God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  THE BALTIC: JULY–SEPTEMBER 1147

  Of all the Christian fronts, that in the Baltic most obviously offered fulfilment of self-interest: for the secular rulers of Holstein and Saxony, reinforcements and legitimacy to their quickening efforts to spread their authority and vassals into neighbouring Slavic lands; for the squabbling kings of Denmark, a further chance to secure their southern approaches; for churchmen, an opportunity to ally force to missionary work in the hope of a permanent extension of Christendom. Viewed as a holy war, the Baltic crusade of 1147 failed; seen as larger than usual summer raids to acquire booty and to extend increasingly porous local political frontiers, the campaigns achieved limited but tangible results.

  At the Diet of Frankfurt, the Saxon muster had been fixed for 29 June, the Feast of SS Peter and Paul, at Magdeburg. In April, the pope appointed Anselm bishop of Havelburg as his legate to the expedition; he also probably sent letters to the Danish Archbishop Eskil of Lund, a friend of Bernard, to encourage the participation of the warring Kings Canute V and Sweyn III whose predecessor, Eric the Lamb, may have been approached by a papal legate to join the Holy Land expedition the previous year. Further incentive came in June with the provocative pre-emptive strike on the recently re-established Christian port of Lübeck by the Wendish Prince Niklot of the Abotrites, who previously had cooperated with Adolf of Holstein in the recent German penetration of his western provinces, Wagria and Polabia. The confusion of the shifting frontier found little space for rigid political division based on religion; competition revolved around forts protecting settlements producing agricultural rents, control of trade and access to slaves. The Frankfurt holy war offered a chance to establish a military coalition to extend German authority eastwards; submission not conversion represented the central aim, despite the papal prohibition on truces and treaties with the pagans and Bernard’s call for their baptism or annihilation. Canon law forbade simple war of conquest. Yet the consequences of repeated border raids, temporary annexation and repeated missions along the Saxon/Slav borderland left many pagans open to the charge, however misleading, of apostasy, such as Niklot’s allies on the island of Rügen, who had briefly been ruled by the Danes in the 1130s. As apostates rather than pagans they were fair game, as were any infidels who hindered the holy war to Jerusalem, the fragile justification promoted by Bernard.3

  Politics got the better of piety. For Henry the Lion, the enterprise allowed him to win his spurs in reasserting ducal leadership over the push eastwards, Helmold idealistically disapproving of his mercenary motives.4 In Denmark, the holy war provided a suitably honourable good cause behind which the parties in the civil war could be persuaded to unite. In mid-July, with the archbishop of Bremen and an old Welf ally, Conrad of Zahringen, a recruit of Bernard’s the previous winter, Duke Henry advanced into Abotrite country to besiege Niklot’s newly fortified outpost at Dobin at the same time as a combined Danish army and fleet descended on this remote fortress from the north. Danish resolve was soon undermined, a sally from Dobin inflicting considerable damage on their army while their fleet was attacked by Niklot’s Rügian allies. The consequent ravaging of the area by some besiegers alarmed Saxon crusaders hoping for territorial gain: ‘Is not the land we are devastating our land?… Why are we… destroyers of our own incomes?’5 Despite the defiant words of the spring, to extricate themselves from a militarily forlorn and politically self-defeating exercise, the crusaders soon negotiated a treaty with the Abotrites under which the garrison at Dobin accepted baptism and released Danish prisoners while Niklot agreed to return to his alliance with Adolf of Holstein and pay tribute. The terms amounted to a scanty fig leaf to allow the Danes and Saxons to withdraw, the former to resume their civil war, the latter to business as usual. The treaty fooled no one, least of all a highly critical Helmold of Bosau, who described the supposed Wendish conversion as false; Niklot’s rule stayed intact with his and his people’s paganism; the idols, temples and sanctuaries remained, as did the able-bodied Danish prisoners who swelled the Wendish slave market. In the context of the propaganda of Frankfurt, nothing had been achieved.

