[another reference to foxes despoiling grapevines, Cant. II, 15]; Cap. 1, Col. 1094B:
‘Rusticani homines sunt et idiotae, et prorsus contemptibiles: sed non est, dico vobis, cum eis negligenter agendum. Multum enim proficiunt ad impietatem, et sermo eorum ut cancer serpit (II Tim. II, 16, 17)’; Cap. 3: ‘laetentur in perditione hominum.
Tolle de Ecclesia honorabile connubium et torum immaculatum (Hebr. XIII, 4); nonne reples cam concubinariis, incestuosis, seminifluis, mollibus’; Cap. 7: ‘Immundis autem, et infidelibus nihil est mundum, sed polluta est eorum mens et conscientia (Tit.
I, 15)’; Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, Historia Albigensis, PL 213, Cap. 8, Cap. 43. Peter the Venerable agrees on the false prophecy of Muhammad, PL 189, Cap. 29, Col.
0698A: ‘nec propheta fuerit, nec Dei nuntius, sed seductor et profanus sequentia declarabunt’. See also C.M. Kurpiewski, ‘Writing beneath the Shadow of Heresy: The Historia Albigensis of Brother Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay’, Journal of Medieval History 31, 2005, 1–27; Frassetto, ‘The Image of the Saracen’; R.I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987, pp. 17–19.
101 Moore, Persecuting Society, pp. 68, 98, 122, 139.
102 Beda, Quaestionem super genesim ex dictis partum dialogues, PL 93, Col. 0311A; Hrabanus Maurus, Commentariorum Genesim libri quattuor. De conjunctione Agar, PL 107, Cap. 18, Col. 0544A; Walafrid Strabo, Liber genesis, PL 113, Col. 0122A–B; Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermones in Cantica Canticorum, PL 183, Col. 1094B.
103 Moore, Persecuting Society, 1987, pp. 22, 111.
104 Petrus Venerabilis, Adversus nefandam haeresim, PL 189, Col. 0685D–0686B: ‘Ex quo ab aliquot annis lex Mathumetica de lingua Arabica in patriam, id est Latinam, meo translata est, mirari non desino, nec satis mirari sufficio, qua ratione propheta ille vester suo Alchoran quaedam de Hebraica, quaedam insuper de Christiana lege excerpta admiscuit . . . Si acquiescit Judaicis vel Christianis scriptis ex parte, cur non acquiescit ex toto? . . . Cur bonam dixit legem Judaicam, quam non sequitur? cur Christianum Evangelium praedicat, quo vituperat?’
105 Bernard McGinn, Antichrist: Two Thousand Years of the Human Fascination with Evil, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000, p. 85.
106 Eulogius of Cordoba Eulogius names Muhammad a heresiarch and forerunner of antichrist, PL 115, Col. 744C–D; and Petrus Alvarus identifies him with Behemoth and Leviathan, in the line of the predecessors of antichrist, PL 121, Col. 535A.
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However, these two authors were writing in the Iberian peninsula, and their texts reflect ideas specially related to the reconquista. Except for the remotely possible exception of Ademar of Chabannes, crusade historians from the Franko-Norman and Teutonic realms did not discuss crusading in terms of the appearance of antichrist before the thirteenth century.
107 According to the Koran, Muhammad’s only miraculous act was the production of the holy book, whereas the Hadith and biographies contain several references to the miracles of the Prophet.
108 As Norman Daniel states in ‘Learned and Popular Attitude to the Arabs in the Middle Ages’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 41, 1977–8, 41–51. However, he is painstakingly correct in pointing out the difficulty of explaining medieval western texts, which seem to include fact and fiction at the same time. He could have been describing the interpretation of these early travesties of Machomet’s life.
109 GN 100; Adelphus, Vita Machometi, lines 115–17. Several later crusade-related authors were aware of the monotheism of Islam, including Peter the Venerable and his translators, Otto of Freising, William of Malmesbury, William of Tyre and Humbert of Romans.
