In many respects this was a very different world from our own. It was highly localised with poor roads and communications networks. Today we watch international conflicts unfold live on satellite television. Back in the age of the crusades news of events in Jerusalem probably took a minimum of ten weeks to reach northern Europe: up to two months of sea travel to Genoa, Venice or Pisa (although ports were closed between October and February because of the dangerous winter seas), and then weeks of hard riding through Italy and France on old Roman roads. Modern-day leaders summon their confidants by telephone or e-mail and they can respond almost immediately to events. A medieval leader would have to send out messages by horse — another slow and cumbersome process — and the recipient would then have to ride back or send a messenger in reply.
In some respects, the physical landscape would appear different from that of today; for example, there was far more woodland than now. This period saw significant population growth and, while agricultural techniques were improving, famines were frequent and devastating (one every seven years in twelfth-century Flanders, for example). The vast majority of the population lived in the countryside; urban centres were relatively few and in northern Europe particularly, they were small and underdeveloped; Paris is estimated as having a population of c. 20,000 at the end of the eleventh century, today it is at least 2.5 million. The intellectual landscape was different too. Monastic writers and other churchmen produced highly sophisticated works of theology and history and the study of science, law, logic and government would all take off rapidly in the twelfth century. We take the ability to read and write for granted, but these skills were rare at the time of the crusades. Education was limited to the monasteries, although by the middle of the twelfth century cathedral schools such as Laon in northern France were flourishing and the Italian cities of Bologna and Salerno were centres of learning in law and medicine respectively. While literacy was very limited c. 1100, it would expand rapidly over the next century and written record-keeping and the formal offices of Church and State (such as chanceries) also emerged strongly over this time. A rise in trade — in part encouraged by the opening of the Eastern Mediterranean through the crusades — further encouraged literacy and numeracy with bills of exchange and accounting records becoming ever more essential.
In a society dominated by violence and religion the role of women was often limited to that of a wife and child-bearer. Women could not carry arms in battle and church teaching on the sins of Eve meant that women were viewed as a prime cause of sin and temptation in all walks of life, and even in a religious vocation far fewer openings were available for female spirituality than for that of men. While a select few women could have great standing as carriers of a royal blood-line (such as Melisende of Jerusalem), a lack of legal status and education also prevented women from holding power outside the home.
Aside from the overarching bond of Christian faith, loyalties at the time of the First Crusade were much more localised than today. Modem European societies revolve around nation states, but medieval allegiances tended to be with one’s lord and the local saint and church, rather than with a king or emperor, or the papacy in Rome. During the twelfth century this began to change with a growth and consolidation of central power apparent in both the secular and ecclesiastical spheres. In consequence of this, many people began to look towards such figures for direction, for protection and for justice, thereby increasing their leaders’ authority further.
Marcus Bull has pinpointed two prominent aspects of eleventh-century society and indicates their crucial influence on the attraction of Pope Urban’s appeal of 1095 (Bull, 1995). First, the violence so endemic in the medieval West. The weakness of central authorities at this time meant that renegade castellans and robber bands could ravage an area and cause chaos. Localised warfare was a perpetual danger, so much so that the Church attempted to control it through the Truce of God movements which, for a certain period, bound warring parties to keep the peace as a way of trying to instil some sense of order. If the vows were disregarded, then knights working on behalf of the Church would punish the oath-breakers with force. Secondly, and linked to this culture of violence, was the importance of religion. Western Europe in the twenty-first century is a fairly secular society and it is often difficult to grasp the centrality of religious belief to medieval men and women. God’s favour dictated much of their lives and explained many events, both natural and man-made. Miracles, that to us might seem doubtful, were often accepted as manifestations of the divine. For example, at the Battle of Antioch in 1098, ‘There also appeared from the mountains a countless host of men on white horses, whose banners were all white. When our men saw this they did not understand what was happening or who these men might be, until they realised that this was the succour sent by Christ and that the leaders were St George, St Mercurius and St Demetrius. This is quite true for many of our men saw it’ (Gesta Francorum, tr. Hill, 1962: 69). The matter-of-fact comment at the end of this passage indicates the implicit acceptance of God’s hand in this. Medieval people should not, however, be seen as simple or credulous because their belief-systems accommodated concepts and values to which we no longer hold. It is not necessary for us to accept their viewpoint, but it is essential that we recognise it and appreciate its impact upon their lives and actions: only when this is understood can we begin to comprehend episodes such as the crusades. As a coda to this issue we should note that during the twelfth century ecclesiastical authorities kept an ever closer eye on claims of the miraculous and showed a real determination to safeguard orthodoxy.