  The main army of possibly some tens of thousands assembled at Magdeburg early in August under the legate Anselm of Havelburg, its religious veneer displayed by the presence of six other German bishops although the adherence of powerful Saxon marcher lords led by Albert the Bear proved more significant for its conduct. The regent Wibald of Corvey asserted the dimension of imperial leadership of this revived Drang nach Osten, the failure of the king’s representative and the duke of Saxony to make common cause underscoring the unresolved political tensions lurking beneath the banners of the cross. Operating well away from Duke Henry’s foray to Dobin, part of the legate’s army battered its way over a hundred miles into Wendish territory to Demmin on the river Peene, possibly as a prelude to an assault on the strategically important island of Rügen, attacked by the Emperor Lothar a couple of decades earlier. Despite the iconic destruction of the pagan temple and idols at Malchow to the south, the siege of Demmin proved fruitless, Wendish resistance forcing a stalemate from which the Christians lamely withdrew early in September. The failure before Demmin owed much to the division of the German army. Persuaded by rapacious local margraves, the bulk of the Christian force turned further east to besiege Stettin in Pomerania, a major trading station on the Oder estuary. The difficulty in this lay in the fact, soon transmitted to the besiegers by the townsmen hanging crosses on their walls, that Stettin had already accepted ‘the German God’, as locals called Him, a point reinforced by a delegation from the city led by its bishop of many years, Adalbert, who pointedly suggested that if the crusaders genuinely intended to promote faith this was best achieved by preaching not fighting. He struck a nerve; as a well-informed Bohemian commentator noted, the Saxons were more interested in land than religion and so quickly agreed a truce with the bishop and the Christian prince of Pomerania, Ratibor.6 The Wendish crusade begun with such acclaim at Frankfurt, and attracting recruits from as far afield as Moravia, Denmark and the southern Rhineland, petered out in a failed Saxon land grab.

  If of little immediate tangible importance except to participants and victims, the precedent of the Wendish crusade added a new dimension to the bleak warfare across Christendom’s Baltic frontier. The tacit acceptance that conversion and violence served the same end of promoting the Word of God and securing the souls of the pagans now began to be formalized. In the eyes of the Czech commentator Vincent of Prague, the bishop of Moravia had taken the cross in 1147 to convert the Pomeranians.7 That they had already been converted by Bishop Otto of Bamberg twenty years earlier proved embarrassing but did nothing to undermine the principle which thereafter became a regular prop to campaigns of territorial aggrandizement and ecclesiastical imperialism. Conquest became the precursor to conversion and, as such, easily attracted the status of holy war and, increasingly, the legal trappings of a war of the cross. The campaigns of 1147 did not invent religious warfare in the Baltic, for Germans or for Danes; nor, thereafter, were all wars of expansion legitimized by papal grants of Jerusalem indulgences. However, the legacy of 1147 reconfigured how such wars came to be articulated and justified and, on occasion, recruited.

  THE CAPTURE OF LISBON: MAY TO OCTOBER 1147

  The fleet that sailed out of the Dart estuary on 23 May 1147 numbered between 150 and 200 vessels drawn from the Rhineland, Brabant-Limbourg, Flanders, Boulogne, Normandy, Lincolnshire, East Anglia, London and the major ports of southern England, including Dover, Hastings, Southampton and Bristol, with other contingents from Scotland and possibly Brittany, their destination Jerusalem.8 The English force alone may have comprised about 4,500 men, the whole army perhaps 10,000. The muster of this polyglot armada completed a complicated process of recruitment and planning. Those from imperial lands acknowledged the leadership of Count Arnold III of Aerschot, a nephew of Godfrey of Bouillon, and so connected with the ruling house of Jerusalem as well as the aura of the First Crusade. However, the imperial
crusaders had travelled separately, those from Cologne embarking on 27 April arriving at Dartmouth on 19 May to find Count Arnold from Brabant-Limbourg already waiting. The Anglo-Norman contingents displayed marked regional diversity, reflected in their being organized into four groups: those from Norfolk and Suffolk under a local landowner, Hervey of Glanvill; the men of Kent under Simon of Dover; the Londoners; and the rest led by Saher of Archel, a lord with lands in Lincolnshire. Additionally, a distinct camaraderie existed among those from Southampton and Hastings who had been part of a similar expedition that had failed to capture Lisbon in 1142; on the 1147 campaign they and their spokesmen, the cross-Channel merchant Veil brothers, together with men from Bristol, proved awkward companions even though Saher of Archel and Hervey of Glanvill remained mutually supportive. While those from coastal Flanders and Boulogne, under Christian of Gistel, Count Arnold’s men and the Germans tended to coalesce, to the extent of fighting together and later sharing texts narrating the events at Lisbon, the Fleming priest Arnulf copying the account of Winand from Cologne, the Anglo-Normans remained fissiparous. Disputatious relations between the main linguistic groups – Anglo-Norman and Germano-Flemish – persisted to the end.

