God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Two events transformed the redefinition of the Reconquest apparent in some later eleventh-century texts into a tradition of holy war; the invasion of Spain by the Moroccan fundamentalist Almoravids and the development of the papal policy of penitential war that led to the First Crusade. From their original base on the fringes of the Sahara, by the early 1080s the Almoravids, a sect of austere Islamic fundamentalists, had conquered Morocco. Representing a very different cultural perspective than the Arabic Mediterranean sophistication of the rulers of al-Andalus, the Almoravids combined the fanaticism of converts with the militancy of outsiders. They were the al-Murabitun, ‘people of the ribat’, armed monasteries on the frontiers of Islam, who imposed strict observance on their followers, subjects and neighbours by force of piety and arms. Religion lay at the heart of their aggressive politics. By the mid-1080s they were ready to extend their authority across the Straits of Gibraltar into al-Andalus whether the local Muslim rulers welcomed them or, as was almost universally the case, not. The Almoravids regarded what they saw as the corrupt decadence of the taifa kings with as much contempt as they despised the Christian infidels. In return, the emirs of al-Andalus no less than their Christian neighbours and partners saw the Moroccan invaders as threatening their power and the whole mutually beneficial political system. However, with the pressure growing from the north, in the aftermath of Alfonso VI’s capture of Toledo in 1085, the taifa emirs, led by Seville, had little option but to invite Almoravid aid. The invasion, led by Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, led to the defeat of Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086. Over the next quarter of a century, by force, coercion and diplomacy, the Almoravids absorbed remaining taifa emirates into their empire, the last, Zaragoza, falling in 1110. The adoption of a newly aggressive idea of Christian holy war came in direct response to this new threat to territory and the cosy system of parias. However, despite official ecclesiastical pronouncements, this was not perceived as a simple blanket religious conflict. Twelfth-century Christian Spanish writers repeatedly drew the distinction between the Muslims of al-Andalus, sometimes called ‘Hagarenes’, with whom business could be done, and the alien invaders, referred to as ‘Moabites’, with whom it could not.20

  Into this new political situation arrived foreign soldiers with the ideology and institutions of penitential warfare. In 1089, perhaps in response to news of the Almoravid invasion of that year, Urban II offered the same remission of sins to those who helped rebuild the city and church of Tarragona as that granted to those on penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, an offer repeated in 1091. Contributing to the defence of Tarragona, over the border on the coast fifty miles south of Barcelona, constituted a penance, as the city was intended as a ‘wall and bastion (literally ‘ante-mural’) against the Saracens for the Christian people’.21 Such mingling of defensive religious just war and remission of sins defined by analogy with the extreme penance of the Jerusalem pilgrimage showed how papal ideas were moving. The launch of the First Crusade did not deflect Urban from support of the Tarragona enterprise. He tried to insist that local counts should not fulfil their Jerusalem vow in the east but fight the Muslims nearer home. This hope was not entirely successful. There is little evidence that the cause of Tarragona proved popular but rather more for Spanish involvement in the Jerusalem campaign itself. However, the success of the First Crusade had its impact on Spain as elsewhere. Peter I of Aragon had taken the cross to go to Jerusalem in 1100. A year later, still trying to annexe Zaragoza, he displayed banners of the cross at the siege of the city and built a castle to intimidate the citizens nicknamed ‘Juslibol’, i.e. ‘God Wills It’, the slogan of Clermont.22

