From the evidence of texts such as those written by Fulcher, Guibert, William and many others we can accept that certain sections of medieval society were conscious of belonging to a particular nation. We can define national identity as a sentiment or sense which defined membership of a nation according to certain common characteristics. National identity could apply to a group to which an individual believed himself or herself to belong, just as it could serve to define those who did not belong. It could thus establish a sense of solidarity among those who subscribed to it, but also produce or reinforce a sense of difference from other nations, and in some circumstances might even be a source of conflict between different nations. One of the features that made many crusade expeditions different from other types of military campaign was that they brought together 109
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large numbers of people not only from different nations, but from all classes of society in joint enterprises in a way that rarely occurred in other contexts in the Middle Ages. The aim of this chapter is to explore the relationship between the idea and practice of crusading, on the one hand, and concepts and manifestations of national identity, on the other, within the multinational or multi-regional crusade armies in the period between the Council of Clermont in 1095 and the Treaty of Jaffa, which concluded the Third Crusade in 1192.
Nations, kingdoms and languages at the time of
the crusades
Guibert of Nogent couches his anecdote in terms of an opposition and rivalry between French and Germans, nationalities which are, of course, familiar to us today, but we must be careful not to imagine medieval nations as possessing the same or even necessarily similar defining characteristics as those which bear their names in the modern world.7 At the time of the First Crusade, medieval Christendom regarded the known world as being inhabited by different ethnic groups: in the written sources which have come down to us, these might be described variously as nationes (nations), populi (peoples) or, just as (if not more) frequently, gentes (races or tribes). In practice these terms were largely used interchangeably, most often in the sense of ‘nations’ or ‘peoples’, and this chapter will not attempt to make significant distinctions between them.8
Nations were believed to possess various defining characteristics. A representative view of these was given at the beginning of the tenth century by Abbot Regino of Prüm, who in a much-quoted passage described how the diverse peoples of Christendom varied with regard to descent, customs, language and laws.9 Medieval people tended to have a fond belief that such characteristics were immutable and that therefore national communities were of great antiquity. In fact, we know that the diverse peoples and political entities of the Migration period and the early Middle Ages varied greatly over time in their ethnic composition.10 Indeed, many modern historians have been reluctant to use the term
‘race’ as a translation for the Latin gens, since it implies an idea of biological descent, as well as having numerous unfortunate connotations of misuse in more recent history. Yet common descent is precisely what most of those medieval people who considered the question believed, or affected to believe, and the period between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries saw a huge increase in the composition of stories in both Latin and vernaculars that described the descent of peoples from ancient ancestors or ancestral groups.11
One of the main reasons for the increase in the writing and elaboration of origin stories was that accounts of ancient migrations and conquests could be used to provide legitimation for political claims at the time of their composition, since it was commonly held that there was a congruence of national and political identities, and one salient characteristic of a nation was that it had some sort of political organisation which encapsulated customs and law. However, the vagaries 110
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of history meant that by the time of the First Crusade, there was often no clear correspondence between political units and ethnic communities, with the result that, as Susan Reynolds has persuasively argued, the existence of a kingdom was increasingly being regarded as the most important defining feature of a nation, often outweighing other factors which might have been considered more important in earlier times.12 Thus, by 1200, there was a clear sense of a nationality encompassing the entire kingdom of Scotland, even though an earlier age had defined its territory as being occupied by different peoples. The nationality that was defined by the existence of a kingdom even outweighed obvious linguistic differences; its inhabitants were perceived as Scots, even though the majority of them were divided between speakers of Gaelic and various Anglian dialects (the ancestors of the Scots language), and ruled over by a predominantly French-speaking elite.
The kingdom of the High Middle Ages was increasingly regarded and functioned as the principal institution which defined both a political and ethnic community. As Reynolds has expressed it, ‘kingdoms and peoples came to seem identical – not invariably, but sufficiently often for the coincidence of the two to seem the norm to contemporaries’.13 At the time of the early crusades the vast majority of Christians were the subjects of some twenty kingdoms. Seventeen of these were in existence in 1095: Germany (whose ruler was also King of Italy and Burgundy), France, England, Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Castile-León, Navarre, Aragon, Bohemia, Poland, Hungary, Rus’ and Byzantium. In the following century kingdoms were also established in Sicily, Portugal, and – as a result of the First Crusade – Jerusalem. The kings of Germany (through their authority as emperor, crowned as such by the pope) and the rulers of Byzantium claimed a super-regnal status.14 Even the city-states of northern Italy formally belonged to the kingdom of Italy and ultimately derived their authority from the monarch or his representatives, such as archbishops and bishops.
