God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  Urban II’s speech at Clermont was the first public declaration of his new concept of holy war that we know of. The event itself was carefully orchestrated, its theatricality aimed at establishing a concrete image and memory. In a partially literate society, ceremonies acted as media for information, exhortation and formalized debate, as in the regular crown-wearings by kings such as William the Conqueror, or at the Peace and Truce of God assemblies. In the repeated familiar ritual of church liturgy, the mass exposed with particular force basic issues of the relationship of God and man, sin and redemption; it provided an ideal setting for preaching the Jerusalem expedition. At Clermont, the presence of such a grand figure as the pope itself lent power to the imagery of language and action, the flavour of penance in his Christocentric message strengthened by its proclamation five days before the beginning of the penitential season of Advent. During the speech, chanting of the slogan ‘Deus lo volt’, probably led by a papal claque, established the participation of the congregation in the ritual as well as symbolizing the correct submissive acceptance of divine guidance.13 At Clermont the unfamiliarity of the new ritualistic forms, notably taking the cross, and the uncertainty of the correct response presented problems. As with all revivalist meetings, Urban’s sermon demanded a physical as well as vocal reaction; nothing destroys the message of ritual more certainly than unease or confusion in its performance. Later crusade preachers were in no doubt of the importance of a member of the audience to set an example, to use an analogy from modern Christian evangelists, by promptly ‘coming on down’ to take the cross. ‘Converts’ were often planted to be the first to respond in this fashion after the end of the sermon.14 At Clermont this role was taken by Adhemar of Le Puy, who, following Urban’s address, demonstrated to the rest what was expected of them by immediately taking the cross, numbers of which, some recorded, had been prepared earlier. At the end of the subsequent oath-taking, a cardinal led the congregation in the general confession, a prayer familiar to all from the mass. The ceremonial of commitment, confession, penance, oath and cross proved iconic and effective, its imagery and language lending distinctive identity to the recruits in the exercitus Dei. Some of those ‘signed’ with the cross saw themselves as pilgrims, peregrini, receiving the recognized symbols of pilgrimage, such as the napkin or satchel and staff. Thus novelty and familiarity could be satisfyingly and effectively blended. The crusade and the pilgrimage were originally distinct. Yet official correspondence and chroniclers suggest a rapid fusion of language, images and ideology; charters recording departing crusaders’ property transactions talk of penitential journeying as often as explicit fighting, their models similar contracts struck by earlier pilgrims; it is frequently very difficult to see the difference. Members of the mass German pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1064–5, said to number 7,000, had, according to one account, worn crosses. The attitudes and social rituals of Urban’s new war and of traditional pilgrimage were often identical; to the pope’s apparent concern, many took up or followed the cross in 1095–6 with little or no soldierly skill or intent.15 The key to Urban’s success in 1095–6 lay in the incorporation of existing images and emotions into a fresh concept of secular spirituality.

  In fact, as far as we can tell, at the time the Clermont speech proved something of a damp squib. Very few lay magnates attended, not even the count of Toulouse. Few bishops bothered to record the council’s decree concerning the Jerusalem expedition, most retaining copies only of those canons effecting church reform. Provincial ecclesiastical councils held in the wake of Clermont, such as one at Rouen, ignored the Jerusalem business. There survives no official account of what Urban actually said at Clermont. Three eyewitnesses recorded their versions years later only after the success of the expedition had moulded attitudes and perspectives. Even then they disagreed with each other, using the speech to reflect their own visions of what they later thought worthy of recognition. The artificial literary quality of these accounts established a model for succeeding propaganda exercises, the inspirational set-piece sermon becoming a familiar stereotype of crusade literature if not practice, but they do not record Urban’s own words. In November 1095, success was by no means inevitable. To a large extent, the impact of Urban’s message depended on the subsequent publicity skills of the pope himself. These proved to be formidable.

