God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  From the North Sea to the Mediterranean, recruits conformed to Quantum praedecessores, raising money on their property, in particular from religious houses, with the permission of relatives and overlords. In the increasingly competitive land market of the twelfth century, such guarantees by the king, local count or bishop were as necessary as was the compliance of interested family members, relicts and heirs who often needed firm persuasion to honour the deals of deceased crusaders. The attractive provisions regarding church protection and immunity from civil law suits required similarly careful management. In November 1146, the bishop of Salisbury had to be reminded by the pope that church jurisdiction did not extend to land disputes originating before the defendant took the cross. Even so, the popularity of the crusade with thieves, noted by Otto of Freising, may not have been coincidental.75 The emotional or spiritual dimensions behind the legal framework emerged fitfully. In contrast to papal letters and chronicles, references in monastic land charters to taking the cross or to preaching are rare. Some charters, but not a majority, related the donations or mortgages to remission of sins; ‘love and fear’ apparently moved one Poitevin, Raynard rusticus, the countryman.76 However, large numbers of non-combatant or otherwise militarily incompetent pilgrims did travel with the German and French armies, giving the enterprise a dogged if inconvenient revivalist tinge that drained efficiency and resources on the march and in battle. For aristocrats and arms-bearers, the imperative to translate property into cash generated expediency. Bishop Godfrey of Langres pawned gold and silver vessels from his cathedral church while promising restitution to a suspicious chapter.77 Acquisitive religious houses skilfully played the market. In the face of royal demands for tax, the monks of Fleury protested a lack of cash, offering a miscellany of precious candlesticks and thuribles instead, yet at the same time provided money to local worthies in return for pledges of property.78 The business could be highly lucrative, in both the short and long term. The English abbey of St Benet Holme in Norfolk made an effective profit on its deal with Philip Basset of Postwick of a minimum of 133 per cent spread over seven years, the frowned-upon usury hidden here as ubiquitously elsewhere behind the fiction of mutual gifts.79 The cost of crusading is difficult to underestimate. Reiner von Sleiden sold outright part of his allodial (i.e. freehold) patrimony to the abbey of Klösterrad, near Aachen.80 Dozens of land charters record landowners raising sums many times (three in Philip Basset’s case) their annual revenue; they also chart those who failed to return.

  The elaborate organization of the Second Crusade matched its vast human and geographic scale. The expeditions of the kings rested on the collaboration of socially, financially and politically distinct military households of the great nobles, each with their own regional and personal identity, cohesion and loyalties. However, where the armies of 1096 retained their separate regional identities to the end, Conrad and Louis, through deference and convenience, imposed an element of unity, providing, for better or worse, field leadership and chairmanship of the baronial high command. As the papally sanctioned chief organizers, they conducted the preparatory diplomacy; negotiated with local rulers during the march; set the schedule of departure and muster points; and supplied men and money. Both Conrad and Louis possessed continuing access to large funds, either cash in their own coffers or sums held on account by third parties such as the Templars. Once in Palestine in the spring of 1148, Conrad was able to reassert his authority after a disastrous journey by taking troops into his pay while Louis, using his assets in France, presumably including his church tax, as collateral, borrowed heavily from the Templars in the east; during the stumbling march across Asia Minor Louis repeatedly bailed out his impoverished nobles, knights and infantry.81

  The geographic, political and social diversity of recruitment challenged coherent mustering, leadership, strategy, structure and timing. Yet most of the land and naval contingents for the east embarked between April and June 1147, arriving together, despite contrasting vicissitudes, a year later in the Holy Land. Planning, not chance, lay behind the musters at Dartmouth in May 1147, Regensburg the same month or Metz a month later; the adherence to the German force of Ottokar of Styria at Vienna in late May or early June; the arrival of the Anglo-Norman contingent to join Louis at Worms in late June; or the secondary French muster at Constantinople in October, where Louis waited for the counts of Maurienne and Auvergne and the marquis of Montferrat and those who had left the main army at Worms to travel via Italy, the Adriatic and the Balkans. The mechanics of such extended coordination included, from the early spring of 1146, extensive correspondence linking the major participants with each other and with those through whose territory any expedition could expect to pass: Byzantium, Sicily, Hungary, the Christian rulers of the Iberian peninsular. Bernard of Clairvaux acted as head of a central secretariat as well as attending, in person or by agents and proxies, all the summit meetings between the main crusade leaders. On his preaching tour in 1146 Bernard contacted figures in the Flemish crusade leadership, including Count Thierry and Christian of Gistel, commander of those from Flanders and Boulogne who assembled at Dartmouth.82 In the Rhineland, Bernard encountered civic and ecclesiastical authorities involved in raising and organizing troops, including the archbishop of Cologne, one of whose priests later wrote an eyewitness account of the siege of Lisbon. Another who sent home a description of the Lisbon campaign, the priest Duodechin, came from Lahnstein on the Rhine, which Bernard had either visited or passed by in the second week of 1147.83