110 The animal motif is developed in the story of the bovine disciple of Machomet.
According to Adelphus and Guibert, the false prophet trained a cow to perform his false miracles. The cow ran to him with the Saracen law on her horns at his command, acting as a messenger of faith. In Gautier’s version, Machomet has a white bull arrive bearing the Koran, and Embricon includes in his vitae a lengthy series of bovine miracles, which culminate in the removal of the King of Babylon from the throne and his replacement by Mammutius before the eyes of an admiring audience. GN 97–98; Adelphus, Vita Machometi, lines 225–32; Gautier of Compiègne, Otia de Machomete, lines 839–56; Embricon of Mainz, Vita Mahumeti, lines 518–41, 605–44, 667–9, 695.
111 The western tradition relates the prohibition on the eating of pork to the death of the Prophet. In Guibert’s account Mathomus dies during an epileptic attack, and is eventually eaten by pigs, which leave nothing behind but his heels. His followers think that he has gone to heaven. Adelphus’s work includes a similar story, although this time the part of the body left behind is the right arm. Machomet’s link with pigs is here stressed by making him a swineherd from Lebanon. In Embricon’s text, God strikes Mammutius with epilepsy and makes him fall among pigs, which lacerate his body and separate his head from his shoulders. GN 99; Adelphus, Vita Machometi, lines 311–22; Embricon of Mainz, Vita Mahumeti, lines 835–45, 1055–7.
112 Generally speaking, the majority of medieval learned treatises emphasized heresy and the denial of Christ rather than idolatry in their explanation of Islam. However, genre dictated the interpretation to some extent, and in cases of the chansons and chronicles, idolatry prevails or occurs in parallel with heresy.
113 Jean Flori, ‘La caricature de l’Islam dans l’Occident médiéval: origine et signification de quelques stéréotypes concernant l’Islam’, Aevum 2, 1992, 245–56; Norman Daniel, Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (3rd edn), Washington: Oneworld, 2000, p. 193.
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T H E I M PA C T O F T H E F I R S T
C R U S A D E O N W E S T E R N
O P I N I O N T O WA R D S T H E
B Y Z A N T I N E E M P I R E 1
The Dei Gesta per Francos of Guibert of
Nogent and the Historia Hierosolymitana
of Fulcher of Chartres
Léan Ní Chléirigh
While the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 to the forces of the First Crusade led to centuries of strained relations between the ‘West’ and the Islamic world, ironically, the effect of the crusade on the most important local Christian power, the Byzantine Empire, was disastrous. Disputes during the course of the 1096–9 expedition coloured Western attitudes against ‘New Rome’, entered into the consciousness of Latin Christendom and laid the basis for a direct assault on the empire – a Christian empire – by crusaders in 1204. Chapter 3 of this volume provides a detailed examination of the political, economic and military interaction between the crusades and the Byzantine Empire, but in this chapter the mentality of the first crusaders towards their co-religionists will be examined in detail. The devastating consequences of the enmity between the Latins and the Byzantines are well known, but the origin of this antagonism remains more obscure. Did the crusaders leave Western Europe hoping, as Urban II almost certainly did, to reconcile any religious grievances with the orthodox Christians and combat Islam as a unified Christianity?
Or had they preconceived negative attitudes towards the Byzantines that were given flight when political circumstances brought conflict between them? Was Urban II’s conciliatory attitude towards the Eastern Christians echoed among the majority of the crusaders, or was it even understood? Did the events and outcome of the campaign of 1096–9 harden attitudes that had initially been positive?
The relative abundance of sources for the First Crusade, those written by eyewitnesses and those written by contemporaries, allows us to canvass a broader section of opinion than for many periods in the Middle Ages. In particular, through an examination of two early twelfth-century chronicles of the First 161
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Crusade, which offer widely differing views of the Byzantines, this chapter will demonstrate that there was not a consensus of opinion towards the Byzantines even up to a number of years after the fall of Jerusalem. The
Dei Gesta per Francos of Guibert, abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy, contains religious, political and moral denunciations of the Byzantines and their emperor, Alexios I Komnenos, while the Historia Hierosolymitana of Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain to King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, contains almost no criticism of the emperor or his subjects. The influences on these two authors are investigated to assess the effect that the events of the crusade and its aftermath had on their attitudes, allowing for some insight into the impact the First Crusade had on the evolution of the views of the Latin West towards the Byzantine Empire.
