God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Except in the eyes of his own apologists, Louis VII’s international prestige fell short of Conrad’s. Yet, as with Conrad, the extent of recruitment and active political involvement of the leading provincial magnates encouraged his role as the driving force behind this eastern policy and, more generally, as king. The blend of pious show, military exertion and administrative direction in providing men, money, command and strategy provided Louis with a unique opportunity to establish himself and his dynasty. The muster roll of French lords who travelled east with the king testified to the potential political dividends. While the counts of Toulouse and Nîmes sailed independently from ports on the French Mediterranean coast, most of the rest of the kingdom was represented in Louis’s great army: Flanders, Soissons, Bar, Ponthieu, Nevers, Tonnerre, the Bourbonnais, the Auvergne, Meaux in Champagne, Mâcon in southern Burgundy and Vienne in imperial Provence; the lords of Nogent in the Seine valley, Rancon and Lusignan in Poitou and Magnac in the Limousin. With these lords came their retinues and dependants, in considerable numbers in the case of Thierry of Flanders. The core of support rested with the king’s affinity; his brother Robert count of Dreux and La Perche; his formidable wife Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, who presumably secured the Poitevin and Limousin contingents: Geoffrey of Rancon, later notorious for causing the near-annihilation of the army in Asia Minor, had entertained Louis and Eleanor on their honeymoon.66 The presence of women provided a notable feature of the Second Crusade. Apart from Eleanor and her household ladies, the counts of Flanders and Toulouse travelled with their wives and the statutes agreed by the northern European fleet at Dartmouth in May 1147 assumed the same for members of that force.67 In the French king’s army, the household clerks, led by Bartholomew, the chancellor, and his personal chaplain, the monk Odo of Deuil, a coming man seconded from the abbey of St Denis, were joined by some ecclesiastical heavyweights, such as the bishops of Arras, Langres and Lisieux, the last two both claiming legatine authority, Godfrey of Langres partly on the ground of his close association with Bernard, having been his prior at Clairvaux.68 The canon lawyer, classical scholar and acerbic wit Arnold of Lisieux contested Godfrey’s pretensions, famously describing him as ‘like the wine of Cyprus, which is sweet to taste but lethal unless diluted with water’. Neither behaved well, attracting gossip that they lined their pockets from alms given in return for absolution by sick and dying crusaders. Their bickering, while contributing little to the smooth running of the campaign, ignored the legate actually appointed, Guy of Florence, cardinal of St Grisogono, a man of some bureaucratic ability later displayed in Outremer after the end of the crusade, but on the march fatally hampered by his lack of fluency in French. Without Bernard, none took the role of Adhemar of Le Puy on the First Crusade.69 Nonetheless, the dynamism that propelled so many disparate political, personal and clerical groups towards the east under the king’s Oriflamme testified to a sense of secular, even national as well as religious identity. Although able to speak German and holding land in the empire as well as France, Thierry of Flanders journeyed with King Louis.70 Among those of the king’s personal bodyguard killed around him in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the Cadmus mountains were knights from across France but also William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, a pillar of the Anglo-Norman establishment.71 Under the sign of the cross new bonds of loyalty could be forged.