  The incorporation of the formal apparatus of crusading – bull, indulgence, temporal privileges, cross – sprang from the wider, older association of Christian conquest and religious war. The past, as revealed by twelfth-century accounts of earlier campaigns against the Moors, was reconfigured to include holy war. From c.1115, the patronal saint, James the Apostle, began to be referred to as a ‘knight of Christ’, apparently shocking a visiting Greek, a story that suggested the novelty of the saint’s new role.23 Other saints, such as George in Aragon and Catalonia, and even, bizarrely, the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville, popular in León, were recruited to the providential mission of reconquest, as was the cult of the Virgin Mary. These local or adopted celestial allies outflanked papal arguments promoting St Peter as the peninsula’s proprietary saint. There were other limits to the acceptance of the crusade. Twelfth-century writers close to the action continued to chronicle the non-violent interaction between Christian and al-Andalus Muslims. Even the early thirteenth-century epic on Rodrigo Diaz, the Poema de Mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid) admits to the hero’s friendship with Muslims and catalogues the deficiencies of Rodrigo’s Christian associates as much as those of the Moors. As with the Historia Roderici of a century before, this is hardly ‘crusading’ literature.24 Despite the trickle of papal bulls from the early decades of the twelfth century, holy war was grafted on to the Spanish conflicts only gradually and, from an Iberian perspective, incompletely. Not all subsequent wars against Muslims were crusades. Crusading did not, as often in the eastern Mediterranean, set the military and political agenda but followed it, shaping mentalities, not strategy. The association of holiness to defence and conquest paid practical dividends, in the use of military orders in front-line settlements as well on campaign, or in the access to ecclesiastical and lay taxation. However, Iberian Muslims rarely attracted from Iberian Christians the consistent demonization concocted by western rhetoric far from the crusade frontier. Spanish convivencia, while never the Edenic state of multicultural harmony some have imagined, precluded the worst excesses of religious hatred in the contest for supremacy that rumbled and spat for a century and half after the First Crusade. The tainted legacy of entrenched intolerance and the racist persecution and expulsion of non-Catholic Spaniards belonged more to the period after the effective completion of the Reconquest, Granada excepted, in the mid-thirteenth century than to the previous period of active crusading.25 Nonetheless, crusade stereotypes did influence the creation of Spanish Catholic exceptionalism in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing a justification for internal discrimination with an abiding external incentive, the recovery of Jerusalem. The self-image of warriors of Christ, specially favoured and specially commissioned, that permeated Spanish official culture by 1500 was thus an indirect product of the historical Reconquest crusade experience.26

  HOLY WAR

  By analogy, the First Crusade lent definition to the application of holy war to the Spanish Reconquest. While remissions of sins were attached to various Spanish campaigns by Paschal II, the full panoply including cross-giving was applied to the ephemerally successful Pisan-Catalan-southern French assault on the Balearic Islands in 1113–14, and possibly to the unrealized attack on Tortosa planned in 1115. The successful siege of Zaragoza by Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118 drew a papal indulgence for those who died or, in the tradition of Urban II’s Tarragona appeal of 1089, contributed to the establishment of the city’s new church and clergy. The consistent papal line was that the Spanish war against Islam was as useful and therefore as meritorious as the wars for the Holy Land, even in the absence of equivalent symbols and privileges. The First Lateran Council of 1123, summoned by Calixtus II, a former papal legate to Spain, confirmed the equation by lumping together those who had taken the cross for Jerusalem and Spain (Canon XI).27 At the same time, Calixtus granted to crucesignati in Spain ‘the same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern church’ for an expedition planned in Catalonia under the legates of the archbishop of Tarragona.28 On the other side of the peninsula, in 1125, Archbishop Diego Gelmirez of Santiago took up the linguistic and theological association in a grandiose scheme apparently aimed at reaching Jerusalem via north Africa: ‘let us become soldiers of Christ… taking up arms… for the remission of sins’.29 However, as with the papal plan for a general crusade in Spain in 1123, the archbis
hop’s ambition proved stillborn. In general, crusading apparatus was most effective when it fitted existing plans rather than of itself stimulating action in the manner of many eastern Mediterranean campaigns. It is notable how regularly papal crusade grants came in response to requests from local Iberian rulers. Perhaps of greater significance than the operation of the formal paraphernalia of the Jerusalem holy war in Spain was its influence on aspirations. Increasingly, wars in Spain were regarded by their promoters in terms of the wider conflict defined by the Jerusalem war. This redefinition was neither universal nor constant. Yet its penetration was evident in Leonese and Castilian chronicles and, most startlingly, in the 1131 testamentary arrangements of Alfonso I of Aragon-Navarre (d. 1134), who left his kingdom jointly to the Templars, Hospitallers and the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre. Ten years before his death Alfonso had attempted to found a militia Christi, modelled on the Templars, entrusted with the task of fighting all Muslims and, in the fashion of Archbishop Gelmirez, cutting a new path to Jerusalem.30

