In Distant Lands

by Lars Brownworth

  This was the moment – carefully nurtured with Byzantine gold – that Alexius had been preparing for. Now, with his great enemy divided and weak, a counteroffensive could push the Turks out of Asia Minor and undo the damage of Manzikert. Such a golden opportunity might never come again.

  Unfortunately, however, he lacked the army to take advantage of it. The loss of Asia Minor had deprived the empire of most of its veteran soldiers. Alexius cobbled together a force of mercenaries and raw recruits that looked impressive enough marching out of Constantinople's Golden Gate, but was useless in actual combat. The first time he led it against a proper army it was immediately cut to pieces. Two successive attempts to reform the army met with the same result.

  The trouble was less one of numbers than of the quality of the mercenaries who had been largely drawn from neighboring barbarian tribes and whose loyalty was questionable at best. When confronted by the tough, disciplined western armies or the more numerous eastern ones, they tended to panic. If Alexius could find reliable troops – a few hundred would do – they would act as a tonic, stiffening the resolve of the rest.

  Fortunately, there was a ready source of such men close to hand. The heavily mailed knights of Western Europe were virtually irresistible when they charged. With the right balance – enough troops to strengthen his army but few enough to keep under control – Alexius could push the Turks completely out of imperial territory.

  The only detail to be worked out was to decide exactly whom to ask. He certainly couldn't write Bohemond – or any other Norman leader – and invite them back to have a second crack at the empire. Nor could he simply pick a monarch from the confusing morass of petty European states, as it was unlikely that they would have the required resources. There was only one figure of sufficient standing who would both know whom to ask for support and have the clout to make sure Alexius received it. The emperor addressed his fateful appeal for help to the pope.

  The Byzantine ambassadors charged with delivering Alexius' request found Pope Urban II presiding over a church council in the northern Italian town of Piacenza. This was the first major gathering of Urban's pontificate, and he was pleased to have distinguished visitors from the east in attendance. The Byzantines traditionally refused to recognize the supreme authority of Rome – a lapse that had already caused a serious schism with the east9 – and it was gratifying to have the personal representatives of the emperor. With little hesitation, he invited them to speak to the entire assembly.

  Considering the environment, the ambassadors wisely chose to appeal to a sense of Christian fraternity rather than the more mundane rewards of earthly riches to inspire their audience. There were, of course, tantalizing hints of wealth to be gained in the cultured east, but the bulk of the time seems to have been focused on the persecution and suffering that eastern Christians were forced to endure. The Turks, they claimed in lurid detail, were at the very gates of Constantinople. The ancient Christian communities of the East – like Antioch, where the word "Christian" had first been used – were submerged under a Muslim flood. The armies of Islam had already seized all seven churches mentioned in the Book of Revelation and, if left unchecked, would soon threaten the West as well. Surely, they concluded, it was the duty of all good Christian knights to come to the defense of their eastern brothers and protect Constantinople, the great bulwark of Christian civilization.

  The argument was a persuasive one, and in Pope Urban it had the added benefit of falling on very fertile ground. As he dismissed the council and headed north over the Alps to his birthplace of France, a grand and daring vision began to take shape in his mind.

  The Islamic threat to Western Europe was well known to the papacy. Rome itself had been sacked by a Muslim raiding party in the ninth century, and the invaders had managed to partly burn St. Peter's Basilica. The Christian lands of North Africa – home of St. Augustine and other influential Church fathers – had been swallowed up by the Islamic advance, along with most of Christian Spain. Now that Byzantium was overwhelmed, Christendom was under siege by Islam on every front.

  Under normal circumstances, a king or an emperor would be expected to take up the sword to defend Christendom, but no suitable candidates were available. Royal authority was virtually an endangered species in the West. Thanks to the decentralizing nature of feudal arrangements and the divisive Germanic custom of splitting up a father’s inheritance among all of his sons, a ruler’s authority seldom extended beyond the immediate reach of his palace. Only the pope had the moral standing to lead an offensive against the Muslim threat.

