God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  THE CALL TO ARMS

  News of the fall of Edessa filtered through to western Europe in the summer and autumn of 1145, arousing little particular alarm. The papal Curia was well informed of eastern affairs; there had been crises before, some leading to calls for action, as after 1119, some not. Papal involvement in Syrian politics was complicated by the need to consider Byzantine responses. By the mid-1140s, Byzantine overlordship over Antioch had been reluctantly admitted by Prince Raymond, who had renewed his homage to the new Greek emperor, Manuel I Comnenus, in 1145. An Antiochene appeal for western aid could have been regarded by Manuel as undermining his claims, especially as the head of Antioch’s delegation to the west, Bishop Hugh of Jubail, had a history of opposition to the Greeks. The new pope, Eugenius III, elected in February 1145, could not afford to alienate Byzantium given his complicated and precarious position in Italy. His predecessor, Lucius II, had been killed in street fighting in Rome, which remained barred to the new pope except briefly over Christmas 1145. The rivalry between King Conrad III of Germany and King Roger II of Sicily, a longstanding enemy of Byzantium, further complicated matters. According to Otto bishop of Freising, Conrad III’s half-brother, an eyewitness at the papal Curia during November and December 1145, two eastern embassies were negotiating with Eugenius at the time: Armenian bishops over possible ecclesiastical union with Rome and ambassadors from Antioch seeking help for Prince Raymond over disputes involving the ruling family. As both touched relations with Byzantium, Eugenius needed to be wary. As Otto of Freising described it, news of Edessa scarcely dominated discussions; it is likely Eugenius had heard the news already.11 It may be that the pope’s decision to issue a new call to arms, couched in terms of aid for ‘the eastern church’, which could be taken to include the Greeks, was partly designed to mitigate the appearance of provocative interference in a sensitive Byzantine sphere of influence, allowing Eugenius to assert his authority without jeopardizing his wider diplomatic interests.

  Eugenius III’s bull Quantum praedecessores, dated from Vetralla on 1 December 1145, contained an unequivocal statement of papal jurisdiction, including the power to grant full remission of sins ‘by the authority given us by God’ and ‘by the authority of omnipotent God and that of the Blessed Peter the Prince of the Apostles conceded to us by God’.12 In describing the temporal and spiritual privileges in detail, the bull provided a model for future papal exhortations. Eugenius recalled the First Crusade and the establishment of the Christian states in the east, before explaining how the fall of Edessa, with its attendant atrocities, threatened ‘the Church of God and all Christianity’. Repeatedly referring to the heroic example of their ancestors, Eugenius appealed directly to ‘those who are on God’s side, and especially the more powerful and the nobles’ to ‘defend the eastern Church’, a cause which would secure ‘your reputation for strength’. To those who undertook ‘so holy and very necessary work’, Eugenius offered the remission of all confessed sins, as instituted by Urban II; the church’s protection for their families and property; immunity from civil law suits begun after they had taken the cross; exemption from payment of interest on loans and debts; and the right to raise money by pledging land or possessions to churches or other Christians (by implication excluding Jewish bankers). To emphasize the redemptive, penitential quality of the enterprise, the pope, formerly of the austere order of Cistercian monks, stipulated sumptuary regulations, discouraging haute couture, colourful or fur-lined garments, gilded arms, hunting dogs and hawks. The loss of Edessa had been punishment for the sins of Christians; those embarking on its restoration must have regard for piety and efficiency not show. Eugenius III was restaking the papal claim to lead secular Christendom after years of schism and political weakness. In contrast to Urban II’s strategy in 1095/6, Eugenius’s bull and its reissue of 1 March 1146 were addressed to a monarch, Louis VII of France. By highlighting the response to Urban’s summons by ‘the most strong and vigorous warriors of the kingdom of the Franks and also those from Italy’, Eugenius may initially have envisaged targeted, local recruitment more reminiscent of Calixtus II’s plans in 1119 than 1096. He undertook no immediate general recruiting tour and, beyond approval and authorization, continued in a remarkably passive role. Leadership and organization were to lie elsewhere.

