navigation, or the extent of the plain for marching… But since the outcome of that expedition, because of our sins, is known to all, we have purposed this time to write not a tragedy but a joyous history, leave this to be related by others elsewhere.65