The First Crusade

by Thomas Asbridge

  Urban's vision of his religion was, however, coloured by the work of Christian theologians who, in the course of the first millennium CE, decided that scripture might not actually offer such a decisive or universal condemnation of violence and warfare. In part, these theorists were initially sent scurrying to reconsider Christian doctrine by the living reality with which they were confronted. It was always going to prove difficult to maintain an unwavering policy of pacifism in the face of mankind's inherent bellicosity, but, with the conversion of the Roman Empire, it became virtually impossible to sustain the absolute rejection of violence. From the fourth century onwards, Christianity underwent a gradual but deep-seated transformation as it fused with a Roman 'state' for which warfare was an essential feature of existence. Attempting to balance the proscriptions of faith with the needs of empire, some of the earliest Christian scholars, known as the founding fathers or patristic writers, sought to refine man's understanding of the message contained in the Bible. They did not have to look far to realise that, on the question of violence, scripture was riddled with apparent contradictions.

  In spite of its stated ban on bloodshed, Mosaic Law actually endorsed military defence in the face of aggression. Elsewhere, the Old Testament went even further. Being an ongoing history of the Hebrews' long struggle for survival, it describes a series of holy wars, conflicts sanctioned and supported by divine licence, in which God was held to be the author of victory. To patristic theologians, these examples appeared to indicate that, under the right circumstances, even vengeful or aggressive warfare might be permissible. Even the New Testament, if judged from a certain perspective, could appear to be ambivalent in its approach to physical conflict. Jesus had after all said that he came to bring not peace but a sword, and at one point had used a whip of cords to drive moneylenders out of the temple.

  The most influential patristic writer to grapple with these problems was the north African bishop St Augustine of Hippo (354-430 CE), perhaps the most eminent theologian in all Christian history and author of a long series of works exploring human existence and religious devotion. St Augustine's work on Christian violence laid the foundation upon which Pope Urban II eventually erected the crusading ideal. St Augustine argued that a war could be both legal and justified if fought under strictly controlled conditions. His complex theories were later simplified and consolidated to produce three prerequisites of a Just War: it must be proclaimed by a legitimate authority', like a king, prince or bishop; it ought to have a 'just cause', such as the recovery of lost property or defence against enemy attack; and it should be fought with 'right intention', that is without cruelty or excessive bloodshed. These three Augustinian principles were the basic building-blocks of the crusading ideal. But, although Augustine's work shaped the format and nature of Pope Urban IFs crusade sermon at Clermont, it did not actually provide the western Church with a working doctrine of holy war. St Augustine broke Latin Christian theology from the shackles of pacifism, and his ideas gradually filtered down into European society, helping to salve general anxieties about the relationship between faith and military service. But there were distinct limitations to his theory as it was applied to the medieval West. It was seen to demonstrate that certain forms of necessary, public warfare might be 'justified' - that is, acceptable and lawful in the eyes of God.24

  A significant conceptual divide separates this from 'sanctified' violence. This latter form of warfare was not deemed simply to be tolerable to God, a potentially sinful act to which he was prepared to turn a blind eye because its evil would lead to a greater good. Instead, a holy war was one that God actively supported, even demanded, which could be of spiritual benefit to its participants. Pope Urban's crusading ideal was an extension of this second class of sanctified warfare, but it was not until the eleventh century that the Latin Church really developed a working theory of holy war.

  Between the age of St Augustine and the council of Clermont, western Christendom gradually became acculturated to the concept of sanctified violence. This was an incremental, organic process, marked by sporadic episodes of theological experimentation, not a driven programme of linear development. Before the year 1000, the papacy occasionally dabbled in the rhetoric of holy war when facing significant threats. In the ninth century, two successive popes sought to rally military support by promising rather vaguely defined spiritual benefits - a 'heavenly reward' or 'eternal life' - to those who fought and died in defence of Rome. But this type of appeal seems to have garnered only a limited response and soon fell into disuse. At the same time, Latin society underwent a fitful awakening to the idea that 'just wars' might encompass elements of sacred obligation or reward. The prominent role of Carolingian bishops in sponsoring, even directing, brutal campaigns to conquer and convert the pagans of eastern Europe helped stimulate the idea that warfare might have a pious goal. The Christianisation of Germanic 'barbarian' traditions also encouraged reverence for the martial qualities of the warrior class and the adoption of the ritual blessing of the weapons of war by the clergy. It was a relatively small step to imagine that esteemed Christian knights, bearing sanctified arms and armour, might be capable of performing some sort of devotional service to God. Even so, at the turn of the millennium, any receptivity to the potential sanctification of violence was still balanced by an ingrained, almost instinctive suspicion that, amid the endemic disorder afflicting society, much of the 'public7 warfare proclaimed as 'just' by feuding lords was, in fact, illicit and thus sinful.