  RESPONSES (I): THE KINGDOM OF FRANCE

  The pope was not alone in seeing aid for the Holy Land as a chance to combine a holy cause with the assertion of political status. The decision to issue Quantum praedecessores may have been influenced by knowledge that Louis of France would prove receptive. Louis VII (1137–80) was a young man in a hurry to emancipate himself from the tutelage of his father’s cronies and to redeem his early mistakes as king, not least his uneasy relations with leading ecclesiastics, including Bernard of Clairvaux and Pope Innocent II. Still only twenty-five, in 1145 Louis’s power within his kingdom was geographically limited, politically and ideologically heavily dependent on the church. By reputation pious and modest, it has been commented that ‘modern historians have generally thought that he had a good deal to be modest about’.13 In later life he was quoted as observing contentedly that, in comparison with the riches of fellow monarchs, ‘we in France have nothing but bread, wine and gaiety’, an early version of a characteristic, misleading French self-image.14 Such mellow reflection came with age, experience and repeated disappointment after a long career of energetic ineffectiveness. As a young man, the devout Louis acted with impulsive self-confidence, famously when, during a protracted feud with Theobald count of Champagne, he burnt down the church at Vitry in 1143, allegedly with hundreds of people inside. Two Second Crusade veterans who knew Louis suggested he had harboured a ‘secret’ desire to go to Jerusalem, whether as a knight or a pilgrim is not entirely clear.15 As part of the general reconciliation with Champagne and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1144–5, Louis may have toyed with the idea of a penitential pilgrimage. Apart from the Vitry incident, and talk of the unfulfilled Jerusalem vow of Louis’s elder brother Philip (d. 1131), Louis had incurred ecclesiastical censure over his oath to bar the archbishop of Bourges from his diocesan seat: the holding of the Christmas court in 1145 at Bourges itself may have assumed significance in this process of reconciliation.16 The news of Edessa could have focused Louis’s intentions, and it is probable that Eugenius was aware of this when he issued Quantum praedecessores. Before he could have received the papal bull, Louis summoned the bishops and magnates ‘in greater numbers than usual’ to his Christmas crown-wearing at Bourges, where he broached the subject of the eastern enterprise.

  The eastern expedition provided Louis with the chance to act as king of the western Franks in a manner not seen since the Carolingians. The three assemblies gathered to discuss the matter, at Bourges (December 1145), Vézelay (March 1146) and Etampes (February 1147), personally and symbolically emphasized his sovereignty by associating princes from across France with a specifically royal policy. In charters of departing crusaders from Rheims in the north to Auch near the Pyrenees, the campaign was recognized as King Louis’s expedition, ‘the royal army’.17 Louis’s former adversary, Theobald of Champagne, subsequently dated charters from the king’s crusade.18 The first west Frankish king to lead a foreign conquest for three centuries, on campaign Louis established lasting relationships with magnates that in later years helped make his court more central in French politics. Immediate political dividends included a royal census, a descriptio generalis, preparatory to the levy of a tax for the expedition that exempted ‘neither sex, nor order nor rank’; not a popular move, but if implemented offering the precedent of the king’s power to tax beyond his own tenants. A more limited, but onerous levy on churches caused painful negotiations and corporate resistance.19 Such extraordinary taxes recognized royal authority on a new level, as did his presence as crusade commander in areas outside his demesne lands. At Verdun and at Metz, where Louis mustered his large army in June 1147, his chaplain noted, ‘although the king found nothing there which belonged t
o him by right of lordship, he nevertheless found all subject (quasi servos) to him voluntarily.’20 This international adventure conferred on Louis and his dynasty the reality of national rule.

  Much of this could only have been guessed at in December 1145. Beside all political calculation lay the king’s personal piety, widely attested throughout his life and especially on crusade. Initially, the magnates at Bourges remained unimpressed, despite an impassioned address on the Edessa crisis by Godfrey de la Roche, the opinionated, forceful and well-connected bishop of Langres, like the pope a former Cistercian abbot. Louis’s chief minister, Abbot Suger of St Denis, openly opposed the proposal, citing the dangers to which the king’s absence would expose France. Journeys to Jerusalem, in arms or not, were dangerous and Louis had no son. The Bourges meeting reached no conclusion beyond possibly appealing for guidance to Bernard abbot of Clairvaux, the bishop of Langres’s former superior, the most influential moral arbiter, political lobbyist and revivalist preacher of the time. The king’s own brother, Henry, only that year had taken his vows at Clairvaux. Bernard transformed the prospects, conduct and nature of the whole project.21