  A key element in a carefully devised strategy to assert the papacy’s political and moral purpose, Urban’s scheme reflected sentiments central to his personal understanding of Christendom, Christian history and the papacy’s role in reform. Close examination of Urban’s thought has revealed that his intellectual approach to the unity and integrity of Christendom, and hence his Jerusalem venture was determined by a particular schematic view of Christian history: an idealized picture of the purity of the early church; its corruption by human sins that allowed the conquest of ancient Christian centres by Islam from the seventh century; the eleventh-century Christian recovery of lands lost in Spain, Sicily and finally the eastern Mediterranean; this reconquest manifesting an opportunity for a general Christian renewal through divine grace, a process in which the pope performed as God’s executor and coadjutor.16 Hence the intrinsic duality in Urban’s Jerusalem project: the material objective to aid Byzantium and the eastern Christians and recapture the Holy City enmeshed with the transcendent purpose of serving God by liberating the Holy Sepulchre as an individual and collective act of piety and redemption. Going beyond the academic debate on holy war pursued in the circle of papalist intellectuals (e.g. Anselm of Lucca, John of Mantua, Bonizo of Sutri), Urban, following the logic of his mentor Gregory VII, argued in 1095–6 that not only was the war meritorious, and thus participation not blameworthy, so too was the fighting, which, refashioned into a religious act combining penance and charity, ‘for the love of God and their neighbour’,17 would earn substantial merit rather than dutiful expiation, as with William of Normandy’s troops at Hastings in 1066. To emphasize the unique nature of the enterprise and the special status of participants, probably at Clermont, certainly by the end of his French tour, Urban attached regulations designed to protect crusaders’ property, to prevent husbands unilaterally abandoning their wives, to prohibit indiscriminate clerical and monastic participation and to ensure advice was sought from local priests. One witness at Clermont later indicated that Urban had tried to forbid the participation of unchaperoned women, the old, the infirm and the poor, unless subsidized by the wealthy.18 These rules merely pointed the central innovation of the plenary indulgence, remission of sins, for fighting in the holy war. This was controversial on two counts: holy war was now classed as penitential; and the pope was assuming the authority of Christ in seeming to remit sin not just penance. Whatever academic unease was aroused, neither innovation provoked much resistance, certainly not after the expedition’s success.

  Jerusalem formed the cornerstone of Urban’s concept of penitential warfare in 1095. The Clermont decree, preserved by the bishop of Arras, and repeated almost verbatim by the pope in a letter to Bologna in September 1096, was unequivocal: ‘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.’19 Writing to supporters in Flanders a few days after his Clermont speech, Urban talked of the Muslim conquest and ravaging of the eastern church:

  Worse still, they have seized the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection, and… have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery… we visited Gaul and urged most fervently the lords and subjects of that land to liberate the eastern churches… [and] imposed on them the obligation to undertake such a military enterprise for the remission of all their sins.20

  Contemporary descriptions of his preaching in the Loire valley, echoed in numerous charters drawn up by monastic recipients of departing warriors’ property, confirm that Urban encouraged people ‘to go to Jerusalem to drive out the heathen’. As he expressed it in a letter to the monks of Vallembrosa in October 1096, his r
ecruits ‘are heading for Jerusalem with the good intent of liberating Christianity’.21 The restoration to Christendom of the scene of the ideal church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles represented more than a propaganda device or a sop and capitulation to ill-informed populism, as some twentieth-century historians such as Carl Erdmann have implied. Rather it signalled the ultimate libertas ecclesiae for which the whole church reform movement of the previous half-century had been striving.

  Jerusalem in the eleventh as in other centuries defined an ideal as much as a terrestrial city. It could stand as a metaphor, ‘the holy city, God’s celestial Jerusalem’, as an English royal charter of 1093 put it, for the world redeemed by Christ.22 Jerusalem could represent a spiritual condition and aspiration, as in the religious life of an individual or community, or its attributes could be geographically transposed to create a virtual reality in relics and shrines. Clairvaux abbey in the mid-twelfth century was likened to Jerusalem by its abbot, St Bernard, as had been the imperial courts of Charlemagne or Byzantium. More pervasively, the liturgy recreated scenes from Jerusalem in the mass or enacted whole episodes, as in the increasingly popular Easter plays, each a glimpse of the Holy City. Yet for all its liminality, poised between heaven and earth, God and man, Jerusalem remained a place as well as an ideal, temporal as well as spiritual, corporal as well as supernatural. In the tenth and eleventh centuries its distance – loca remotissima, as one historian of Urban’s expedition put it23 – and association with Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection ensured Jerusalem as the most meritorious goal of pilgrimage to such an extent that the chronicler Ralph Glaber noted that such a trip was in danger of becoming a fashionable social accessory rather than an act of piety.24 The difficulties of the journey, magnified a hundred-fold by war, secured its penitential attraction.