  Behind direction and strategy lay the armies’ structure. The authority of the kings should not be exaggerated. Both French and perhaps to a greater degree German forces threatened to dissolve into their princely and baronial constituent parts although holding together long enough for adversity to compel unity. Political advantage, lack of alternatives, the comradeship of shared experience and hardship contributed to cohesion. Yet Louis VII failed to impose disciplinary ordinances on his nobles, his chaplain acidly commenting: ‘because they did not observe them well, I have not preserved them either’. Louis’s ordinances, promulgated when his army mustered at Metz, were designed ‘for securing peace and other requirements on the journey, which the leaders secured by solemn oath’.84 A precisely similar process led the leaders of the disparate contingents at Dartmouth to swear to obey mutually agreed statutes regulating the exercise of criminal and civil justice; sumptuary rules; the behaviour of women; the mechanics of corporate discussion, worship, and distribution of funds; and solving disputes between groups and leaders. Such disciplinary statutes were familiar features of medieval warfare, Richard I insisting on them in 1190 during his crusade. The commanders at Dartmouth in 1147 had in effect entered into a coniuratio or societas coniurata, a sworn association, a commune. Unlike the sworn communal statutes of Metz, those of Dartmouth retained their force when disputes emerged between the regional groups at critical points before and after the siege of Lisbon.85 Later on his march to the east, Louis managed to establish a sworn fraternity under which his army agreed to be ruled by the Templars.86 The readiness of the French king and the leaders at Dartmouth to create sworn communes testifies to the lack within the armies of a common legal system or political authority. Moreover, some crusaders lived outside ties of noble clientage. Across north-western Europe, urbanization had thrown up towns in which corporate identity demanded separate legal recognition. One 1147 contingent comprised of Londonienses, Londoners whose commune had only six years earlier decided the fate of the English crown by siding with King Stephen to prevent the coronation of his cousin, the pretender Matilda.87 Over the previous half-century, towns and cities across the Rhineland, the Low Countries and northern France had sought rights of self-determination and justice; some of the charters granting these rights echoing the Dartmouth statutes. Sworn agreements became necessary in the absence of other political bonds, a circumstance regularly repeated on polyglot crusades. As an English writer remembered a century and a half later, the Dartmouth crusaders ‘are
by alliance/Sworn among themselves and are not retained’.88 Neither the lasso of fealty nor pay held such a force together, comprising recruits from the Rhineland, the Low Countries, northern France, southern England, East Anglia and Scotland. As striking as the urban elements in the Dartmouth (and the other) expeditions appeared the willingness of secular lords to submit to such structures, even if, in the heat of battle, the agreed rules got broken, as by the Count of Aerschot and Christian of Gistel at the fall of Lisbon.89 Experience of administering local public rights may have familiarized such lesser aristocrats to sworn associations to keep the peace; alternatively the commune may have evoked the legacy of ecclesiastical peace leagues. To view medieval Europe as hidebound by social and economic hierarchy, called by some the feudal system, ignores a perennial feature of public life which the theoretical and occasionally actual non-hierarchical nature of crusading highlighted. Sworn bonds of association were familiar and habitual. On the day they set out on crusade, at the entrance to the forest at Evry between Auxerre and Troyes in southern Champagne, Milo, lord of Evry-le-Châtel, and his knights bound themselves together with oaths to join the king’s expedition.90 Such associations can be found in similar circumstances on later crusades and are reminiscent of the fraternity formed to pay for siege engines at Antioch in 1098. Thus, beside the necessities of survival, the imperatives of enthusiasm, the community of family, friends and companions, the crusaders in the armies of 1147 were assembled and glued together by a network of mutual oaths: to the church in taking the cross; to lords and paymasters; and to each other. Time and unimaginable hardship were to put these bonds under fearful, often fatal, strain.

  8. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Second Crusade and Bernard’s Preaching Tour 1146–7

  10

  ‘The Spirit of the Pilgrim God’: Fighting the Second Crusade

  The enthusiasm for holy war generated in the summer of 1147 reminded Otto of Freising of a prophecy promising victory in the east to the king of France that talked of ‘the spirit of the time of the pilgrim God’. While suggesting that belief in such predictions owed much to ‘Gallic credulity’, Otto nonetheless described the Christian armies ‘inspired by the spirit of the pilgrim God’. Others fashioned events in more concrete terms. After describing the circumstances as ‘new and astonishing’, the Saxon priest Helmold from Bosau, on the Baltic Slav frontier, writing twenty years later, depicted the military operations of 1147 as part of a measured plan: ‘It seemed to the initiators of the expedition that one part of the army should be sent to the east, another to Spain and a third against our neighbours the Slavs.’1 Hindsight and local interest produced a neat version of the past. Contemporary witnesses appeared less struck by Helmond’s ‘universal labour’. At the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147, Bernard of Clairvaux legitimized the Saxon foray in the context of the eastern expedition, a move confirmed by Eugenius III and recorded by Otto of Freising, who was there. Yet Otto wrote nothing about the course of the Baltic operation and later confused the capture of Almeria by the Genoese with that of Lisbon, not associating the latter as the third limb of the 1147 holy war. Henry archdeacon of Huntingdon, a cousin of one of the commanders at Lisbon, saw the Portuguese adventure as the naval arm of the land expedition east while ignoring the Baltic raids entirely. The various eyewitnesses to the siege of Lisbon took a similar view. The pope, from yet another perspective, distinguished between the eastern campaign, the Slavic war and the continuing reconquista in Spain, all holy enterprises in papal eyes meriting Jerusalem indulgences, yet all different in motive and inception; Eugenius mentioned the Lisbon fleet not at all. Few other contemporaries drew any parallels at all, certainly not those clerics who drafted the land charters by which departing crusaders endowed religious houses in return for ready cash. Bernard’s association of different theatres of holy war, possibly including Spain as well as the Baltic, appears essentially reactive rather than intentional or planned; for the pope such links merely followed policy sanctioned in use for a generation.2 For all Bernard’s bluster at Frankfurt about the Baltic army protecting the columns bound for Jerusalem, organizers and participants were bound by no calculated grand strategy embracing all Christendom’s frontiers. Rather, holy warriors, inspired by much less tangible emotions, found themselves through expedience fighting at the same time at the three corners of Europe.

  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.