Some of these kings were by no means as powerful as other rulers who were technically their subjects: for example, at the end of the twelfth century the King of France was often hard put to challenge the power of the Duke of Normandy (not least because the duke was also king of England) or the Count of Flanders, and it is no coincidence that during this period Normans and Flemings maintained a sense of being peoples who were separate from the French.15 However, kings did have one great advantage: they were distinguished from other rulers by their coronation and associated sacral attributes such as anointing with sacred oil, which functioned as a recognition of their place in a divinely established order. It was felt that the king was owed a loyalty by his people and church that was different from, and superior to, obligations to lesser institutions. The complex of authority conferred by coronation was the reason why so many rulers who lacked a royal title were keen to acquire it.
The normative status of the kingdom as a governmental form can be seen in the context of the early crusades and the establishment of Latin principalities in Syria and Palestine, or, as these regions were known to contemporaries, Outremer.
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The crusaders who conquered Palestine in 1099 regarded it as constituting a regnum (kingdom), but its first ruler, Godfrey of Bouillon, did not adopt the title of king, probably because of the crusaders’ belief that this regnum belonged to Christ.16 Yet Godfrey’s dispute with the first patriarch, Daimbert of Pisa, over the sovereignty of Jerusalem led to a situation where his brother and successor, Baldwin I, insisted on a royal coronation and title as a public sign that he was a ruler independent of any ecclesiastical authority.17 Contemporaries also had similar expectations of non-Christian peoples with regard to governmental forms.
In his great history of Outremer written in the 1180s, the chronicler William of Tyre provides a rather fanciful account of how the Turks spent years wandering until they settled in Persia, but fled the oppression of the Persian ruler, fearing that they would be unable to overcome him because they had no king ‘as was the custom among other peoples’. Only after the election of the eponymous ancestor Seljuk as king were they able to conquer P
ersia, and eventually all the lands of the Middle East.18
As well as providing a sacral, ideological focus for loyalty and identity, kingdoms formed a concrete mechanism of government with which the upper echelons of society, both lay and ecclesiastical, had to interact. We must remember that ideas of national identity were primarily – although by no means exclusively – embodied and expressed by a relatively small political class: kings and great magnates and their many vassals, officials, jurists and other advisors; bishops, abbots and members of cathedral chapters; and the patriciates of urbanised areas. These were the people who enforced laws, who made alliances and directed wars, who attended courts, councils and coronations, and who patronised the writing of history and literature and constituted – directly or indirectly – the consumers of such writing.
Of course, many urban communities, such as the towns of Lombardy or Flanders, were developing precocious ideas of at least regional identity and solidarity, which often extended to a complete citizen body; but in the normal course of events, individuals and communities further down the social scale and relatively distant from the movers and shakers of political life were far less concerned with issues of national identity, apart from extraordinary circumstances, such as invasion, where they might actually be confronted with hostile forces belonging to a different nationality.
In such circumstances, language might well be seen as the main feature which differentiated friends from foes. It has always been a significant marker of national identity, but we must be careful not to project assumptions and circumstances current in the modern world back to the Middle Ages. The nationalisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries identified linguistic identity as the primary criterion used to define inhabitants of a particular territory as loyal and committed citizens of a state, or of a putative state. Each state required its own language, and within that state only one language was accepted as the medium of government, military service, education, commerce and culture. After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires in 1918 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, new states 112
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emerged which had never previously figured on the map of Europe, defined in their territorial extent primarily by the settlement patterns of a given predominant language.
In medieval Europe attitudes were rather different, at least from the perspectives of monarchs and elites. As we have seen in the case of Scotland, kingdoms could easily accommodate different languages within their communities. Indeed, diverse languages were seen as a source of strength, and kings of Hungary, Bohemia and Poland, for example, encouraged Germans and Walloons to settle for the skills that they would bring to their new homes, and German-speaking linguistic islands survived in these countries for hundreds of years.19 Yet linguistic diversity was not only a product of economic advantage, but was often accorded a central place in political life. Thus the chronicler Johannes of Viktring records the enthronement ceremony of the Duke of Carinthia in 1286, which involved the duke being questioned as to his suitability by a Slavic-speaking free peasant.
