The World of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Into this new political situation arrived foreign soldiers with the ideology and institutions of penitential warfare. In 1089 and 1091, Urban II offered the same remission of sins given to Jerusalem pilgrims to those who helped rebuild the city and church of Tarragona, across the frontier fifty miles south of Barcelona, as the city was intended as a ‘wall and bastion against the Saracens for the Christian people’.10 The First Crusade did not deflect Urban from support of the Tarragona enterprise, urging local counts to fulfil their crusade vows not in the east but nearer home. In the event, Jerusalem seems to have proved a greater draw, in Christian Spain as elsewhere. However, Urban’s elision of objectives stuck. Peter I of Aragon (1094–1104) took the cross for Jerusalem in 1100. A year later, besieging Zaragoza, he was described as wearing his cross and displaying banners of the cross. The siege castle he built was nicknamed ‘Juslibol’, ‘God Wills it’, the slogan of Clermont.11

  The subsequent incorporation of crusading institutions – bulls, indulgences, temporal privileges and cross – only gradually refined older associations of conquest and religious war. The past was reinvented to accommodate holy war. From around 1115 the patronal saint, James the Apostle, became a ‘knight of Christ’, perhaps in part as a potent competitor to contest papal proprietary claims for St Peter.12 Other saintly recruits included popular heavenly crusading patrons the Virgin Mary and St George, but also, in León, the less obvious seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville. However, local traditions of non-violent association of Christians and al-Andalus Muslims continued to shade crusade stereotypes, as in the literary treatment of Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid. Both the twelfth-century Historia Roderici and the early thirteenth-century epic Poema de Mio Cid admit to Rodrigo’s friendship with Muslims and the shortcomings of Christians as well as Moors. The tone of crusading is absent.13 The insinuation of crusading into Spain through papal bulls and the example of the Jerusalem wars was not comprehensive. Crusading was not associated with every campaign nor did it determine politics or military strategy. The most concrete association of holiness with war found expression in the imported Military Orders, their indigenous imitators and crusade taxation. The Iberian reality of shared space with other religions tempered the demonising posturing and religious conflict familiar in the rest of Latin Christendom. Only in the later Middle Ages did memorialised crusade models more obviously encourage aggressive cultural discrimination and the active social pursuit of an exclusive divine mission.14

  91. St James the moor killer by Tiepolo.

  92. Convivencia? A Christian and a black Moor playing chess.

  The Spanish Crusades

  The legacy of the First Crusade and its apparatus lent patchy definition to holy war in Spain. Special interest was shown by popes with experience as Spanish legates: Cardinals Rainier (Paschal II, 1099–1118), Guy of Burgundy (Calixtus II, 1119–24) and Hyacinth (Celestine III, 1191–8). However, the initiative for seeking crusade formulae came chiefly not from Rome but from Iberian commanders wishing to enhance existing military schemes. Paschal II offered remission of sins to encourage Spaniards to resist the lure of the Jerusalem war in favour of fighting the Moors and Almoravids at home.15 At the request of the Pisans, the cross, a papal banner and remissions were granted to an ephemerally successful Pisan-Catalan-southern French campaign against the Balearic Islands in 1113–14, and possibly for a planned assault on Tortosa. Those who died helping Alfonso I ‘the Battler’ of Aragon capture Zaragoza in 1118 or contributed to restoring its church were rewarded with papal remissions. Spain’s moral and strategic equivalence with the Holy Land was confirmed by Canon XI of Calixtus II’s First Lateran Council of 1123. This equated those taking the cross for Jerusalem with those for Spain, a stance reiterated by regional church councils and Calixtus’s granting to crucesignati in Catalonia the ‘same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern church’.16 The rhetorical incorporation of Spain with the Holy Land found an echo in Archbishop Diego Gelmirez of Santiago’s 1125 fanciful project to attack Jerusalem via north Africa: ‘let us become soldiers of Christ . . . taking up arms . . . for the remission of sins’.17 By 1150, this redefinition of the Reconquest as cognate to the Jerusalem war was reflected in Leónese and Castilian chronicles, with their themes of revenge and militant scriptural references. Most strikingly, in 1131, Alfonso I of Aragon-Navarre (d. 1134) formally – if abortively – bequeathed his kingdom jointly to the Templars, Hospitallers and the canons of the Holy Sepulchre; in the 1120s he had toyed with the creation of a Templar-style militia Christi to combat Muslims and open a new way to Jerusalem.18

