God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  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 archbishop’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. Duri
ng 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.

  The Las Navas de Tolosa campaign was instrumental in this process. The battle of 16 July 1212 was won by a coalition of Spanish kings, Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon, and Sancho VII of Navarre. Although a few northern allies under Archbishop Arnaud Amaury of Narbonne remained in the Christian army for the battle, the bulk of the French recruits had deserted the campaign a fortnight earlier, disappointed at the lack of action or booty and oppressed by the summer heat, while the duke of Austria had not yet arrived. The victory over al-Nasir (1199–1214) and his large Almohad force could thus be proclaimed as a specifically Spanish achievement and fitted into a providential narrative of Spanish revenge for the ‘Spanish’ defeat of 711. Although surrounded by the panoply of crusading, the campaign relied on the secular resources of Castile. Alfonso VIII bankrolled the whole enterprise, paying for the bulk of the coalition troops, including stipends for Peter II and his Aragonese army, and providing the unreliable French with horses. To allow him to do this, Alfonso had extracted a massive forced aid of 50 per cent of annual revenues from the Castilian church. The muster had been fixed at Castilian Toledo for Pentecost 1212. The consequences of the Las Navas campaign were profound, if equivocal. The Reconquest’s association with crusading institutions failed to disguise the dependence for success on the national strength of, in particular, Castile, re-emphasized following the death during the Albigensian crusade at Muret in 1213 of Peter II, a crusader killed by crusaders. The victory of Las Navas opened Andalucia to Castilian aggression. It fatally undermined Almohad prestige and power both in Spain and Morocco, where a demoralized al-Nasir died in 1214. The financial precedent exerted possibly the most direct material influence as successive Iberian monarchs exploited the church to fund their wars, in particular appropriating a third of ecclesiastical tithe income (tercias) as well as attempting to syphon off clerical taxation designed to help the Holy Land. Combined with a range of extraordinary lay levies and forced loans, the needs of the Reconquest materially strengthened the fiscal and hence political power of the state in thirteenth-century Iberia, a lasting legacy of the expedients that won the triumph at Las Navas.38

  Within forty years, all that remained of Muslim al-Andalus politically was the emirate of Granada, reduced to a Castilian tributary. As the disintegrating Almohad empire fell with accelerating rapidity into Christian hands, crusading in Spain adopted a settled local flavour. There were no more Muslim counter-attacks to excite the fear of all western Christendom. When the kingdom of Navarre devolved on to Theobald IV count of Champagne (1201–53) in 1234, its new French ruler preferred to take the cross for the Holy Land, not Andalucia. The great warrior kings of the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile (and of León from 1230) and James I, ‘the Conqueror’ of Aragon, rolled back the Muslim frontier self-consciously in the name of God. Each flirted with carrying the fight beyond the peninsula, to Africa or Palestine. Yet neither found the commitment that led their contemporary Louis IX of France to the Nile (1249–50), even though, as Christendom’s elder statesman, James I sent an Aragonese regiment east in 1269 and played a central if hardly positive role in plans for a new eastern crusade in 1274. Some conquests were accompanied by gestures of religious restoration and purification, with a stated goal of extending the Christian faith. When Ferdinand III captured Cordoba in 1236, he returned to the cathedral of St James in Compostela the bells al-Mansur had seized in 997, which had been housed in the Cordoban great mosque ever since. Elsewhere, the siege of Valencia (1238) attracted English and French recruits and Seville (captured 1248), was partly settled by foreign Christians to replace the expelled Muslims. Yet much of the Reconquest involved negotiation and accommodation of the religious, legal and civil liberties of the conquered, as with James I’s annexation of Mallorca (1229) and Valencia (1231–8) and Ferdinand III’s occupation of Murcia in 1243. In the kingdom of Valencia, the majority Muslim population remained, despite James having taken the cross in 1232 to symbolize his religious credentials. The few attempts at conversion amounted to little, although some Muslims apostatized, such as Abu Zayd, the king of Valencia deposed in 1229 and ally of James I. He adopted the Christian name Vincent. In 1245, his son, al-Hasan, by then governor of the Moroccan Atlantic port of Sale, abortively offered to convert and turn his city over to the Order of Santiago as a start to the conversion of the Maghrib.39 In many ways, after the conquests, Muslims and Christians changed roles, the mudejars now becoming the protected second-class citizens. The sound of calls of the muezzin
to prayer persisted in some areas for centuries, to the growing annoyance of their Christian neighbours. Although new sacred and secular landscapes and spaces were created, from encouraging Christian immigration and changing Arabic place names to converting mosques into churches, initially, at least, holy war did not impose a holy settlement on the ancient Muslim communities of conquered al-Andalus. Accommodation survived. In regions such as Valencia, non-Christian communities negotiated their own futures, their subordinate status only very slowly succumbing to concerted discrimination. However, the status and rights of the mudejars did deteriorate, until the recrudescence of militant neo-crusading led to the imposition of intolerant and increasingly racist Christian uniformity under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their heirs Charles V and Philip II. Yet, the expulsions and persecutions of mudejars and moriscos testified to the hold not of the crusading ideals familiar to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but to a newly configured aggressive militancy that engaged the crusade tradition as well as the Reconquest myth to drive its chariot’s wheels.