  Despite the precariousness of its unity, the gathering of such a heterogeneous force at the same time in the same place cannot have been coincidental. Its lack of great princes or counts as leaders and its chronic search for booty make what cohesion there was more impressive. Apart from Count Arnold and Saher of Archel, described as ‘lord’, other leaders came from the lesser landed aristocracy, such as Christian, castellan of Gistel, and Hervey of Glanvill, or merchant and urban elites: the Viels of Southampton and Caen; Simon of Dover; Andrew of London. Town origins appeared as prominently in eyewitness descriptions of the expedition as regional affiliations: Cologne; Boulogne; London; Hastings; Bristol; Southampton; young men from ‘the region of Ipswich’ (de provintia Gipeswicensi).9 Such groups had been assembled by forces beyond simple social hierarchies, reflecting a complexity of relationships typical of the economically prosperous regions around the North Sea and English Channel. Without kings or great counts, the organizational impetus suggests largely hidden processes of rural and urban local self-awareness and communal action, if only in hiring and equipping ships and raising money. It may be no chance that many of the leading figures came from the prominent trading centres or some of the most densely populated areas of north-west Europe, where the ease of transmission of news and ideas was matched by a sense of community and a tradition of corporate action. Some members of the fleet were veterans of the attack on Lisbon in 1142; some may have previously been crusaders to the east. Others had felt the power of Bernard’s oratory or, like Christian of Gistel, who met the abbot in August 1146, his conversation. Among the Anglo-Normans, many may have seized the opportunity to escape the conflicts and compromises of civil war; the Veils of Southampton, heavily involved in the Channel ferry and cargo business, were partisans for Matilda. Like others, they also had ready access to shipping.10

  Some in the leadership may have anticipated fighting the Moors of Iberia. Afonso Henriques (1128–85), who was carving out an independent principality of Portugal along the Atlantic seaboard south from the rivers Mino and Duero, had maintained close links with the papacy in his as yet unsuccessful attempts to receive recognition as king. His designs on Lisbon were no secret; the crusader fleet included veterans of his failed attack on the city in 1142. In April he had captured the strategically vital stronghold of Santarem, the key to the lower Tagus valley, its investment providing an essential prerequisite for an assault on Lisbon downstream. The arrival of the crusade fleet had been anticipated by the Portuguese; an advance flotilla of five ships sailed directly from Dartmouth to Lisbon, apparently in five days, where it awaited the main fleet after its leisurely and laborious progress of more than a month. While Peter Pitoes, the bishop of Oporto, expended much eloquence and hard bargaining to attract the support of the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders after they arrived at the mouth of the Duero on 16 June, the Flemings under Christian of Gistel and the others from the Low Countries under the count of Arschot were still at sea. However, less than a fortnight later immediately on arrival at Lisbon the Flemings agreed to Afonso’s terms to join his attack on Lisbon whereas contingents from the Anglo-Norman realms needed much persuasion. It is possible that some of those recruited from areas and by lords associated with Bernard during his Flanders tour of late summer and autumn 1146 may have agreed to cooperate with the Portuguese before setting out, although a letter from Bernard to Afonso that exists is probably not genuine.11 The rest of the force gathered at Dartmouth came round to the idea only gradually. The idea of such action cannot have appeared entirely alien. The thrust of such action fitted the prevailing general justification for the holy war as proclaimed in 1146–7 by the pope, Bernard and, in his awkward way, Radulf. Although Eugenius III seems not to have specifically authorized the Lisbon enterprise, in April 1147 he had extended his approval to other Iberian battles against the Moors. As recorded by a member of his audience, the bishop of Oporto echoed the rhetoric of his northern European colleagues by calling for vengeance on the infidels oppressing Christians and occupying their land: ‘shall it be permitted to the adversaries of the cross to insult you with impunity?… the praiseworthy thing is not to have been to Jerusalem, but to have lived a good life while on the way’, a criterion fulfilled by expelling the Muslims from Lisbon.12 However, this ‘just war’ did not replace the vows of the Holy Sepulchre. Jerusalem remained the ultimate objective; seizing Lisbon merely a righteous act of meritorious obedience to the will of God fully in keeping, declared one of the army chaplains, with the crusaders’ ‘new baptism of repentance’.13