  Bernard of Clairvaux’s decision to prosecute the crusade may not have been unexpected. The bishop of Langres was a kinsman and former colleague; the pope a pupil. Some collusion between king and abbot may have occurred before the meeting at Bourges. Some of those Bernard met during a tour of Languedoc in June and July 1145, such as the count of Toulouse, took the cross in 1146. Bernard’s own links with holy war and Outremer were intimate. Although declining to establish Cistercian houses in the east, for years he encouraged the settlement of another new austere French order, the Premonstratensian monks, in the kingdom of Jerusalem, interceding with Queen Melisende on their behalf. Count Hugh of Champagne, donor of the site of Clairvaux, became a Templar, as had one of Bernard’s uncles. Some years earlier Bernard had composed the De Laude novae militiae on the Templars’ behalf and had helped secure recognition for the order. He regularly concerned himself with men journeying to Jerusalem as pilgrims or warriors, although for those with a monastic vocation he regarded the cloister as preferable, persuading one crucesignatus to abandon the crusade for ‘something far better’, ‘that true Jerusalem’, the Cistercian order, and threatening his fellow monks and the order’s lay brethren with excommunication if they attempted to join the expedition east. Bernard was far from immune to the allure of Holy Land relics, receiving a piece of the True Cross from Patriarch William of Jerusalem (1130–45) and, in due course in 1153, being buried with a relic of St Thaddeus sent from Palestine.22 Bernard’s conspicuous spirituality, witnessed in his spare, ascetic almost frail frame, was allied with a tough, masterful clarity of intellect, eloquence and invective, making him an unnervingly effective platform orator as well as an irresistible personal advisor, at once an outstanding forensic debater, academic thinker, religious comforter, political operator and worker of miracles. As the refined intellectual aristocrat and fellow Cistercian Otto of Freising put it, ‘endowed with wisdom and a knowledge of letters, renowned for signs and wonders’, Bernard appeared ‘as a divine oracle’; an ideal recruiting agent for the crusade.23

  The early months of 1146 saw intense diplomacy between the French court, Bernard and the papal Curia. Once his initial, possibly formal, reluctance was overcome, Bernard insisted that he would only preach the cross with full papal authorization and legatine power. Throughout his career, legality, due authority and obedience acted as cornerstones of Bernard’s temporal activities; in 1146–7 they provided him with the necessary means to discipline as well as direct recruiting operations. The inexperienced Eugenius, on the other hand, once more an exile from Rome, chose this moment to display the exaggerated fussy legalism of the chronically insecure by threatening to excommunicate the archbishop of Rheims for crowning Louis at Bourges at Christmas, a move hardly designed to encourage enthusiastic cooperation. In the end it took Bernard at his most schoolmasterly to tell the pontiff not to be so silly; the king’s goodwill and the expedition to Jerusalem were far more important than ruffled vanities or procedural niceties.24 By March, dispositions were complete. On 1 March the pope reissued Quantum praedecessores with minor amendments, chiefly tightening the clauses prohibiting luxury, a good Cistercian theme, and sent Louis VII a cross which he had blessed to wear. A new assembly of French magnates was called to meet at Vézelay in northern Burgundy on 31 March, Easter Day.

  Bernard’s preaching at Vézelay assumed almost iconic importance in perceptions of the crusade in his own time and in subsequent centuries. The crowd gathered at the hilltop town was so large that, like Urban in 1095, Bernard preached outside the church, in the fields with their panoramic views across the Burgundian hills. Flanked on the platform by the king and other notables, Bernard used the papal bull to outline the need for action and the rewards on offer before adding his own impassioned appeal. Oddly, there survives no contemporary description, real or imagined, of what the abbot actually said as opposed to the psychological impact on his audience. Judging from his subsequent correspondence, Bernard may have argued that through the crisis in the east God had provided a unique offer of salvation. As he put it in letters to England, Lorraine and Bavaria, in return for fighting to secure the ‘land made glorious by His miracles, holy by his blood… in which the flowers of His resurrection first blossomed’ (a theme particularly suitable for Eastertide), God was putting himself ‘in your debt so that, in return for your taking up arms in His cause, He can reward you with pardon for your sins and everlasting glory’. Thus the cross became a ‘badge of immortality’, a ‘sign of salvation’. Turning from fighting each other, sinful malitia, to taking vengeance on the heathen, holy militia, ‘mighty men of valour’, ‘men of war’ were presented with a cause in which, paraphrasing St Paul, ‘to conquer is glorious and to die is gain’. The exchange was a ‘bargain’; for the small price of taking the cross, the return was full indulgence of confessed sins. It was no less than the ‘cause of Christ’.25