The announcement of the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont in 1095
by Pope Urban II and the subsequent preaching by himself and others prompted an enormous response from military men and unarmed pilgrims. Whether intentionally or not, the call to combat the enemies of God created a dichotomy between Christians and non-Christians in the minds of the crusaders with violent results, such as the massacres of the Rhineland Jews in 1096. This theological background to the preaching of the crusades placed the Byzantine Empire in a difficult position. In 1095 Alexios had sent envoys to the Council of Piacenza to ask for Western aid against the encroaching Muslim forces.2 It is almost certain that Alexios had in mind aid of a similar nature to that which the West had been providing for generations, namely mercenaries or groups of knights who would be assimilated into the imperial forces. The imperial forces would then presumably have been employed in strategic operations designed to reconquer the lands lost by the empire; indeed, this is how Alexios conducted his military affairs in the wake of the crusade. In contrast with this more limited perspective, the actual crusade was an independent, all-out assault on the non-Christian East up to and including Jerusalem.
When the crusade armies began to arrive in imperial territory in 1096, Alexios was faced with the difficult task of accommodating substantial armies with their own independent leaders as well as large numbers of non-combatants who were poorly funded and even worse behaved.3 Having requested aid from the West, Alexios now had to deal with that aid and the crusaders apparently expected the empire to take full part in the expedition. The poor discipline of the initial crusade contingent led by Peter the Hermit on their journey through imperial territories and their disturbance of public order near Constantinople had put the Byzantines on their guard.4 When the following crusaders arrived to a hostile population and close attention from imperial forces, relations deteriorated and violence broke out.
Once reasonably harmonious relations had been restored and the crusading army moved into Asia Minor, there was a degree of Latin–Byzantine cooperation on the expedition, most notably during the siege of Nicaea in June 1097, when Alexios provided boats to the crusaders to blockade the city from the lake side.
During the siege of Antioch, with the apparent failure of Alexios to join the expedition, as well as the departure of Tatikios, the Byzantine envoy to the 162
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crusade, many crusaders felt that they no longer owed political or religious loyalty to the Byzantines. Establishing a Latin principality centred on Antioch, Bohemond I, the Norman Prince of Taranto, defended his occupation of lands held previously by the emperor by accusing Alexios of defaulting on his promises to the crusaders.
In 1101 groups of crusaders left Western Europe and travelled through the empire to reinforce Latin forces in the new crusader principalities. These crusaders were defeated heavily in their journey through Asia Minor and some commentators blamed the outcome on Byzantine treachery.5 It was at this time that the earliest written reports of the crusade made their way back to Western Europe.
Probably the earliest and certainly the most influential of the narratives of the First Crusade was the anonymous Gesta Francorum et Aliorum Hierosolymitanorum. That this chronicle was available in multiple copies can be seen in the extent to which it was used by other authors both the Levant and Western Europe.6 The Gesta Francorum was almost certainly written by a follower of Bohemond, the leader of the southern Italian Normans. Not long after the defeat of the forces of Kerbogha, Atabeg of Mosul, by the crusade forces after the siege of Antioch in 1098, Bohemond had established himself as Prince of Antioch. This had brought him into conflict with the Byzantine emperor, who claimed the city for himself.
Bohemond returned to France in 1106 and preached a new crusade with the support of Pope Paschal II. This crusade never made it to the Near East; instead, it turned aside at Dyrrachium and engaged the Byzantine forces there. It has been suggested by modern historians that the intention of the Norman prince had been to attack the Byzantines from the start, and one contemporary commentator reported that Bohemond had verbally attacked the Byzantine emperor while preaching the ‘crusade’ of 1106–7 in France.7 This perspective, developed by A.C.
Krey in a famous article, led him to suggest that the Gesta Francorum was brought to the West by Bohemond to support his preaching campaign and that the anti-Byzantine tone of the Gesta suited his purpose.8 The subsequent criticisms of the Byzantines by those medieval authors who used the Gesta Francorum as the basis of their chronicles have therefore been traced to this attempt by Bohemond to lead an assault on the Byzantine lands.