This ritual originated at a time when the duchy was almost completely Slavic in character, but it continued to be performed long after the ruling dynasty, the political and ecclesiastical elites and a large section of the population had adopted the German language.20 At the other end of Christendom almost forty years before, part of the enthronement ceremony of Alexander III of Scotland was the recital in Gaelic by a seanachaidh (reciter of tales) of the king’s genealogy back to his remote ancestor Iber Scot.21
One reason why monarchs and elites in the West were more comfortable with linguistic diversity than other social groups was that they were regularly confronted with the essential place of the Latin language alongside their own vernaculars as a vehicle of administration, the law and worship as well as much of the historiographical and imaginative literature they patronised. In some kingdoms the sociolinguistic situation was more complex than the simple diglossia of Latin and vernacular. After 1066 England was trilingual, with a French dialect (Anglo-Norman) in everyday use by the governing elite, English dialects spoken (but rarely written) by the bulk of the populace, and Latin as the language of the Church and of civil and ecclesiastical administration. In the kingdom of Sicily, which included much of the southern Italian mainland, the situation was even more complicated. The population comprised speakers of Arabic, Greek and Romance (i.e. a proto-Italian dialect), with a ruling class whose predominantly Norman origin meant that, at least initially, it used French, while the royal chancery worked with and issued documents in Greek, Arabic and Latin.22 These cases of multilingualism were by no means a source of weakness, and both England and Sicily were remarkable for the efficiency of their administrations as well as the fiscal strength and royal power that these helped to support. We should not assume that kings and nobles necessarily had fluency in Latin or vernaculars other than their own mother tongues; the essential point is that they would invariably have access to those who did.
Merchants, pedlars, sailors and others who followed mobile or itinerant professions had incentives to acquire knowledge of additional tongues, but in their 113
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everyday lives the broad mass of the European population, the absolute majority of whom lived and worked on the land, would rarely have been confronted with speakers of a different language unless they lived close to a linguistic frontier or in an area containing a linguistic minority, or if they faced a foreign invasion.
The significance of the crusades in this respect is their character (at least until the late twelfth century) as mass movements: the appeal of Pope Urban II was primarily directed to those social groups which had traditionally been accustomed to waging war – that is, nobles and knights – but the status of the crusade as a penitential pilgrimage meant that it was difficult to prevent the participation of non-combatants belonging to both sexes and all classes. Over the course of the subsequent two centuries the crusade movement threw together many different sections of society outwith political elites and military classes, with the effect that large numbers of people were suddenly confronted with strangers of different nationalities and languages in a manner that rarely occurred in the normal course of their lives, in enterprises in which they were all expected to work and fight together for the good of Christendom as a whole.
Nationality, regional identity and language in the
First Crusade
Of the entire crusade movement, the campaign which brought forth the broadest response in social and geographical terms was the First Crusade, whose forces left their homes in 1096 and reached Jerusalem in 1099.23 However, it did not include any kings, although their status would have made them the most obvious military leaders. The most powerful monarch in the West was Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Italy and Burgundy, but he was involved in a relentless struggle with the papacy over control of the Church in his dominions.
King Philip I of France had been excommunicated because of adultery shortly before the crusade and was unacceptable to the papacy as a participant, although his brother, Count Hugh of Vermandois, took part.24
The groups usually known as the ‘People’s Crusades’ comprised participants from northern and central France, western Germany, Lombardy and England.
Most of these broke up or were dispersed long before they reached Constantinople, and only a minority reached Asia Minor under the charismatic leader Peter the Hermit.25 In the better-ordered expeditions which kept to the official departure date of 15 August, crusaders from different parts of the West clustered around the leadership of regional magnates: the great dukes, counts and princes of France, western Germany and southern Italy. For most of the campaign each of these contingents marched, foraged and fought as separate units, coming together only for major battles and sieges. At various points in the campaign, the success of the c
rusade was hampered and even jeopardised as a result of quarrels between individual leaders, supported by their military retinues: these included disputes between the Apulian prince Tancred and Baldwin of Boulogne, the future King of Jerusalem, over possession of the port of Tarsus in Cilicia; between Raymond 114
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of Saint-Gilles and Bohemund over the city of Antioch and, later, territories beyond the Orontes; and between Raymond and Godfrey of Bouillon over the rulership of Jerusalem and, subsequently, the possession of the town of Ascalon in southern Palestine.26
Historians of the crusade have rarely asked whether any of these or other disputes may have been exacerbated or even driven by factors of national, regional or linguistic identity and difference. The great majority of the crusaders who reached Asia Minor originated from the kingdom of France, but this does not imply any linguistic unity. It is now commonplace in both academic and popular histories of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France to state that on the eve of the great revolution of 1789, less than half the population spoke a language that could be recognised as French. By the later Middle Ages the dialect of Paris and the Ile-de-France (known as Francien) had acquired a prestige above any other variety of French as the language of the royal court and the university of Paris. By the eighteenth century Parisian French was recognised as the universal language of diplomacy and polite society, yet travellers regularly reported difficulties in understanding and being understood in the French provinces.27 If this was the situation on the cusp of the modern era, how much less standardisation – and thus communication – must there have been centuries before the printing press, regular coach services and the Académie Française?
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