A prime concern of medieval man was to avoid the terrors of the afterlife — eternal damnation in the torments of hell so vividly depicted in the frescoes and sculptures that adorned every church and survive today in their most sophisticated and fearsome form at Autun and Conques in France. Religious observance, led by the monastic empire of Cluny, was growing rapidly. The lay nobility formed close ties to a particular institution and in their quest for salvation often provided increasing levels of financial support for the local church. Pilgrimage was also extremely popular as people visited saints’ shrines in search of help, protection, cures and forgiveness. The cult of saints was a prominent aspect of religious life. Saints were formerly humans, who had led exemplary lives (virgins, martyrs) and were almost certainly in Heaven. They were used by medieval people as intercessors to God in other words, as intermediaries who, if properly approached and venerated (not worshipped, or else the sin of idolatry was committed), might secure an individual, a family or a community divine favour. Saints were tangible evidence of the divine and were present in the form of relics, which were fragments of their bodies, or objects associated with their lives, placed in highly decorated crosses or caskets (known as reliquaries) and kept in churches. The gathering of relics was especially valued and the crusades meant that many more items connected with the life of Christ and the Apostles could be brought back from the Holy Land (see pp. 26, 119).
The need to atone for one’s sins — sins that were committed in thoughts and deeds of avarice, greed, envy, lust and violence — was a message hammered home to Christians. The ability of the Church to communicate this message was given a powerful stimulus by the rise of the Reform Papacy. By the middle of the eleventh century the papacy had become a localised and inward-looking institution concerned with politics in Rome, rather than the leadership of the Catholic Church. In 1046, however, Henry III of Germany removed the three rival candidates for the see of St Peter and installed the first of a series of reform-minded outsiders who were determined to purify the Church itself and also to offer direction and spiritual advancement to their flock.
A brief tour of Europe reveals the fragmentation of the area and also demonstrates an important trend in the political map. The bulk of the Iberian peninsula had been conquered by Muslims from North Africa in the eighth century, but the Moors, as they were known, were eventually checked. By the middle of the eleventh century, the small Christian king
doms that had grown up in northern Spain were firmly established and the first stirrings of the reconquista (the reconquest) were being felt. Moves to regain Christian lands and to establish control over more territory saw a major advance in 1085 with the success of King Alfonso VI of Leon-Castile at Muslim-held Toledo, and at the time of the First Crusade further progress was anticipated. What we would recognise today as France was, in theory, under the authority of the Capetian King Philip I (1060-1108), but his sphere of influence extended barely 35 kilometres outside Paris and the nobles and castellans in his lands could challenge his authority with impunity. Other lords in France held greater areas of land, although, with one exception (see below), they lacked Philip’s cachet of being a king — an anointed monarch — and therefore blessed by God. The duke of Aquitaine and the count of Toulouse, for example, controlled substantial territories, but were geographically remote from the Capetians and were also separated by language (the southern French spoke a tongue called Occitan) and culture, with their nexus based around the Pyrenees and the Mediterranean. In the north of France, the counts of Anjou and Champagne were very strong, but it was the dukes of Normandy who, through the conquest of England in 1066, had the greatest prestige and, of course, a royal title. They also had far more money than the Capetians, although in the 1090s their land was divided between Robert Curthose in Normandy and William Rufus in England. The counts of Flanders held an important economic and strategic position on the North Sea coast and to the east their lands bordered on the German Empire. This vast dominion, covering Germany, the duchy of Burgundy (in the south-east of modern France) and northern and central Italy (down to just north of Rome), was the most powerful and prestigious territory in Catholic Christendom. The emperor was anointed by the pope and claimed superiority to kings. From the mid-1070s, however, a bitter schism between the papacy and the emperor had broken out (known as the Investiture Controversy) as the two leading powers in the West tried to delineate the extent of their authority in this fast-evolving society. The struggle had reached such a pitch that Emperor Henry IV was an excommunicate (in other words he had been cast out of the Church by the pope) and hence unlikely to work with Urban II on the crusade. Furthermore, many of the powerful German nobles who regularly challenged Henry’s power were also looking to their own affairs, rather than any external enterprise. The only exception to this concerned the regions to the east of Germany (the eastern side of modern Germany and Poland), which were inhabited by pagan tribes and, in conjunction with the Church, were subject to the gradual extension of Christian influence. The kingdom of Hungary began the process of conversion early in the eleventh century and missionary work took place further north in Poland and Pomerania. Scandinavia was already largely Christian by this time.