  93. Archbishop Gelmirez blesses two knights.

  13. The Spanish Reconquista.

  The association of Reconquest with crusade remained contingent not automatic. In 1146 the Genoese attempt on the port of Almeria was described in secular terms whereas in 1147, with the Second Crusade to the east already launched, a renewed ultimately successful Genoese attack with Alfonso VII of Castile attracted both the rhetoric and institutions of holy war. ‘Redemption of souls’ had been offered even before Alfonso secured crusade status for the new attack from Eugenius III. While in practice the initiation and execution of the Almeria campaign owed nothing to the eastern expedition, it easily attracted the convenient aura of the Holy Land war, as did the Catalan-Genoese siege of Tortosa in 1148 that elicited a new papal grant of indulgences, ‘which Pope Urban established for all those going for the liberation of the eastern church’.19 The piggy-backing of the Reconquest onto the Jerusalem war was emphasised by Afonso of Portugal’s employment of passing crusaders in the successful siege of Lisbon (July–October 1147). This represented part of a pattern whereby fleets bound for the Holy Land attacked Muslim seaports, for pay, plunder, glory and winter anchorages: King Sigurd of Norway in 1108 (Sintra, Alcácer do Sal); the North Sea fleets of the Second Crusade in 1147 (Lisbon), and their successors in 1189 (the Algarve and Silves) and 1217 (Alcácer do Sal). While lacking separate crusade bulls, these interventions reinforced a perceived unity of purpose and merit between Spain and the Holy Land. Yet the gloss of piety did not disguise the incentive of land and profit. The contemporary Poem of Almeria, celebrating the 1147 conquest, combined crusade motifs (St Mary, forgiveness of sins, ‘the trumpet of salvation’) with praise of chivalric values (‘the glory of waging war is life itself’; the Castilian knights ‘enjoy themselves more in war than one friend does with another’) and the promise of ‘reward of this life’ as well as the next: ‘prizes of silver, and with victory . . . all the gold which the Moors possess’: a distillation of the distinctive flavour of the Reconquest crusades.20

  In Spain, as elsewhere, the failure of the Second Crusade dampened the popularity of formal trappings of the crusade. Occasional deployments of papal grants, cross and indulgences persisted, as for a Catalan campaign in the Ebro valley in 1152–3. A council at Segovia in 1166 proposed Jerusalem indulgences for those fighting in defence of Castile while during Cardinal Hyacinth’s two legatine missions of 1154–5 and 1172–3 the future pope, a tenacious crusade enthusiast, took the cross and offered remission of sins. In 1175, Hyacinth persuaded Alexander III to issue a fresh crusade bull in the face of a new danger posed by the Almohads, al-Muwahhidun, or ‘Upholders of the Divine Unity’. Puritanically fundamentalist, and like the Almoravids from desert margins of south Morocco, the Almohads sought to impose their vision of the original purity of early Islam on the Maghreb and al-Andalus. Under their founder Muhammed ibn Tumart (d. 1130, declared a mahdi in 1121) and his successor Abd al-Mu’min (1130–63), the Almohads quickly overran the decaying power of the Almoravids in north Africa and, from 1146, began to subdue the emirs of al-Andalus. By 1173, Muslim Spain had been annexed under Yusuf I (1163–84), who now directly challenged the Christian rulers to the north. Over the next quarter of a century, many earlier Christian advances were reversed. In 1195, Alfonso VIII of Castile, supported by a crusade bull of 1193, was defeated at Alarcos and the Tagus valley raided. Yet, poli
tics still trumped religion: disaffected Castilians fought for the Almohads at Alarcos; a Muslim regiment joined Alfonso IX of León’s invasion of Castile in 1196. In response, in 1197 the nonagenarian Celestine III, former legate Hyacinth, promulgated full eastern crusading privileges against Alfonso IX.