  The idea of a pan-Christian military campaign had first been floated by Urban's predecessor Gregory VII. In a particularly imaginative burst, Gregory had proposed an army drawn from every nation of Western Europe with himself at the head. Like a latter-day Moses, he would free God's people from the oppression of the Turks, and spectacularly demonstrate his papal role as defender of the faithful.

  Gregory died before he could do more than dream, but Urban, who had been a close confidant, was now in a position to make it a reality.10 As he traveled north across the Alps in the summer of 1095, he turned it over in his mind, refining it into a far more ambitious plan than even Gregory had imagined.

  Clermont

  The pope's visit to France was a sort of homecoming. Nearly sixty years before he had been born Odo of Châtillon, a younger son of a noble family in the Champagne wine-producing region of north-eastern France. The ostensible reason for the trip, however, wasn't to revisit the picturesque valleys of his youth, but the outrageous behavior of the French king, Philip the Amorous. Philip had fallen in love with the wife of the Count of Anjou, but lacked the discretion to keep the affair private. He then compounded the error with the appalling treatment of his wife, the queen. The moment she gave birth to their son, Philip divorced her on the grounds that she was too fat, before abducting his mistress. Repeated attempts by French bishops to convince him to return the kidnapped woman to the Count of Anjou failed, and even the threat of excommunication couldn't change the king's mind.

  To address this situation and other abuses, Urban announced a great council of the Church to be held at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France, on 18th November, lasting for ten days. Although attendance at these meetings was restricted to the clergy – a disappointment, no doubt, to the curious – there was one unusual item that was announced. On the second to last day, the local cathedral would be open to the public so that the pope could make a statement of great significance.

  The proclamation had the desired effect. People from the surrounding countryside began to flood into Clermont, eager to hear what the pope would say. Excitement continued to build throughout the week despite the cold winds of November and the rather routine nature of the early meetings, in which simony, the practice of selling Church offices, had been condemned, along with the marriage of priests and the appointing of bishops by secular leaders. As expected, King Philip was again ordered to give up his mistress and again refused, so was officially excommunicated.

  By the ninth day, the crowds were so large that they couldn't fit inside the cathedral, so a special platform was built in a large field just outside the eastern gate of the city. Urban, who had managed the entire spectacle perfectly, rose to his feet and began to speak. What followed quite literally set all of Europe into motion.

  Surprisingly, we don't know exactly what he said. Although four contemporary accounts exist, including one that purports to have been an eyewitness, none claim to be a verbatim record, and all were written a few years after the event. Most likely, each author wrote the speech they believed the pope should have given. Nevertheless, although differing in details, they all agree on the gist of what was said.

  The pope seems to have started by detailing the deplorable conditions of the Christian communities of the East. He echoed Byzantine concerns about mistreatment by the Turks, the destruction of Christian shrines, and the murder of Christian pilgrims. But instead of Constantinople
, Urban focused on Jerusalem, which to the western medieval mind was the literal center of the world.

  While Christians in the West absorbed themselves in petty wars at home, their brothers and sisters in Jerusalem were being slaughtered. The Holy City, where Christ had lived, died, and been resurrected was under the domination of a cruel, blasphemous enemy. On the temple mount, the Muslims had erected the Dome of the Rock, which contained an inscription warning Christians to cease worshiping Christ and that 'the justice of God is swift'. The shrines of the faithful that remained were being closed or taken over, native Christians were being expelled, and pilgrims were routinely robbed, tortured, and killed.

  Those few Christians who elected to stay were subjected to appalling treatment. As the French monk Robert of Rheims remembered Urban putting it:

  “(The Turks) are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women?”11

  Having painted this emotional landscape, Urban delivered his masterstroke. Those whose consciences were guilty – and the medieval life was nothing if not bloodstained – could redeem themselves by marching to the aid of the East. They could exchange their fratricidal conflicts for the higher purpose of a righteous war, and if they died along the way it would only be to trade the pain of this life for the rich rewards of heaven.

