The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  20. Eleventh-century Amalfitan coin with cufic epigraphy: ‘There is no God but God. Muhammed is the Prophet of God.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  The impact of the Jerusalem war of 1095–9 on Latin Christendom can be exaggerated but was profound. It enhanced papal authority, invested western European culture in the politics of the eastern Mediterranean, and bequeathed an acrid legacy of unrealistic geopolitical ambition. The First Crusade disrupted those who took part; those it left behind; and those it encountered across Europe and the Near East. The religious dynamism of the Jerusalem war was shaped by a bleak world view of urgent conflict between good and evil, sin and virtue, eternal life or eternal damnation. However, while the conception of holy war rested on scripture, legend and law, its realisation was grounded in economic and social systems in which power and authority lay with arms-bearing ruling classes, the targets of Pope Urban II’s summons to fight: ‘the knights who are making for Jerusalem with the good intention of liberating Christianity . . . since they may be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom’.1 Beyond religious rhetoric, the campaign was framed by agricultural incomes; patterns of trade; the nature of lordship, kinship and service; and the ways men, materiel and money were assembled for war. Not everyone was convinced. Traditional beliefs in Christian pacifism or the primacy of the monastic ideal were not universally abandoned. Support for the First Crusade was political, following the contours of current controversies. Involvement was tempered by circumstance and self-interest. Large numbers of those who took the cross soon abandoned it. Others, such as the papally backed Norman rulers of the recently conquered Sicily, in contrast to their cousins in southern Italy, showed little appetite for the new adventure, preferring to consolidate their new possessions on the island and their trading relations with their Arab neighbours in north Africa and Egypt. Over a century later a northern Iraqi historian, Ibn al-Athir, described how Count Roger of Sicily (c. 1072–1101) reacted to suggestions of shipping a Frankish army to north Africa with a loud fart, adding the less percussive arguments that any such campaign would leave him out of pocket and destroy his existing agreements with the emir of Tunisia. Instead, Roger proposed: ‘if you are determined to wage holy war on the Muslims, then the best way is to conquer Jerusalem’.2 Although evidently ben trovato, the anecdote recognised the reality of Mediterranean politics, and by extension the politics of the crusade, driven by material concerns as much as religious compulsion.

  The Plan

  The plan to relieve Byzantium in Asia Minor followed by an invasion of Syria and Palestine was devised by Pope Urban II after a council held at Piacenza in Lombardy in early March 1095, at which Greek ambassadors asked for military aid against the Seljuk Turks. This was not the first such Byzantine appeal. As with earlier Greek invitations, it may have been accompanied with a substantial financial inducement, which might have contributed both to Urban’s enthusiasm and his ability to fund an extensive preaching and recruitment exercise and attract support.3 The decision to include the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre carried wide significance, not least by tapping into current eschatological excitement, a perception, encouraged by some popular preachers, a series of poor harvests and some unusual celestial phenomena, that the world was facing the Apocalypse, as prophesied in the Book of Revelation when Christ would return with a New Jerusalem. More pragmatically, Urban may already have been aware of requests for help from clergy in Jerusalem and returning pilgrims.4 The Council of Piacenza represented the first international church assembly of Urban’s troubled pontificate. Taking leadership of a movement to inspire the laity to aid fellow Christians in the east powerfully furthered papal assertion of primacy within Christendom, a natural corollary to Urban’s fostering of better relations with Byzantium and the eastern Church in a neat upstaging of his opponents, the German emperor Henry IV and his client pope Clement III. One later commentator, born during the preaching of the First Crusade, repeated gossip that Urban had plotted with the Normans of southern Italy to use the commotion created by the crusade to regain control of Rome, then in imperialist hands.6 Whatever the truth of this, Urban energetically exploited the Jerusalem war to his political advantage. He also recognised the recent precedents of Christian rulers’ conquests of Muslim territories. As he put it in 1098: ‘in our days with the force of Christians, God has attacked Turks in Asia and Moors in Europe’.7 Urban’s predecessors had regularly branded recoveries of lost Christian realms meritorious, religious wars, acts of liberation and restoration: in 1089, Urban himself had associated reconquest in Spain with penance and remission of sins.8