  It was not until the second half of the eleventh century that Latin Christendom truly began to edge towards the acceptance of sanctified violence and thus became receptive to the idea of crusading. The first step was the accelerated incidence of papally sponsored warfare. With elements of the Reform Movement urging Rome to pursue an energetic policy of empowerment, successive popes began taking a more active interest in the protection of their Italian territories and the extension of their international influence. It soon became apparent that, if Rome wished to stand on the world stage, it would, on occasion, need some form of material military power with which to enforce its spiritual will. It was nothing new for the papacy to seek martial support from its secular allies; the difference was the degree of its direct, even personal, involvement in warfare. In 1053, Pope Leo IX (1049-54) actually participated in a battle against the aggressive Norman adventurers who had recently invaded southern Italy, offering his supporters absolution from sin as reward for their military service. A decade later, one of Leo's successors, Alexander II (1061-73) lent papal support to Christians fighting against Islam in Iberia, suggesting that this type of warfare might, of itself, be penitential.25

  Pope Gregory VII and sanctified violence

  During the pontificate of Gregory VII the doctrine and application of sacred violence underwent a radical transformation. Gregory's ambitious and uncompromising vision of papal authority prompted him to pursue the sponsorship and sanctification of warfare at an unprecedented pace. His work created the platform upon which Urban stood in 1095. Possessed by an intensely personal notion of his office and believing more wholeheartedly than any pope before him that he was the literal, living embodiment of St Peter, Gregory was utterly convinced that he could wield full apostolic authority on earth. In his mind, there seems to have been no question but that the pope should have total, unchecked control over the spiritual wellbeing of mankind. He was, equally, in no doubt that this power took precedence over that exercised by kings and princes. To realise this audacious ideal, Gregory took a massive step towards the militarisation of the Latin Church. He decided that what Rome really needed was not the martial backing of potentially unreliable secular allies, but a fully fledged papal army owing its allegiance, first and foremost, to St Peter.

  In pursuit of this goal, Gregory made a series of sweeping pronouncements that slowly percolated throughout western society, threatening to reshape the Latin world order. He set about reinterpreting Christian tradition in order to establish a precedent for
his combative policies. Centuries earlier, patristic theologians had described the internal, spiritual battle waged against sin by devoted Christians as the warfare of Christ'. In time, it became popular in learned circles to conceive of monks as the 'soldiers of Christ', ascetics armed with prayer and ritual, engaged in a metaphorical war with temptation. Gregory appropriated this idea and twisted it to suit his purpose. He proclaimed that all lay society had one overriding obligation: to defend the Latin Church as 'soldiers of Christ' through actual, physical warfare.

  The laity had, in recent decades, been encouraged to reimagine their spiritual relationship with God and the Latin Church in terms that mirrored the structure of temporal society. With God conceived of as 'lord' and 'ruler' of the 'kingdom' of heaven, Christians were conditioned to believe that they owed him loyalty and service as they would a mortal king. To turn this diffuse theory into reality, Gregory harnessed and adapted a popular fixture of Christianity. Latin Europe was accustomed to the notion that saints - Christians who had lived meritorious lives or been martyred, and thus, in death, attained a special place in heaven - deserved reverence. Throughout the West, men and women championed patron saints, offering them dutiful veneration in return for protection and support. Gregory sought to transform this localised patchwork of allegiance by harnessing the universal appeal of St Peter. Rome had, for some time, described its supporters as fideles beati Petri, the 'faithful' of St Peter. But Gregory chose to focus on a different aspect of the word fideles, emphasising its implication of service and vassalage to suggest that all Latin Christians were, in fact, Vassals of St Peter and so by implication vassals of the pope.

  By fusing the vision of Christendom as God's 'kingdom', the practice of venerating saints and the feudal connotations of the term fideles, Gregory concocted an elaborate justification for his claim that all lay society owed him a debt of military service. In truth, much of Europe would not have fully understood this intricate web of distorted precedent and warped tradition, and certainly, in the divisive atmosphere of the Investiture Controversy, not all Latins answered Gregory's call to obedience. But he did manage to recruit a powerful network of fideles willing to do the bidding of Rome, many of whom would later support Urban's crusade.

  The most devoted and influential of these fideles was Countess Matilda of Tuscany, the great matriarch of northern Italy. Ruling one of the grandest princedoms in Europe, Matilda commanded respect in all corners of western Christendom. The not inconsiderable military resources of this 'daughter of St Peter', as she liked to be known, lent real force to the papal cause. As a wealthy patron Matilda also attracted some of the finest minds in Europe to her lavish court. Men like Anselm of Lucca, a master of canon law (the history of Church law and papal judgements) and the arch propagandist Bonizo of Sutri set out to shore up the theological underpinnings of Reform policy and cement the doctrine of Christian warfare. Throughout the 1080s, their work served to consolidate Gregorian theories in some areas and to fuel the pursuit of papal authority in others. This 'think tank' amassed an array of textual authorities with which to defend Matilda's reputation and rebut any criticism of the papacy's militarisation. Anselm scoured the annals of ecclesiastical law in search of precedents for the sanctification of violence, while Bonizo wrote a series of popularised, polemical histories of the Church, designed to demonstrate that God actually had a long record of endorsing holy war. One of their colleagues, John of Mantua, even managed to reinterpret a key pacifistic passage in scripture. John noted that, although Christ had ordered St Peter to sheathe his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, he had not told him to cast it aside. On this basis, John maintained that Jesus had, in fact, wanted his chief apostle to keep the weapon by his side for use at a later date. John's allegorical argument was that, while God did not intend the pope to wield the 'sword' in person, he did expect him to direct a material weapon' - the armed laity - in defence of Christendom. The work carried out at Matilda's court played a vital role in the genesis of the crusading ideal, serving to assemble and shape centuries of Christian thought on the question of violence into a coherent theory of sanctified violence, a resource upon which Urban would later draw.