  It was in this concluding part of the speech that Urban subtly added something new to Church doctrine. Western Christian thinkers since the time of St. Augustine in the fifth century had taught that wars could be just if they met certain standards.12 Urban, however, was suggesting something else. He had addressed his audience as 'soldiers of St. Peter', and had charged them to defend the Church. The normal fighting that a knight engaged in – pursuit of more territory, wealth, or power – endangered his mortal soul, putting him at risk of damnation on the Day of Judgment. The struggle to recover Jerusalem, however, was for a higher cause, and would therefore help to cleanse the soul of sin. The knight who took up this cross would become a militia Christi – a knight of Christ – purified by the act of piety and pilgrimage. The crusade was more than a just war, it was a holy war.13

  By the time the pope had finished speaking, men were openly weeping and cries of “Deus vult!” (God wills it!) were ringing out. This became a roar as the distinguished cleric Adhemar of Le Puy climbed to the front of the platform and knelt before the pope. As he pledged to journey to Jerusalem, one of the pope's men produced two strips of red cloth and sewed them to the shoulder of Adhemar's surcoat in the shape of a cross. So many of the knights and minor aristocracy pushed their way forward to 'take the cross' that Urban's men ran out of cloth and had to rip donated garments to furnish enough crosses.14

  The electrifying response took even Urban by surprise. It was due less to the pope's charisma than a great religious awakening that had been sweeping through Europe since the start of the century. Apocalyptic dread was a constant feature of medieval life, but the dawn of the eleventh century seemed particularly portentous. A millennium had elapsed since the incarnation and resurrection of Christ, and there was a growing sense that the world was worn out and nearing its end. The last judgment was clearly approaching.

  To escape the growing feeling of guilt, the medieval mind turned increasingly to monasteries and the power of relics. The physical remains of a holy site or holy person – or objects with which they had contact – could act as powerful advocates for a sinner. From the time of Charlemagne on, many altars contained relics, and their veneration rivaled the sacraments in the daily life of the medieval church.

  The most powerful relics were those associated with Christ or the Virgin Mary, but those of lesser saints could also work miracles and often became the focal points of pilgrimage. In the ninth century, the bones of St. James the Greater, one of the twelve Apostles of Christ, had been found in Spain, and Christians had walked for hundreds of miles through hostile territory just for the chance to see them. The Cathedral of Santiago that housed the relics had warded off both Viking and Muslim attacks, and by the time of Urban's speech had become the most famous site in Christendom.

  When Urban mentioned Jerusalem, therefore, it had set off ripples of excitement. Jerusalem was not merely a city, it was the spot where Christ had lived, died, and been resurrected. If the clothes that had touched a saint were holy, how much more was the city where Jesus had lived? Just as Christ himself was the central figure of history, so too was Jerusalem the literal center of the world.15

  Pilgrimage

  This belief in the importance of Christ's earthly home wasn't new. As early as the second century, despite opposition by the Roman authorities who were attempting to suppress the religion, Jerusalem and Bethlehem had become popular places for Christians to visit. The dangerous journey undoubtedly had more symbolic than physical merit, since, thanks to a succession of imperial rulers who had done their best to erase Jerusalem from memory, there wasn't a lot to see. In A.D. 70 the emperor Titus had sacked the city so brutally that, as the historian Josephus reports, 'nothing was left that could ever persuade visitors that it had once been inhabited.' For a generation it lay in ruins until Hadrian rebuilt it as a colony for his veterans, renaming it Aelia Capitolina, and purposely building a great temple to Venus on the site of Christ's crucifixion.16

  But Christians had never forgotten the physical setting of the Gospels. Although most were illiterate, all had been told by their priests of Jesus’ life and knew by heart the names of villages and places with which he had interacted. In the fourth century, Constantine the Great's mother, St. Helena, despite the fact that she was in her seventies, made the first 'official' pilgrimage to the Holy Land to walk in Jesus’s footsteps. According to legend she was guided by an old Jew to the spot of Hadrian's temple, now a crumbled ruin used as a rubbish heap, where she discovered the True Cross buried beneath the foundations.