  URBAN II

  When he began promoting the First Crusade in 1095–6, Pope Urban II had been at the centre of international ecclesiastical politics for over fifteen years. Born Eudes (Odo) of Châtillon-sur-Marne around 1035 into a second-rung seigneurial family in Champagne, he received his early education and training at Rheims, where one of his teachers was the future founder of the austere Carthusian order of monks, Bruno of Cologne, who remained a lifelong mentor and confidant. After preferment as a canon and archdeacon at Rheims, in about 1068 Eudes entered the great Burgundian monastery of Cluny where he rose to be grand prior. Called to Rome to assist Gregory VII, in 1080 Eudes was installed as cardinal bishop of Ostia, quickly assuming a leading role in promoting and defending the pope’s ambitious moral and ecclesiastical policies, earning the disparaging epithet of Gregory’s pedisequus or lackey. He cut his teeth as an effective polemicist, networker, political operator and combative diplomat, especially while papal legate in Germany, 1084–5. Regarded as papabile on Gregory’s death in 1085, he was elected pope in succession to Victor III (1086–7) in 1088. Although committed to the full ideological quasi-monastic rigour of Gregorian reform, Pope Urban pursued his objectives with greater flexibility and collegiality, slowly managing to rebuild support against Emperor Henry IV and his protégé the anti-pope Clement III, as well as establishing a more cohesive identity for papal administration, known from 1089 as the curia. Preaching the First Crusade formed part of this process, providing Urban with a popular international cause, a unique diplomatic opportunity to consolidate reconciliation with Byzantium and a chance to ally moral reform with political action that involved the laity as well as clergy: most of the canons of the Councils of Piacenza and Clermont in 1095 addressed issues of church discipline. The alliance of secular and religious commitment found its definitive symbol in the granting to crusaders of the cross, a ceremony which Urban instituted at Clermont. The crusade sat easily in Urban’s wider policies of offering spiritual rewards for religious loyalty, as in his encouragement of Spanish Christian advances against the Moors, as well as exploiting his political alliances – notably with the Normans of southern Italy, whose crusade commander, Bohemund, was a personal acquaintance – and his ecclesiastical contacts: on the way to Clermont, Urban consecrated the high altar of the new church at Cluny. Theoretical papal authority over the crusade was maintained through legates, Adhemar of le Puy and then Daimbert of Pisa, and accepted by the expedition’s leadership, who wrote to Urban from Antioch in 1098 asking for his assistance after Adhemar’s death. Although Urban died a fortnight after the fall of Jerusalem in July 1099, before he could learn of the triumph, his mark on the memory of the campaign and on subsequent crusade history remained indelible.5

  21. Urban II at Cluny, October 1095.

  2. The routes of the First Crusade and that of 1101, with Urban II’s preaching tour of 1095–6.

  Recruiting in northern Italy may have begun soon after Piacenza; a Lombard army reached Constantinople by the summer of 1096. Urban’s close diplomatic links with the leaders of the Normans in southern Italy probably alerted them to the papal initiative at an early stage. Between July 1095 and September 1096, Urban toured much of southern, central, western and south-eastern France. The novel presence of a pope north of the Alps caused a sensation, heigh
tened as the ageing pontiff maintained a gruelling schedule of public appearances, often in the open, even in winter. Urban combined preaching with presiding over important local religious ceremonies, such as the translation of relics or the dedication of altars. Wherever he went he negotiated with local ecclesiastics and lords for their support for the Jerusalem scheme. Letters and legates were sent to those regions that, because of distance or political impediment, such as the excommunications of the king of France and the emperor of Germany, he could not visit. By the time he held a council at Clermont in the Auvergne in late November 1095, Urban had already secured the commitment of a string of notables. The council itself was intended to attract secular as well as ecclesiastical leaders from across France. In a carefully staged and choreographed performance, at the end of the assembly, on 27 November, Urban preached on the Jerusalem war.

  It is not known what Urban said. No verbatim record exists, and attendance was patchy. The decrees of the Clermont council chiefly reiterated papal policies on church authority, independence, organisation and discipline. The decree on the Jerusalem war, which only survives in seventeenth-century copies of a dossier of council documents kept by one of the attendees, the bishop of Arras, offered a special form of penitential exercise that forged together Gregory VII’s idea of penitential violence, the papal concept of in-violate church freedom, and a campaign to Jerusalem.9 Church protection was extended to those who undertook this task and to their property. Tendentiously, the pope’s God-given authority over human spiritual affairs was assumed. The uniquely generous spiritual benefit of full remission of penance was open to all who confessed their sins. This full remission coupled with the explicit goal of Jerusalem transformed a mundane scheme to provide mercenary troops to Byzantium into a cause of ostensibly transcendent significance. Unlike his mentor Gregory VII’s similar proposal in 1074 to assist Byzantium and march on to Jerusalem, Urban’s provided a clear structure of message, response and reward: the positive incentive of remission of penance instead of Gregory’s bleaker, more amorphous emphasis on martyrdom; the replacement of Gregory’s vague promise of ‘eternal reward’ with precise spiritual and temporal rewards signalled by swearing a vow and taking the cross.10 Oaths provided a familiar, serious bond of commitment. Simple, memorable slogans were deployed: ‘Take up your cross and follow me’, ‘Liberate Jerusalem’, ‘expel the infidels’, ‘earn salvation’, ‘God Wills it’. The subsequent campaign of public ceremonies, private conversations, sermons, letters, legates, and the recruitment of local opinion formers, notably monastic networks, displayed propaganda management of a high order.