  The proposed crusade against Alfonso IX followed the Third Crusade’s reignition of the Jerusalem war as the standard for church-approved violence. In 1188, Clement III extended Holy Land crusade privileges to Spain, including proportionate indulgences for non-combatant material contributors and a grant of church revenues. Thereafter, unlike crusades against Baltic pagans and apostates, heretics or other Christian religious or political dissidents in Europe, crusades in Spain were automatically assumed to be equivalent in merit to those to the Holy Land, even if not always as important.21 In 1213, Innocent III cancelled the offer of crusade privileges in Spain except for Spaniards themselves in favour of his new Holy Land enterprise.22 By the early thirteenth century, crusade privileges became customary accessories to the Reconquest especially after the strenuous international preaching campaign preceding the crusade of 1212 that led to the crushing victory of Alfonso VIII of Castile and Peter II of Aragon over the Almohads at Las Navas de Tolosa, the true beginning of the process of reconquest that ended in 1492. While this campaign included recruits from across the Pyrenees (most of whom left before the climactic battle), and later Christian conquests attracted foreign settlers, the thirteenth century saw the Spanish crusade become the preserve of Spaniards alone, its traditions and institutions developing in parallel but distinct from the rest of western Christendom.

  94. The Almohad banner captured at Las Navas de Tolosa.

  Military Orders

  The Military Orders supplied one example of this Hispanisation of crusading. As providers of frontier garrisons, recipients of alms, estates, villages and castles, the Military Orders were integral to the Reconquest. While attracting patronage in the form of land grants by the 1130s, from the 1140s the Templars and Hospitallers exercised military roles. The Orders’ combination of disciplined commitment, hierarchical control, directed endowment and military efficiency proved a model for local rulers to establish their own national Orders. As in the Baltic, the proximity of a frontier with non-Christian territories gave the Spanish Military Orders a status, power and significance denied similar national Orders elsewhere in western Europe. By 1180 every Spanish kingdom except Navarre had their own Order alongside the Templars and Hospitallers (who remained prominent in Aragon and Catalonia): Calatrava in Castile (1158); Santiago (1170) and St Julian of Pereiro, later known as Alcantara (by 1176) in León; Evora, later Avis (by 1176) in Portugal. Local fraternities sprang up defending individual frontier castles, although lacking the resources or institutional permanence of the larger national Orders. Another Order, La Merced (c. 1230) in Barcelona, dealt with ransoming captives from the Moors.

  95. A Templar tower on the Ebro near Tortosa.

  Patrons included pious nobles or merchants, as well as kings and clerics. The larger Orders became sufficiently established to attract international investment: by 1200 the Order of Santiago held property from the British Isles to Carinthia in southern Austria. The Orders of Alcantara (1238) and Calatrava (1240) were granted papal indulgences to any who fought with them against the Moors, embedding the sort of ‘eternal crusade’ adopted later in the thirteenth century by the Teutonic Knights in the Baltic. That these privileges only came towards the completion of the conquest of al-Andalus signalled the Orders’ wider political, social and cultural influence as they became firmly associated with royal power. Monarchs increasingly controlled them, helping configure Spanish politics as institutionally crusading long after any immediate Moorish threat had been extinguished.

  The Thirteenth Century and Beyond

  The patriation of the Spanish crusade allied the ideal of Christian holy war with wars that would have been fought anyway by armies gathered through normal secular processes of military obligation, dependence, clientage and alliance, with terms of service the same as for non-crusading warfare. The Spanish crusades could hardly be branded as pilgrimages. As the twelfth-century Poem of Almeria noted, beside religious inspiration, pay and booty provided necessary incentives. Increasingly, the Church, as a leading material beneficiary, provided fiscal subsidies. Initially, crusade privileges of the sort offered in 1123 may have been intended as a device to attract international support, southern France appearing especially fertile in recruits. However, cross-Pyrenean involvement declined. The battle of Las Navas de Tolosa on 16 July 1212 became iconic. Won by a coalition of Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon and Sancho VII of Navarre, with most of their French allies having withdrawn a fortnight earlier, the victory over the Almohads under al-Nasir (1199–1214) was presented as providential and national, Spanish revenge for 711.