  Scriptural history and the pseudo-history of Christian prophecy confirmed this unique numinous status. Earlier in the eleventh century the Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes insisted on the historical primacy of Jerusalem over Rome itself as ‘the fountain of Christianity… the mother of all Churches’.25 Throughout the century, notably in the 1030s and 1060s, huge bands of pilgrims trekked east, inspired by chiliastic enthusiasm condemned as misguided by one commentator, who nonetheless recorded the potency of such emotions to attract ‘not only the common people but the elites (primores)’.26 Jerusalem played a prominent part in the genre of eschatological literature popular in western monasteries, cathedrals and courts from at least the mid-tenth century, the setting for the final scenes of Judgement at the end of the world. There, it was widely asserted, the Last Roman Emperor would surrender his crown as a preliminary to the Last Things. Unsurprisingly, such prominence in the Divine Plan appealed to imperialists during the contest between Henry IV and the reforming popes, Benzo of Alba advising the king to fulfil these Jerusalem prophecies himself. Western obsessions with the Holy City may have been sufficiently strong to have persuaded the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to cite the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre in enticing western nobles into his service in the years before 1095.27

  Pope Urban was particularly susceptible to the pull of Jerusalem. As a monk, later prior of Cluny from the late 1060s, he was exposed to vivid images of the Holy City in the interminable liturgical round, in Psalms (e.g. Psalm 79: ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance’) as well as in special ceremonies surrounding Easter and Pentecost conducted in the great Burgundian abbey. As pope, Urban’s interest in the Apostolic church of Jerusalem is suggested by his patronage in the years immediately before 1095 of regular canons – secular clergy who lived in a community – in whom, he insisted, the virtues of the pristine church could be renewed. As a cardinal in Rome after 1079, Urban had been surrounded by relics of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, especially the collection housed at the Lateran, then the pope’s habitual Roman residence. These included Christ’s umbilical chord, foreskin and some of His blood, pieces of the cross, numerous objects associated with His ministry and Passion (such as a loaf and thirteen beans from the Last Supper), relics of Holy Land saints and numerous physical specimens, such as rocks from Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre itself. Such a collection fitted the growing trend in eleventh-century religious devotion away from purely local saints towards those with worldwide appeal, such as St Nicholas at Bari or the cult of the Virgin Mary. It was in trying to establish the universal importance of his Limoges patron St Martial that Adhemar of Chabannes disparaged Rome in preference to Jerusalem, where he claimed the saint had been consecrated. Adhemar died on his own pilgrimage to the Holy City in 1034. International shrines such as St Iago of Compostela in Galicia as well as Jerusalem featured increasingly prominently in the spiritual life of western Christendom. Urban’s preaching of 1095 did not create such interest or enthusiasm, however much it confirmed and extended it; rather, as elsewhere, the pope reforged a new weapon from old shards.28