  Thus militarily and ideologically the Lisbon campaign sat easily within established conventions, expectations and experience of fighting infidels to which the preaching and recruitment of 1146–7 had lent special urgency. A contemporary vernacular song explicitly linked the Saracens in the east with the Almoravids in Spain.14 Even so, anxiety over the propriety of expending time, effort and lives surfaced. During violent storms in the Bay of Biscay, there was terrified talk among the seasick of their being punished for the conversio, the change or alteration, of their pilgrimage, perhaps referring to an already agreed plan to join the Portuguese reconquista. The elaborate and comprehensive arguments deployed at length by the bishop of Oporto implied resistance to the idea of diverting the expedition, while, at Lisbon itself, elements in the fleet still argued for an immediate continuation of the journey to Jerusalem, even if for reasons more of material self-interest than single-minded piety.15 In the event, the success at Lisbon justified the endeavour in the eyes of participants, even if the achievement received remarkably scant attention from observers elsewhere in western Europe.

  The lack of unitary leadership exacerbated the tensions between the different regional groups and within each contingent, the statutes agreed at Dartmouth providing a forum for dissent as well as a structure for unity. Yet sufficient discipline was retained and agreement hammered out between the various groups to ensure enough cohesion to pursue a strenuous and precarious siege. Although leaving Dartmouth together on 23 May, the fleet was soon separated, straggling into the mouth of the Duero and the city of Oporto between 16 and 26 June, the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders having visited Compostela on the way; the count of Aerschot arrived last. At Oporto, Afonso’s plan to hire the crusaders for an assault on Lisbon was presented to the Anglo-Normans and Rhinelanders by Bishop Peter but only after the full fleet reached the Tagus on 28 June did detailed negotiations on terms for military assistance begin. While the Flemish immediately signed up, some of the Anglo-Normans, led by William and Ralph Veil from Southampton, argued that greater profits could be gained in sailing directly to the Holy Land by preying on shipping in the Mediterranean. The dissidents from Southampton, Bristol and Hastings were abetted by veterans who remembered being left in the lurch by Afonso during the 1142 att
ack. Although the debate revolved around payment and booty it also raised serious questions about the unity of the whole expedition. Soon after the crusaders had established a bridgehead on the beach to the west of the city, those from Flanders, Boulogne and the Rhineland, presumably having accepted Afonso’s offers, moved to positions on the east of the city, where they remained a semi-detached force for the rest of the siege. The Anglo-Normans were left to thrash out their differences in a full, ill-tempered council where accusations of bad faith were hurled at the small but experienced minority – comprising eight ships, perhaps as little as 5 per cent of the fleet – who held out against serving Afonso. Apparently, only a passionate but diplomatic appeal to honour, unity and faithfulness to the Dartmouth-sworn contracts by the East Anglian commander Hervey of Glanvill persuaded the Veil faction to cooperate, and even then only after assuring them of adequate provisions and pay. The religious gloss put on events by Hervey of Glanvill’s chaplain Raol, who wrote the most detailed surviving account of the expedition, cannot disguise the national and regional tensions or the anxieties over supplies, profits and possibly the justice of the whole operation.16 That the main opposition to joining an attack on Lisbon came from hardened seamen with experience of Iberian warfare, portrayed as piratical and mercenary gold-diggers, indicated military and political risks in the enterprise that the more optimistic or more naive elements discounted.