  The victory’s material as well as ideological legacy was profound. Politically, Castile reaped the main reward, with al-Andalus exposed by the rapid collapse of Almohad power. Castile lacked competitors with the long minority of James I of Aragon after the death of Peter II in 1213, and the succession to the throne of Navarre of the distant count of Champagne in 1234. Alfonso VIII’s financial expedients that had paid for the 1212 coalition, including a 50 per cent levy on the Castilian Church’s annual revenues, provided a lasting model. Wrapped in crusaders’ mantles, subsequent Iberian rulers used the Church to subsidise their wars, including, from the mid-thirteenth century, a third of ecclesiastical tithe income (tercias) and regular appropriation of Holy Land clerical taxation, used alongside secular levies and forced loans. As with other European frontier regions in the later Middle Ages, the crusade allowed for the permanent extension of the fiscal and political power of the state.

  By 1250, only the emirate of Granada survived in Muslim hands, effectively a client of Castile. After 1212, the traffic of attack and conquest was for the first time largely one way, the rapid collapse of the Almohad Empire leaving a newly enfeebled al-Andalus behind. Whereas after Las Navas, Innocent III concentrated his crusade policy on the Holy Land, his successors Honorius III, Gregory IX and Innocent IV were enthusiastic supporters of applying the crusade to Spanish annexations in Iberia and the Balearic Islands and to plans to invade Morocco. From the 1220s, Fernando III of Castile (1217–52, and of León from 1230) identified his expansion southwards towards the Guadalquivir valley as a religious mission. He appears to have used a crusade bull of 1231 as open-ended consecration for his conquests of Cordoba (1236), Murcia (1243) and Seville (1248). In the 1220s, James I ‘the Conqueror’ of Aragon (1213–76) received crusade bulls for his successful invasion of the Balearic Islands (1229–35) and, from the 1220s onwards, his campaigns against Peniscola, Valencia (annexed 1232–45) and Murcia. Crusades were employed in the 1230s and 1240s by the Portuguese kings Sancho II (1223–47) and Afonso III (1248–79) as they pushed south into the Algrave. The international context was recognised in regular suggestions of extending the holy war to north Africa and Palestine. Within the peninsula, limited foreign involvement persisted: English and French troops joined the siege of Valencia (1238) and foreigners were settled in Seville after 1248. Although schemes for the invasion of Morocco and forays across the Straits of Gibraltar punctuated the next three centuries, only James I, by then crusading’s elder statesman, actively engaged with the eastern crusade, sending an Aragonese regiment to Acre in 1269 and attending the crusade discussions at the Second Council of Lyons (1274).

  96. James the Conqueror besieging Palma, Mallorca, 1229–30.

  As before, holy war was tempered by social and political reality. Annexations tended to be concluded by negotiation that secured some of the religious and legal rights of the conquered (for example, Mallorca in 1229, Valencia in 1238 and Murcia in 1243). Valencia retained its majority Muslim population. While some Muslims prudently apostatised, efforts at conversion were limited. Following conquest, in a reversal of roles, the mudejars (Muslims living under Christ
ian rule) became protected second-class citizens with freedom to worship. Gradually, with increased Christian settlement, the Hispanisation and Christianisation of public spaces, religious sites, place names and secular landscapes, the accommodation with the mudejars frayed both locally and as part of public policy. Even by the end of the thirteenth century, there had been mudejar revolts. Thereafter, inter-faith communal relations tended to be practical not principled. From the mid-fifteenth century, especially in Castile, a political and cultural revival of militant neo-crusading produced active state intolerance and the imposition of Christian uniformity under Ferdinand II of Aragon (1479–1516) and Isabella of Castile (1474–1504), and their heirs Charles V (1516–56) and Philip II (1556–98). Despite rhetorical echoes, the persecution and final expulsion (1609–14) of mudejars and moriscos (descendants of Muslim converts to Christianity) belonged to a different world to that of the Spanish crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.