In Italy, the papacy governed a belt of land around Rome, and to the south the Normans ruled their territories in Apulia and Calabria, taken from the Byzantine Empire by the 1060s, along with Sicily, conquered from the Muslims by c. 1090. To the east lay the Byzantine Empire, successor to the Roman Empire and seat of the Orthodox Church. The emperor was a figure of enormous authority within the Byzantine system of government and, unlike the pope, his position was not challenged by churchmen. In 1054, however, as the papacy tried to establish its pre-eminence over the patriarch of Constantinople, a schism was declared and various liturgical and doctrinal differences were highlighted. The schism was still in existence at the time of the First Crusade (and remains to the present day), and would complicate the relationship between the Greeks and the West throughout the age of the crusades. The emperor also had to deal with many enemies on his extensive borders, including the pagan tribes of the Balkans and the Muslims of Asia Minor. In 1071 the Greeks suffered a terrible defeat at the Battle of Manzikert and as a result had lost control over most of the land mass of Asia Minor.
These interlinked ingredients of a rejuvenated papacy, the laymans’ need to atone for the consequences of sin, ecclesiastical direction of violence through the Peace of God, and the ties between the lay nobility and the Church were all essential elements in the background to the First Crusade. With the conquests of Iberia, Eastern Europe and southern Italy and Sicily, it is apparent that Catholic Europe was expanding, and while the stimulus for this was largely political, rather than religious, it was a trend that would form another important element in the background to the First Crusade. These themes — plus an important innovation in the opportunities for laymen to attain salvation — were all touched upon by Pope Urban II in his historic speech at the Council of Clermont on 27 November 1095.
2
The First Crusade
On 27 November 1095, at the end of a great church council at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade — a call to free the holy city of Jerusalem from the hands of the Muslims. The response to his appeal was quite remarkable: spectators at Clermont interrupted his speech with cries of ‘God wills it!’ and hundreds begged to join the expedition. News of the crusade spread rapidly through Christian Europe; Fulcher of Chartres, a participant in the expedition, wrote that people ‘of any and every occupation’ took the cross. Once the crusaders had assembled he commented: ‘whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges [Savoyards], Lotharingians, Allemani [South Germans and Swiss], Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Dacians [Romanians], Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians’ (Fulcher of Chartres, tr. Ryan, 1969: 88). Representatives of the last two groups probably joined the expedition en route, but the remainder had been attracted by Urban’s initial call to arms. The crusade therefore appealed to people from almost every level of society right across Christian Europe.
The appeal of the First Crusade
Why had Urban’s message provoked such a reaction? The pope had managed to draw together a number of key concerns and trends in late eleventh-century society and synthesised them into a single, highly popular idea. As we noted in the introduction, spiritual issues were a prominent factor governing peoples’ lives at the time of the First Crusade. It was an intensely religious age: the number of saints’ cults was increasing, along with interest in relics and the observation of feast days. Pilgrimage — both local and international — and monastic life flourished. Sin was ubiquitous in everyday life, particularly in the violent society of the late eleventh century and the need for all people — whether rich or poor, nobles or labourers — to atone for their actions is vital in explaining the level of enthusiasm for the First Crusade. Pope Urban was astute enough to pull together these familiar points: contemporary religious zeal, the popularity of pilgrimage, concern for the afterlife and the problem of knightly violence, to form the core of the idea of the crusade. He also offered something new, innovative and highly attractive. A decree from the Council of Clermont records the essence of his message: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance’ (Riley-Smith, 1981: 37).