An overly strict adherence to the above interpretation releases the authors of narratives derived from the anonymous Gesta from having their own input with regard to a negative portrayal of the Byzantines and reduces their chronicles to derivatives of their source. At least three authors in France read the Gesta Francorum in the opening years of the twelfth century. Each of these writers felt that the style of the anonymous chronicle was deficient and that the events it described needed to be presented in a more correct style and within a coherent theological framework.9 All three added information that they had received from other sources, in particular a more detailed description of the Council of Clermont, which the anonymous author described only briefly.10 The extent to which each of these authors reinterpreted the material in the Gesta Francorum to suit their theological and exegetical agenda demonstrates that they were by no 163
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means passive copyists and there is, therefore, no reason to assume that they included statements of anti-Byzantine sentiment unintentionally. Guibert of Nogent, in particular, developed the criticisms of the Byzantines in his source to criticise their character traits, their religion and above all their emperor.
The Gesta Francorum was not the only eyewitness account of the First Crusade: at least three other eyewitnesses wrote accounts of the expedition. It is clear, however, that each of these authors made use of the anonymous history in their own works. In the case of Fulcher of Chartres, although he took part in the crusade, he borrowed a number of sections of his history directly from the Gesta.
This is because Fulcher was absent from the main body of the Christian army from 17 September 1097, when the lord to whom he was affiliated, Baldwin of Boulogne, detached his forces to march towards Tarsus. When Baldwin then took up the opportunity of becoming Lord of Edessa, Fulcher accompanied him as his chaplain.11 It was not until Baldwin completed his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1100
that Fulcher reached the Holy City, and he settled there permanently after 1101, when Baldwin became king on the death of his brother Godfrey of Bouillon. It is clear that Fulcher used the anonymous chronicle (among other sources) to provide details for those events of the First Crusade at which he had not been present, in particular the sieges of Antioch and the journey to Jerusalem.12 The departure of Tatikios from the siege of Antioch and the failure of Alexios to join the crusade at this point brought crusader–Byzantine relations to their lowest level. The Gesta Francorum, Fulcher’s principal source, described the Byzantine envoy as ‘our enemy’. Even if Fulcher were meticulously balanced in his portrayal of the Byzantines up to this point, the unequivocal tone of his source could reasonably be expected to find an echo in his Historia. Yet the Historia Hierosolymitana contains virtually no h
int of this deterioration in relations.
In the cases of Guibert and Fulcher, it is clear that these crusading historians did not adopt the point of view of their source wholesale with regard to the Byzantine Empire, and indeed other subjects. They filtered the material they were using through their own respective perspectives. Through a close examination of the attitude expressed towards the Byzantines in the works of these historians and in providing an assessment of the influences helping shape these attitudes, it can be seen that the events of the First Crusade had, in fact, only a limited effect in changing the very different attitudes of these two authors towards the Byzantines.
Guibert, abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy
The Dei Gesta per Francos is only one of Guibert of Nogent’s written works, which include a work on sermons, biblical exegesis of the Book of Genesis, his autobiography or memoirs, a treatise against the Jews and a work on the treatment of relics.13 Our knowledge of Guibert’s life comes from the autobiography or De Vita Sua sive Monodiae. He was born into a noble family and gives us his father’s name, Evrard, but not his mother’s. When Guibert was born, medical complications put both his and his mother’s lives at risk, prompting Evrard to pledge his 164
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son to the monastic life, should both survive. His father died when he was very young and his mother provided him with a tutor. When Guibert was twelve his mother joined the local monastery of St Germer-de-Fly and his tutor joined the same house soon after.14 After living with his cousins for a time, Guibert also joined St Germer and began his monastic career. By the time of the composition of the Dei Gesta per Francos in 1109, Guibert was abbot of Nogent-sous-Coucy.15
Guibert was not an eyewitness participant on the crusade yet his extensive classical reading informed him that the classical and Isidorean definition of history was that written by ‘him who had taken part’.16 The question of whether he was fit to write a history of the First Crusade troubled Guibert and he paused on a number of occasions to assure his reader that he should not be criticised for writing the Dei Gesta. Guibert explained that he had compared his source, the Gesta Francorum, with the testimony of eyewitnesses to determine its reliability.17
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