  The experience of the late 1140s emphasized how Iberian holy war was influenced by local demands coinciding with grander crusading designs, in this case the Second Crusade. In 1146, the Genoese had attacked the port of Almeria on the southern coast of Granada, an expedition described by contemporaries in wholly secular terms. The following year, in alliance with Alfonso VII of Castile, a renewed Genoese attack had been elevated into a holy war, complete with remission of sins. Alfonso attracted allies to join the venture with promises of ‘redemption of souls’ before he obtained from Eugenius III retrospective confirmation of the status of the new attack on Almeria in the bull Divina dispensatione (April 1147).31 Almeria fell to the Christians in October 1147. In conception and execution, the Almeria campaign had no direct connection with the larger eastern expedition beyond the availability of crusade privileges. In 1148, a further papal grant of crusader indulgences ‘which Pope Urban established for all those going for the liberation of the eastern church’ was applied to the Catalan-Genoese attack on Tortosa at the mouth of the Ebro, which fell after a five-month siege in December 1148.32 Among others, the Tortosa campaign recruited veterans from Almeria and the successful siege of Lisbon (July–October 1147). However, it is notable that, unlike the Aragonese and Catalan ventures of 1147–8, the Lisbon enterprise seems not to have elicited an explicit, separate papal crusade bull, the Portuguese invitation to the Holy Land crusaders, however long contemplated, appearing by comparison rather more opportunist.

  The failure of the Second Crusade in the east dampened papal and probably popular enthusiasm for crusading holy war. However, local conditions, in Spain as in the Baltic, encouraged continued identification of secular conflict with religious war. This was lent added force by a new threat to Christian gains from the Almohads, al-Muwahhidun, the ‘Upholders of the Divine Unity’. These fundamentalist unitarians, originating like the Almoravids in southern Morocco, sought to purge the increasingly corrupt Almoravid regime and restore to the Maghrib and al-Andalus the spiritual purity and intensity of early Islam. The Almoravids had emphasized legalistic rules and operated a very loose theocratic regime even before they declined from their initial austerity. The Almohads, under their founder Muhammed Ibn Tumart (declared the mahdi by his followers in 1121, d. 1130) and his successor ‘Abd al-Mu ‘min (1130–63) destroyed Almoravid power in the Mahgrib and, from 1146, began to infiltrate across the Straits into Spain. (They founded a town at Gibraltar in 1159.) While initially a threat chiefly to the emirs, who had regained a measure of autonomy as the authority of the Almoravids had decayed from the 1120s, soon the Christian rulers felt the force of this new power. By 1173, mainland al-Andalus had been annexed by the Almohads under Yusuf I (1163–84). In the next quarter of a century, the Almohads reversed many of the Christian advances of the previous generations. In 1195 they defeated Alfonso VIII of Castile at Alarcos on the river Guadiana and proceeded to raid into the Tagus valley. Yet, even here, the complexity of Spanish politics overlay any religious conflict. At least one disaffected Castilian noble fought for the Almohads at Alarcos and in 1196 led a Muslim regiment in the army of Alfonso IX of León which invaded Castile.33 The Almohad advance served only to add another potential ally for the warring Christian kings. In an attempt to impose Christian unity, in 1197 the nonagenarian pope, Celestine III, was even induced to authorize the full eastern crusading privileges for those who fought against the renegade Alfonso IX.34 Only in gilded memory was the Spanish crusade a simple religious war.

  Celestine III’s use of the crusade against the Christian Alfonso IX, although eliciting little obvious response, demonstrated how far the mechanics of the Jerusalem war had come to dominate church-sanctioned violence. In 1166, a church council at Segovia had proposed Jerusalem indulgences for those who defended Castile from invasion. By the early thirteenth century, crusade privileges became a regular, accepted element in church warfare. However, Celestine had a more personal concern with Iberian politics. As Cardinal Hyacinth he had twice been on legatine missions to the peninsula, in 1154–5 and 1172–3. On each occasion he had promoted the Reconquest as a crusade, an association he revived during his pontificate, when he sent his nephew, Gregory of Sant’ Angelo, as legate to Spain.35 While Celestine’s commitment exposed the contrast between the rhetoric of holy war and the reality of secular politics, his long career witnessed the consolidation of a crusading tradition which, although reflecting both the general absence of crusading between 1149 and 1187 and its revival and extension thereafter, presented distinctive features.