  This was obvious with the employment of the cross as military banner, personal insignia and mystical symbol; part relic, part totem, part uniform. The ceremony instituted at Clermont tapped into another well of traditional devotion conjured up by the Crucifixion and Christ’s command: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24; cf. Luke 15:26: ‘And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple’). Two eyewitnesses later reported Urban use this invocation, as did a veteran of the expedition itself who probably heard of Urban’s appeal some months after Clermont. The theme of following Christ was a standard of eleventh-century eremitic (the ideal of the recluse) and revivalist rhetoric. On a popular as well as elite level, church reform was pursued by evangelists living and preaching a return to the Apostolic life. The idea was not confined to the Jerusalem journey; it inspired eremitical groups such as the new religious communities of Molesme and Cîteaux established in Burgundy before and during the First Crusade as well as the influential Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the Order of Fontevrault, whose preaching tours coincided with Urban’s. Closer to the papacy, Peter Damian (d. 1072), hermit and cardinal, who exerted a strong influence on successive popes for a generation from the 1040s, was an enthusiast for the Jerusalem pilgrimage who propagated the cult of the cross. The two went together as symbols of practical and mystical remission of sin and redemption. From his Jerusalem pilgrimage of 1026–7, the saintly Abbot Richard of St Vanne of Verdun returned with a piece of the True Cross hanging in a bag around his neck.29 By the 1090s many abbeys had received such relics from pilgrims, not least those, such as Moissac, that were active in support of both pilgrimage and crusade; as Urban’s consecration of Marmoutier indicated, such relics were sought after.

  The use of the symbol of the cross at Clermont signalled a pivotal concern for Jerusalem. Urban himself certainly presided over cross-giving at Tours (March 1096) and probably Le Mans (February), and it is likely that he or his agents distributed crosses wherever he preached. Ceremonies conducted by Urban’s deputies, by local clergy or unofficially proliferated. Apparently at one such occasion at Rouen a riot ensued. Using relics of the cross as a prop to encourage participation, as Urban had done at Marmoutier, became fashionable. It could backfire. An English annalist described how, during the preaching of the Jerusalem expedition, a French abbot constructed his own cross, passing it off as having been made by God: as a punishment, he was afflicted with cancer.30 It is an indication of the independent role assumed by Peter the Hermit, possibly retrospectively, that he carried as a preaching aid a letter from heaven rather than a relic of the cross which, within a year of Clermont, had swept all other symbols aside. Giving the cross was simple and non-discriminatory. Unlike the granting of the symbols of pilgrimage, which assumed a contractual imposition of a penance by a priest, in the first flush of the new ritual, presenting crosses was not a monopoly of those in holy orders. In June 1096, at Amalfi in Apulia, as a carefully staged demonstration of piety a
nd power, the Italian-Norman lord Bohemund of Taranto provided crosses for his men. Although never becoming the exclusive preserve of holy warriors, wearing the cross was immediately distinctive. At Amalfi, Bohemund had been particularly struck by the crosses worn by passing crusaders. Those in the army to Jerusalem themselves referred to recruits who had not yet fulfilled their vows as being ‘signed with the holy cross’ while in 1098 they wrote to Urban himself that he had ‘ordered us to follow Christ carrying our crosses’.31 For others these badges carried more sinister implications. One of the words employed by Hebrew chroniclers to describe the perpetrators of the Rhineland pogroms of 1096 translates as ‘those bearing insignia’, signs of an obsession with the Crucifixion and vengeance on those allegedly responsible who still denied Christ’s divinity.32 For Christian warrior and persecuted Jew, the cross was definitive.

  Urban’s message delivered at Clermont and repeated in sermons and letters over the next three years, emerged clearly: penitential warfare to rescue Jerusalem and the eastern churches from Islam; the liberation of the eastern church after centuries of bondage with the implication of the restoration of fraternal unity with, as one eyewitness at Clermont later had it, ‘blood-brothers’;33 the prospect of the remission of all sins, as Urban clearly stated in December 1095, for those warriors who had taken the cross in sign of their acceptance of their duty to follow Christ; the obligation to revenge the loss of Christ’s Holy Land as a debt of honour; the realization of papal leadership of Christendom; the transformation of a sinful military aristocracy into a godly order. It is not entirely clear how far this was from what Alexius I had envisaged when he despatched yet another embassy to the pope early in 1095, but it is certain that Urban’s scheme owed more to his own rather than the Greek’s designs. Not the least remarkable feature of the inception of the Jerusalem expedition was that the casus belli was the sole invention of the aggressors, almost entirely unimagined by their target. In the west, Urban’s penitential war marked a significant step on the path towards incorporating all Christendom into a militia Dei against unbelievers and sinners.