  Working alongside these Matildine scholars, Gregory VII made the leap from concept to practice, taking significant steps towards the creation of a papal army and marking a distinct turning point on the road leading to Urban IPs speech at Clermont. Early in his pontificate, Gregory laid plans for a grand military enterprise that can be regarded as the prototype for a crusade. In 1074 he tried to launch a holy war in the eastern Mediterranean that would, had it come to fruition, have borne a striking resemblance to the campaign initiated by Urban II in 1095. Gregory sought to recruit lay military support in France and Germany for an expedition to bring aid to the Greek Christians of Byzantium, who were, he claimed, 'daily being butchered like cattle' by the Muslims of Asia Minor. He proposed to lead this bold defence of Christendom in person, declaring that the venture might take him all the way to the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem, and expressed the hope that success might bring about the reunification of the eastern and western Churches under the authority of Rome. Although Gregory declared in a letter of December 1074 that he had already amassed an army 50,000 strong a claim that was sheer fantasy - his grandiose project soon fizzled out, tarnished by its intimate association with Gregory's own personal authority and then extinguished by the scouring-wind of the Investiture Controversy.

  Gregory's planned expedition did, nonetheless, begin to crystallise the ideal of holy war. His predecessor had already implied that violence in the service of God might be meritorious; Gregory's 1074 scheme explained why. The spiritual benefits of participating in his campaign still seem to have been somewhat vague, described simply as a 'heavenly reward', but the reason why such a prize might be on offer was made much clearer. Gregory argued that his projected war would be fought in defence of the Christian faith and that the very act of bringing aid to Byzantium was an expression of love for one's Christian brethren and thus charitable. This formula of charitable defence made it much easier for contemporaries to believe that fighting in a holy war might truly earn them merit in the eyes of God. Events later in Gregory's pontificate also helped to clarify the penitential nature of sanctified violence. In the midst of the Investiture Controversy he urged Matilda of Tuscany to fight Henry IV 'for the remission of her sins' and instructed her 'to impose on [her] soldiers the danger of the coming battle for the remission of all their sins'. The scholar Anselm of Lucca later interpreted this to mean that participation in this war had the same purificational value as other forms of penance precisely because it promised, just like a pilgrimage, to be both difficult and perilous.

  For all this, Gregory VII cannot be regarded as the sole architect of the crusading ideal. He certainly never successfully launched a campaign on the scale of the First Crusade, nor was he particularly concerned to direct the energy of sanctified violence against Islam. But he did break crucial ground on the road to the idea of crusading. Gregory's radical, unrelenting drive towards militarisation prompted considerable criticism in ecclesiastical circles, as he was accused of dabbling in practices 'new and unheard of throughout the centuries'. His vision was so extreme that, when Urban II offered a more measured ideal, he appeared almost conservative in comparison and attracted little censure.26

  Gregory's achievements and those of his predecessors also meant that, by the start of Urban's pontificate in 1088, the concept of holy war had been formulated. The Latin West had been acculturated to the idea that certain classes of violence might be justified, and was slowly waking up to the notion that warfare directed by the papacy might have a penitential character and thus be capable, in some sense, of cleansing the soul of sin. Within a year of his assumption of the papal throne, Urban had begun to experiment with this new weapon: participants in the reconstruction of Tarragona were offered a remission of sin, but on this occasion the pope achieved a subtle shift of theological emphasis by equating this merit to
that of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In the years that followed, as the Gregorian papacy slowly enjoyed a renaissance of authority, Urban pondered the full potential of sanctified violence. It was only at the council of Clermont, in the wake of the appeal at Piacenza, that the full range of his ambition became evident.

  THE SERMON AT CLERMONT

  The First Crusade was proclaimed in November 1095 during Urban IFs momentous visit to France. His was the first journey made by any pope outside Italy for almost half a century. With the ongoing Investiture Controversy and the recent diminution of papal authority, the journey north of the Alps was designed to affirm Urban's legitimacy and assert Rome's presence in his old homeland. Even with the papal reputation besmirched by years of chaotic conflict, Urban's grand tour of the region cannot have failed to impress. It had been decades since most of the towns and villages through which his lavish entourage passed had witnessed a visit from a bishop or prince, let alone that of a pope accompanied by a host of senior clergymen. For many, this was the spectacle of a lifetime.