In other words, in return for fighting God’s enemies on earth and completing the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, a person would receive a spiritual reward of unprecedented magnitude. For properly confessed sins, these actions would constitute a sufficient act of penance to wipe away the consequences of those crimes. Urban laid great emphasis on crusading as a penitential act — and this concept would always remain at the heart of the idea; it can be seen in the appeals for the Second and Third Crusades (see Documents 11, 19), and in other crusade writing such as the Second Crusade narrative, The Conquest of Lisbon (tr. David, 2001). What the Indulgence (as Urban’s promise is technically known) meant was that the average layman had opened to him a new way of attaining salvation when previously the only route to such a reward was by joining a monastery (see Document 1 ii). With the lay nobility of France so concerned for their spiritual welfare it was an opportunity not to be missed. Pope Urban himself came from a French noble family and h
e saw how the crusade fitted the skills and aspirations of the knightly classes: as fighting men they were being presented with a set of circumstances in which they could carry on doing what they did best, yet still receive a spiritual benefit. From Urban’s perspective there was a further bonus in that they would be directing their energies against the infidel, rather than the Church and people of France.
Before considering the planning and progress of the crusade, two important questions need to be answered. First, how could the pope, as a churchman, justify violence, and secondly, what was the actual aim of the crusade?
With regards to the justification of violence it should be noted that there was a recent tradition of papal involvement in warfare. Pope Leo IX had fought the Normans of Sicily in 1053 and in 1074 Pope Gregory VII had tried to assemble a group of knights known as the ‘milites sancti Petri’ (the knights of Saint Peter) to implement papal policy. The main justification for the practice of war, however, was through reference to authoritative texts. By using the writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo (354-430) it was possible to construct a case whereby Christian violence could be commanded by God through his representative on earth — the pope — and if it was performed in the right circumstances (a just cause) and with the right intent (proper motivation) it was an act of Christian love. Part of this just cause was Urban’s call for a war of Christian liberation. Liberation was an idea very much in vogue at this time. The Reform Church was trying to free itself from the control of secular authorities in the struggle known as the Investiture Contest. Also, as we saw earlier, Sicily and parts of the Iberian peninsula were captured by Catholics in the latter half of the eleventh century. In 1095, however, Urban was proposing to liberate two things. First, those Christians living in the East who were said to be persecuted by the Muslims of the region (see Document 1 i). It is likely that such reports were greatly exaggerated in the preaching of the expedition, although it was probably necessary to provoke a sense of outrage to prompt people to such a drastic course of action as taking the cross. Regardless of the accuracy of the pope’s claims, the idea of aiding the suffering of fellow-Christians certainly helped to attract support. Secondly, Urban wanted to liberate a place: Jerusalem. The pope claimed that it was subject to pagan abominations and he called for his audience to weep for the devastation of the Holy Land (see Document 1 i-iii) and to act. Jerusalem was a site sanctified by Christ, the focal point of the Christian faith and therefore of huge importance to everyone in the West. By making the holy city the goal of the expedition Urban was also, of course, able to give the crusade the character of a pilgrimage because as Christ’s burial place the Holy Sepulchre was the ultimate goal for such a journey. There is evidence that the image of Jerusalem as the location of Christ’s death and also, in the future, of the Last Judgement, was increasingly familiar to the people of the West through psalms, songs and relics. It was also the target of rising numbers of western pilgrims during the eleventh century; for example, Count Robert I of Normandy died on his return journey from the Holy Land in 1035, in 1064-65 c. 10,000 Germans, led by bishops and nobles, marched to the East. When Urban spoke of the suffering of pilgrims to the Holy Land he was connecting with a recognisable experience (in terms of the dangers of pilgrimage in general) and an aspiration to reach the East shared by many. He also spoke of the need for vengeance, which was another familiar notion to nobles in the feud-ridden society of the West. Pope Urban’s message had to be carefully crafted because of the immense commitment that he was asking of people: to leave their families, friends and homes for a 4,000 kilometre journey of enormous expense to an unknown land and to fight a fierce and passionate enemy. The effectiveness with which he touched upon so many ideas and values of importance to the people of the Latin West is evinced by the scale of the response to his appeal.
The Crusades 1095-1197 Page 3