  The popularity of the enterprise helped ensure the relatively easy agreement over the grand strategy of the holy war. Heavy recruitment, across France, western and southern Germany, the Low Countries, southern England, parts of Danubean central Europe, reaching northwards to Scotland and, for the Wendish campaign, Denmark, rested on piety, idealism, loyalty to lord or family and communal enthusiasm transmitted along the arteries of social and economic exchange. Religious values found expression in secular analogies directed at various propertied elites. One set of verses composed in 1146/7 talked of a tournament between heaven and hell.72 Bernard articulated the cultural aspirations of arms-bearers by praising their reputation for courage and of merchants in terms of an unbeatable bargain.73 Concentric circles of contact produced substantial contingents. The economically linked networks within the Rhineland or Flanders or Normandy or East Anglia combined with an outer ring of commerce in the Narrow Seas to produce the fleet that gathered at Dartmouth in May 1147. The new community of Cistercian abbeys, Bernard’s own power base, supported older secular and ecclesiastical focal points of recruitment. So did the Templars, another new order that played a significant part planning and on campaign. Templars negotiated for Louis VII in Constantinople in 1146; they acted as the king’s bankers; and later held the French army together in Asia Minor during the grim weeks in January 1148. Bernard of Clairvaux’s own close Templar links were shared with crucesignati such as the Anglo-Norman patrons of the Templars Saher of Archel, one of the commanders of the Dartmouth fleet, and Roger of Mowbray.74 The unanimity between secular and religious authorities in promoting the expedition as spiritual profit or social responsibility contrasted with the political and ecclesiastical divisions within western Christendom in 1096. Whereas Urban II’s call was clearly partisan, Bernard’s transcended political barriers and boundaries, only a few religious radicals distrustful of the church’s overt involvement in the world joining with the Roman commune and Roger of Sicily in openly standing aloof. Unlike 1096, potential crucesignati were supported by ceremonial and legal procedures, recognized in Quantum praedecessores, which, if not always familiar, demonstrated the progress in ecclesiastical discipline, hierarchical communication and canon law achieved in the fifty years between Clermont and Vézelay, backed by the cultural penetration of the story of the First Crusade in French and German vernacular literatures.

  From the North Sea to the Mediterranean, recruits conformed to Quantum praedecessores, raising money on their property, in particular from religious houses, with the permission of relatives and overlords. In the increasingly competitive land market of the twelfth century, such guarantees by the king, local count or bishop were as necessary as was the compliance of interested family members, relicts and heirs who often needed firm persuasion to honour the deals of deceased crusaders. The attractive provisions regarding church protection and immunity from civil law suits required similarly careful management. In November 1146, the bishop of Salisbury had to be reminded by the pope that church jurisdiction did not extend to land disputes originating before the defendant took the cross. Even so, the popularity of the crusade with thieves, noted by Otto of Freising, may not have been coincidental.75 The emotional or spiritual dimensions behind the legal framework emerged fitfully. In contrast to papal letters and chronicles, references in monastic land charters to taking the cross or to preaching are rare. Some charters, but not a majority, related the donations or mortgages to remission of sins; ‘love and fear’ apparently moved one Poitevin, Raynard rusticus, the countryman.76 However, large numbers of non-combatant or otherwise militarily incompetent pilgrims did travel with the German and French armies, giving the enterprise a dogged if inconvenient revivalist tinge that drained efficiency and resources on the march and in battle. For aristocrats and arms-bearers, the imperative to translate property into cash generated expediency. Bishop Godfrey of Langres pawned gold and silver vessels from his cathedral church while promising restitution to a suspicious chapter.77 Acquisitive religious houses skilfully played the market. In the face of royal demands for tax, the monks of Fleury protested a lack of cash, offering a miscellany of precious candlesticks and thuribles instead, yet at the same time provided money to local worthies in return for pledges of property.78 The business could be highly lucrative, in both the short and long term. The English abbey of St Benet Holme in Norfolk made an effective profit on its deal with Philip Basset of Postwick of a minimum of 133 per cent spread over seven years, the frowned-upon usury hidden here as ubiquitously elsewhere behind the fiction of mutual gifts.79 The cost of crusading is difficult to underestimate. Reiner von Sleiden sold outrig
ht part of his allodial (i.e. freehold) patrimony to the abbey of Klösterrad, near Aachen.80 Dozens of land charters record landowners raising sums many times (three in Philip Basset’s case) their annual revenue; they also chart those who failed to return.

  The elaborate organization of the Second Crusade matched its vast human and geographic scale. The expeditions of the kings rested on the collaboration of socially, financially and politically distinct military households of the great nobles, each with their own regional and personal identity, cohesion and loyalties. However, where the armies of 1096 retained their separate regional identities to the end, Conrad and Louis, through deference and convenience, imposed an element of unity, providing, for better or worse, field leadership and chairmanship of the baronial high command. As the papally sanctioned chief organizers, they conducted the preparatory diplomacy; negotiated with local rulers during the march; set the schedule of departure and muster points; and supplied men and money. Both Conrad and Louis possessed continuing access to large funds, either cash in their own coffers or sums held on account by third parties such as the Templars. Once in Palestine in the spring of 1148, Conrad was able to reassert his authority after a disastrous journey by taking troops into his pay while Louis, using his assets in France, presumably including his church tax, as collateral, borrowed heavily from the Templars in the east; during the stumbling march across Asia Minor Louis repeatedly bailed out his impoverished nobles, knights and infantry.81