  Further digging revealed more relics: the inscription that had hung over Christ's head and the four nails used in his crucifixion.17 Helena had the site cleared and her son – the first Christian emperor – erected the Church of the Holy Sepulcher over the spot. Helena spent the rest of her life traveling throughout Palestine building memorial churches on all holy sites that could be identified. This imperial patronage triggered a flood of pilgrims. Within a century there were more than two hundred monasteries and religious lodgings established for penitent travelers.

  By the late fourth century St. Jerome, the author of the Vulgate – the Latin translation of the Bible – was arguing that a kind of 'spiritual energy' radiated from Jerusalem, and advised his readers to visit other key sites as well – Nazareth where Christ had grown up, Bethlehem where he had been born, the Jordan River where he had been baptized, and Cana where he had turned water into wine.18

  The idea of pilgrimage became so popular – and the streams of tourists so disruptive to native monks – that toward the end of Jerome’s life he felt the need to discourage the idea, writing that while a pilgrimage may round off a Christian's spiritual education, it wasn't necessary for salvation, and that a good life could be lived anywhere since character and faith are what really counted. But Jerome himself had chosen to spend the last four decades of his life in Bethlehem, and the call of the Holy Land to the faithful only increased.

  Visiting the physical site where Jesus had walked may have been the ultimate sign of spiritual devotion, but it was also brutally difficult. The journey took months, was horrendously expensive, and the pilgrim had to brave the dangers of shipwreck, bandits, an unknown climate, and often a very hostile population. If a traveler made it safely, he or she had to obtain the correct official p
asses to visit the holy sites, and have a ready supply of cash to bribe the Muslim bureaucrats who handed them out. In addition to all this, there were also the usual difficulties faced by foreigners in an unfamiliar place – unethical merchants, dishonest guides, overpriced trinkets, and poor accommodations.

  The journey was so difficult that it was sometimes used as punishment. Those guilty of especially notorious crimes like murder were commanded to walk to the Holy Land with the murder weapon hung around their necks. This was a sign to other pilgrims that they should not be treated as normal penitents, but instead should be publicly humiliated. In the most extreme cases the punished pilgrims would be expected to walk in particularly degrading conditions. As the English poet Chaucer noted, “when a man has sinned openly... (he must go) naked in pilgrimages or barefoot.” Unsurprisingly, such penitents were required to collect signatures at all the shrines they visited to prove they had gone.19

  Remarkably, the fact that Jerusalem was under Muslim control hadn’t initially slowed the pilgrim trade. Tourism was the lifeblood of the Holy City and – after a brief period of persecution – the Islamic rulers were quick to acknowledge20 that it was in their best interests to keep the flow of gold coming. Over the centuries they arrived at a delicate balance with the Christians. In exchange for allowing the shrines to remain open and for protecting pilgrims within the city, Christian rulers could be expected to encourage pilgrimage and send lavish gifts for the maintenance of existing sites.21

  This arrangement greatly benefited both sides. Gold poured into the Caliphate's coffers, and by the early tenth century, the status of Christians in Palestine had actually improved to the point that they enjoyed almost as many rights as they had under previous Christian rule. The flow of human traffic was greater than it had ever been. Norman dukes, English royalty, and even the terrifying Viking king Harald Hardråda all paid their respects.22 One Muslim traveler to Jerusalem even grumbled that the Christians seemed completely in control, and claimed that it was impossible to find either a non-Christian physician or a non-Jewish banker.23