  The idea that Urban had originally intended only limited aid for Byzantium is contradicted by his proposals’ inclusion of Jerusalem, the unique spiritual rewards on offer, and his own extensive recruitment tour and efforts to communicate with regions beyond his itinerary. Letters, eyewitness accounts and land deeds of departing crusaders paint a fairly consistent outline of the pope’s plan: a penitential military campaign to Jerusalem to recover the Holy Sepulchre, free eastern Christians and thus, in Urban’s own words, ‘liberate Christianity’.11 Relief of the burden of sin struck a chord with arms-bearing aristocrats whose warrior values sat awkwardly with increasingly well-articulated clerical insistence on the unavoidable penalties of temporal sin. Many likened the expedition to a pilgrimage. Urban’s few surviving letters used more general words with penitential associations of journeying and labour (iter, via, labor), while at the same time employing the precise language of divinely ordained sacralised holy warfare (procinctus, expeditio). Witnesses remembered the pope emphasising the armed nature of the struggle at Limoges in December 1095 and a war ‘to hunt the pagan people’ in Anjou in March 1096. The message got through: ‘to fight and to kill’ the defilers of the Holy Sepulchre, as one Gascon charter put it. The sense of a Christian militia suffuses crusaders’ campaign letters.12

  At Clermont, Urban announced the appointment of Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy as his surrogate to lead the expedition and the date of his departure, 15 August 1096. Land routes and a general rendezvous and muster at Constantinople must have been agreed in advance of the contingents setting off. Despite increasing naval capacity, the shippers of Italy hardly possessed the resources or technology to carry very large armies, with adequate rations and horses, across the Mediterranean. Equally, crusade commanders probably lacked sufficient ready cash to pay shipping costs or the appetite to test the ubiquitous landlubbers’ suspicion of the sea that many would never have seen before. Strategically, the question as to why the crusade took three years to reach Jerusalem rather than the few months of a sea voyage, can be explained by the bifurcation of Urban’s plan: help for eastern Christendom and the recovery of Jerusalem. Acceptance of the Greek invitation, and perhaps money, made Constantinople the necessary and obvious first destination. The main land armies mustered across western Europe in the autumn of 1096; reached Constantinople between November 1096 and May 1097; and gathered as one host at the siege of Nicaea by early June 1097, a process speaking loudly of coordination with the Byzantines.

  The military effort stretched from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. Some recruitment appeared distinct from the papal campaign. The excommunicate French king, Philip I, held a conference in Paris in February 1096 to discuss the crusade. Meanwhile, a separate preaching initiative, begun perhaps before the Council of Clermont, was conducted by the charismatic diminutive Picard preacher Peter the Hermit. Later a figure of legend, in practice he apparently combined revivalist oratory with the ability to raise and organise troops, including a number of lords from the Ile de France and surrounding regions, and to provide active leadership for a substantial army of cavalry and infantry from northern France and western Germany.13 Peter retained some standing in the crusader armies even after his own forces had been cut to pieces in Asia Minor in September 1096. How Peter acquired sufficient authority to command such forces is hard to fathom. Remarkably, his contingents – possibly tens of thousands strong – were ready to depart by early March 1096, reaching Constantinople in July and August. His relationship with Urban’s mobilisation is unknown, although early accounts after 1099 linked the two. Peter’s apparent pitch of serving Christ and restoring Jerusalem certainly echoed Urban’s.14

  PETER THE HERMIT

  Peter, known as the Hermit (d. c. 1115), was a popular travelling evangelist from Picardy who preached moral and social reconciliation in northern France, establishing a strong reputation as a charismatic ascetic holy man in the years before the First Crusade. All chronicle accounts note his leading the first wave of crusaders eastwards that came to grief in Asia Minor in the autumn of 1096 and later his role at Antioch in heading the crusaders’ embassy to Kerboga of Mosul. Some suggest his continuing prominence once the expedition had taken Jerusalem. After the crusade, he is said to have returned home, founding a religious house at Neufmoutier near Huy (in modern Belgium). One western German tradition ascribed the initiative for the crusade to Peter, calling him the ‘primus auctor’.15 This tradition gained historiographic traction by being included, alongside prominence given to Urban II, in William of Tyre’s Historia, the great late twelfth-century historical compendium of crusade history that dominated perceptions of the First Crusade until the nineteenth century when Peter’s initiating role was dismissed as fiction.

  Recent scholarship has reassessed Peter’s contribution, noting that, while also a figure of legend, the historical Peter combined his revivalist oratory with raising and organising a coherent thousands-strong armed force, largely of infantry but led by lords and knights.16 This force set out for the east in March 1096, only a few months after the Council of Clermont following Peter’s preaching in areas Urban avoided, from Berry, the Orleannais, Champagne to Lorraine and the Rhineland, with additional recruitment from the Ile de France. The speed of his army’s departure suggests he began to promote the Jerusalem journey before the Clermont speech, possibly in collusion with the pope, indicated by the only de
tailed account of Peter’s preparations. This describes how Peter, prompted by his own ill-treatment on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, and armed with a written appeal for western aid from the Patriarch of Jerusalem (neither of which is impossible or even improbable), persuaded Urban to launch the crusade. Peter’s own preaching lacked offers of the cross and in retrospect was seen as more populist than the pope’s, aimed beyond the knightly classes. Yet the two campaigns shared essential elements: a call from the east; the plight of Jerusalem; the direct order of Christ (in Peter’s case via a dream); and the offer of spiritual reward. It is easily conceivable that Urban, in exploiting the Greek invitation for aid into his scheme of a papally led Christian renewal, incorporated appeals from the Christian community in Jerusalem and the evangelical activism of Peter the Hermit.17 The legend may not be groundless.