  The geographic, political and social diversity of recruitment challenged coherent mustering, leadership, strategy, structure and timing. Yet most of the land and naval contingents for the east embarked between April and June 1147, arriving together, despite contrasting vicissitudes, a year later in the Holy Land. Planning, not chance, lay behind the musters at Dartmouth in May 1147, Regensburg the same month or Metz a month later; the adherence to the German force of Ottokar of Styria at Vienna in late May or early June; the arrival of the Anglo-Norman contingent to join Louis at Worms in late June; or the secondary French muster at Constantinople in October, where Louis waited for the counts of Maurienne and Auvergne and the marquis of Montferrat and those who had left the main army at Worms to travel via Italy, the Adriatic and the Balkans. The mechanics of such extended coordination included, from the early spring of 1146, extensive correspondence linking the major participants with each other and with those through whose territory any expedition could expect to pass: Byzantium, Sicily, Hungary, the Christian rulers of the Iberian peninsular. Bernard of Clairvaux acted as head of a central secretariat as well as attending, in person or by agents and proxies, all the summit meetings between the main crusade leaders. On his preaching tour in 1146 Bernard contacted figures in the Flemish crusade leadership, including Count Thierry and Christian of Gistel, commander of those from Flanders and Boulogne who assembled at Dartmouth.82 In the Rhineland, Bernard encountered civic and ecclesiastical authorities involved in raising and organizing troops, including the archbishop of Cologne, one of whose priests later wrote an eyewitness account of the siege of Lisbon. Another who sent home a description of the Lisbon campaign, the priest Duodechin, came from Lahnstein on the Rhine, which Bernard had either visited or passed by in the second week of 1147.83

  Behind direction and strategy lay the armies’ structure. The authority of the kings should not be exaggerated. Both French and perhaps to a greater degree German forces threatened to dissolve into their princely and baronial constituent parts although holding together long enough for adversity to compel unity. Political advantage, lack of alternatives, the comradeship of shared experience and hardship contributed to cohesion. Yet Louis VII failed to impose disciplinary ordinances on his nobles, his chaplain acidly commenting: ‘because they did not observe them well, I have not preserved them either’. Louis’s ordinances, promulgated when his army mustered at Metz, were designed ‘for securing peace and other requirements on the journey, which the leaders secured by solemn oath’.84 A precisely similar process led the leaders of the disparate contingents at Dartmouth to swear to obey mutually agreed statutes regulating the exercise of criminal and civil justice; sumptuary rules; the behaviour of women; the mechanics of corporate discussion, worship, and distribution of funds; and solving disputes between groups and leaders. Such disciplinary statutes were familiar features of medieval warfare, Richard I insisting on them in 1190 during his crusade. The commanders at Dartmouth in 1147 had in effect entered into a coniuratio or societas coniurata, a sworn association, a commune. Unlike the sworn communal statutes of Metz, those of Dartmouth retained their force when disputes emerged between the regional groups at critical points before and after the siege of Lisbon.85 Later on his march to the east, Louis managed to establish a sworn fraternity under which his army agreed to be ruled by the Templars.86 The readiness of the French king and the leaders at Dartmouth to create sworn communes testifies to the lack within the armies of a common legal system or political authority. Moreover, some crusaders lived outside ties of noble clientage. Across north-western Europe, urbanization had thrown up towns in which corporate identity demanded separate legal recognition. One 1147 contingent comprised of Londonienses, Londoners whose commune had only six years earlier decided the fate of the English crown by siding with King Stephen to prevent the coronation of his cousin, the pretender Matilda.87 Over the previous half-century, towns and cities across the Rhineland, the Low Countries and northern France had sought rights of self-determination and justice; some of the charters granting these rights echoing the Dartmouth statutes. Sworn agreements became necessary in the absence of other political bonds, a circumstance regularly repeated on polyglot crusades. As an English writer remembered a century and a half later, the Dartmouth crusaders ‘are by alliance/Sworn among themselves and are not retained’.88 Neither the lasso of fealty nor pay held such a force together, comprising recruits from the Rhineland, the Low Countries, northern France, southern England, East Anglia and Scotland. As striking as the urban elements in the Dartmouth (and the other) expeditions appeared the willingness of secular lords to submit to such structures, even if, in the heat of battle, the agreed rules got broken, as by the Count of Aerschot and Christian of Gistel at the fall of Lisbon.89 Experience of administering local public rights may have familiarized such lesser aristocrats to sworn associations to keep the peace; alternatively the commune may have evoked the legacy of ecclesiastical peace leagues. To view medieval Europe as hidebound by social and economic hierarchy, called by some the feudal system, ignores a perennial feature of public life which the theoretical and occasionally actual non-hierarchical nature of crusading highlighted. Sworn bonds of association were familiar and habitual. On the day they set out on crusade, at the entrance to the forest at Evry between Auxerre and Troyes in southern Champagne, Milo, lord of Evry-le-Châtel, and his knights bound themselves together with oaths to join the king’s expedition.90 Such associations can be found in similar circumstances on later crusades and are reminiscent of the fraternity formed to pay for siege engines at Antioch in 1098. Thus, beside the necessities of survival, the imperatives of enthusiasm, the community of family, friends and companions, the crusaders in the armies of 1147 were assembled and glued together by a network of mutual oaths: to the church in taking the cross; to lords and paymasters; and to each other. Time and unimaginable hardship were to put these bonds under fearful, often fatal, strain.