  Most obvious was the use of international and local military orders to garrison the frontier regions from southern Aragon to Portugal.36 As recipients of alms, estates, villages and castles, the military orders played a central role in the politics as well as campaigning of the Reconquest, a position reflected in successive rulers’ determination to control them. Each kingdom created its own orders, as well as patronizing the Templars and Hospitallers, who stood as the models for the rest. In the 1140s, these two international orders had begun to be employed in a military capacity as opposed to merely receiving grants of land. Within thirty years, every kingdom except Navarre had established their own orders, while retaining the services of the Temple and Hospital, especially in Aragon and Catalonia. Among the lasting foundations were Calatrava (1158) in Castile; Santiago (1170) and St Julian of Pereiro, later known as Alcantara (by 1176), in León; Evora, later Avis (by 1176), in Portugal. During the same periods a number of more ephemeral orders were established, each, like the more permanent orders, based on frontier castles which, in many cases, gave them their names as well as headquarters. One order, of La Merced (c.1230), was founded in Barcelona to ransom captives of the Moors, a task it shared with the French Order of the Trinity.37 Although the details are often obscure, the initiative to found these orders appears to have come from pious noblemen (or in the case of the Mercedarians a wealthy merchant), with the encouragement and patronage of kings and ecclesiastical hierarchies. The larger orders soon began to resemble the Holy Land military orders in attracting international investment; by 1200 the Order of Santiago held estates from the British Isles to Carinthia. The chronology of foundation, the second half of the twelfth century, suggests that the institutionalization of holy war was not an immediate consequence either of the Reconquest successes of the previous century or of the First Crusade. The presence of these orders influenced the way the Reconquest was pursued, as well as playing a prominent role in national politics and internecine warfare between Christian rulers. However, only when the major conquest in al-Andalus were nearing completion did the Orders of Alcantara (1238) and Calatrava (1240) receive permanent privileges from the pope granting indulgences to any who fought with them against the Moors, creating for them the sort of ‘eternal crusade’ seen later in the thirteenth century, applied to the activities of the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. Consistently, Spanish crusading, while providing a framework for lay enthusiasm and, in the military orders,
institutions for maintaining conquests, remained secondary or complementary to secular considerations and an older association of Christian conquest with religious war.

  Another characteristic of Spanish crusading lay in the two distinct audiences courted by papal grants. Within the peninsula, crusading privileges merely underpinned the pre-existing sense of mission and righteousness involved in fighting armies of infidels and winning land ostensibly for Christianity. It is difficult to gauge the autonomous effect of such appeals on recruits. The wars would have been fought in any case, their cause identified as religious and just. Raising armies followed secular patterns of military obligations and clientage. Troops were summoned as to any other war, their terms of service, chronological and financial, being the same as for secular or non-crusading warfare. Pay or shares in booty held the armies together. The church may have felt more obliged to contribute to crusading ventures as it stood to gain new bishoprics and lands. Crusade privileges, especially those contained in general appeals of the kind instituted by Calixtus II in 1123, were also designed to attract foreign assistance, the crusade as an international recruiting device constituting one of its chief roles in the Spanish Reconquest. Certain areas, such as southern France, were also specifically targeted. There were exceptions, as in 1189–90 and 1217, when crusaders en route to the eastern Mediterranean assisted locals rulers in new conquests along the southern coastline of the peninsula on the pattern familiar from 1147–8. Even so, the significance of cross-Pyrenean aid was largely limited to the period up to the greatest Reconquest victory at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212. Thereafter, although foreigners continued to campaign in the peninsula and to settle in new conquests such as Seville (conquered in 1248), the crusades were increasingly overt adjuncts to national territorial expansion and internal state building. The failure of successive rulers in Catalonia and Languedoc to create a unified kingdom stretching from the Ebro to the Rhône compounded this patriation of the Spanish crusade.