  The combination of the emotional account of the Holy Land and the direct offer of salvation, couched in very simple sets of repetitive logic, proved highly effective. The audience at Vézelay went wild, so many demanding crosses that Bernard’s supply, probably made of wool, ran out, forcing him to tear up his own habit to satisfy them. Yet for all the eloquence and recorded enthusiasm, the events at Vézelay, like those at Clermont just over fifty years earlier, were hardly spontaneous. The success of any recruiting or fund-raising campaign depended (and depends) on the message being familiar, the audience already receptive. The large and distinguished congregation at Vézelay had not been assembled by accident. They knew why they were there. The event had been carefully planned and meticulously orchestrated (even if, as one source mentioned, the platform for VIPs partially collapsed), Bernard bringing with him a ‘parcel of crosses which had been prepared beforehand’.26 Presumably staged after celebration of the Easter mass, with Louis sitting beside the preacher already wearing the cross given him by the pope, the essentially ritualistic and ceremonial nature of the occasion was evident.

  Ritual embellished practical purpose. The Vézelay assembly demonstrated royal authority as well as crusade enthusiasm, the former feeding off the latter, one account even transferring the main address from Bernard to the king. Some of those not present were enjoined to follow the king of heaven as well as the king of France, a significant association.27 The laymen taking the cross alongside King Louis bore witness to the new royal embrace. Besides his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, brother, Robert of Dreux, and uncle, Amadeus of Savoy, count of Maurienne, came some of the grandest independent feudatories in the kingdom, Thierry of Alsace count of Flanders, a veteran of the Holy Land; Alfonso-Jordan count of Toulouse, the son of Raymond of St Gilles, born outside Tripoli in 1104; and Henry, son of Louis’s former adversary Theobald count of Champagne. The geographical reach matched the political: from central France, the counts of Nevers, Tonnerre and Bourbon; from the north
, the counts of Ponthieu and Soissons and the lords of Coucy and Courtenay; from the Limousin and Poitou the lords of Rancon and Lusignan; from the Anglo-Norman realms, William of Warenne, earl of Surrey. Although not all embarked with Louis, by their presence at Vézelay they acknowledged his leadership, as one member of the assembly put it, by papal command, apostolico praecepto.28

  After Vézelay, Bernard prepared for an extensive preaching tour, and diplomatic preparations began. Surprise, as at Bourges, led to meagre pickings. Local clerical and lay elites needed to be alerted to gather support and excite anticipation, Bernard’s arrival completing a process of engagement with the call to Jerusalem dependent on ties of family, locality and lordship as much as religious fervour. He was at Toul in May, but only in late July did Bernard begin a journey that took him to Arras and Ghent in early August, then in a loop through Flanders and the Low Countries in September and October before turning towards the Rhineland and the empire, returning to northern France early in 1147. By all accounts, including his own, he was extraordinarily persuasive: ‘towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive’.29 To inspiration Bernard added organization. Places he failed to reach, such as Brittany, England, Bavaria, Lorraine, Saxony and Bohemia, received letters or messengers, sometimes with copies of the papal privileges that the abbot insisted were the central selling points of the recruitment campaign. The network of the Cistercian order, which had helped propel Bernard to international prominence in the first place, proved central, providing many important ecclesiastical crucesignati. Indefatigably determined to contact as many people as possible, Bernard made the crusade his, even if professional cloistered humility prevented him from actually joining the expedition, leaving clerical leadership to other, as it happened, distinctly less able colleagues.