  8. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Second Crusade and Bernard’s Preaching Tour 1146–7

  10

  ‘The Spirit of the Pilgrim God’: Fighting the Second Crusade

  The enthusiasm for holy war generated in the summer of 1147 reminded Otto of Freising of a prophecy promising victory in the east to the king of France that talked of ‘the spirit of the time of the pilgrim God’. While suggesting that belief in such predictions owed much to ‘Gallic credulity’, Otto nonetheless described the Christian armies ‘inspired by the spirit of the pilgrim God’. Others fashioned events in more concrete terms.
After describing the circumstances as ‘new and astonishing’, the Saxon priest Helmold from Bosau, on the Baltic Slav frontier, writing twenty years later, depicted the military operations of 1147 as part of a measured plan: ‘It seemed to the initiators of the expedition that one part of the army should be sent to the east, another to Spain and a third against our neighbours the Slavs.’1 Hindsight and local interest produced a neat version of the past. Contemporary witnesses appeared less struck by Helmond’s ‘universal labour’. At the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux legitimized the Saxon foray in the context of the eastern expedition, a move confirmed by Eugenius III and recorded by Otto of Freising, who was there. Yet Otto wrote nothing about the course of the Baltic operation and later confused the capture of Almeria by the Genoese with that of Lisbon, not associating the latter as the third limb of the 1147 holy war. Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon, a cousin of one of the commanders at Lisbon, saw the Portuguese adventure as the naval arm of the land expedition east while ignoring the Baltic raids entirely. The various eyewitnesses to the siege of Lisbon took a similar view. The pope, from yet another perspective, distinguished between the eastern campaign, the Slavic war and the continuing reconquista in Spain, all holy enterprises in papal eyes meriting Jerusalem indulgences, yet all different in motive and inception; Eugenius mentioned the Lisbon fleet not at all. Few other contemporaries drew any parallels at all, certainly not those clerics who drafted the land charters by which departing crusaders endowed religious houses in return for ready cash. Bernard’s association of different theatres of holy war, possibly including Spain as well as the Baltic, appears essentially reactive rather than intentional or planned; for the pope such links merely followed policy sanctioned in use for a generation.2 For all Bernard’s bluster at Frankfurt about the Baltic army protecting the columns bound for Jerusalem, organizers and participants were bound by no calculated grand strategy embracing all Christendom’s frontiers. Rather, holy warriors, inspired by much less tangible emotions, found themselves through expedience fighting at the same time at the three corners of Europe.