The Age of Chivalry

by Hywel Williams

  While Roger was consolidating Norman Sicily, his brother had been pursuing his ambitions across the Adriatic in the Greek-controlled Balkans. Robert Guiscard’s army left Brindisi in May 1081, and the battle fought in October at Dyrrhachium against the Greek army led by the emperor Alexius ended in one of the greatest of all Norman victories. The prospect of a Norman being enthroned in Constantinople now seemed realistic, but at this crucial juncture Robert returned to Rome to support Pope Gregory VII, who was being besieged by the German emperor Henry IV. Robert’s son Mark Bohemond conquered Thessaly but failed to maintain authority over the Norman conquests of 1081–82. Robert himself died in 1084 while attempting to restore Norman control in Corfu and Cephalonia, and Bohemond returned to Italy where he and his half-brother Roger Borsa were disputing the succession to their father. The island of Sicily was the jewel in what became the Norman’s Mediterranean crown, and Count Roger’s son, who shared his name, succeeded to the title in boyhood before assuming the reins of government in 1112. Roger II then sidelined his Guiscard cousins who were facing baronial rebellions in their south Italian domains. Having given them military support, he received in return control of their Sicilian territories. Roger had inherited Calabrian territories from his father, and in a dramatic move he invaded Puglia in 1126 following the death of its Norman duke. Southern Italy was now his, and Roger subsequently gained the authority unique to a king. In 1130 there was a disputed papal election and Roger supported the rebel pope Anacletus II, whose emissary duly crowned him that year in Palermo. After Anacletus died in 1138 Roger captured the rival pope Innocent II, who then obliged him by confirming the kingly title in 1139.

  The papacy’s Sicilian association had been unusually close ever since Urban II appointed Roger I an apostolic legate in 1098. This gave the count the right to appoint bishops and collect church revenues in the island but, far from being a concession of its authority, the papacy saw it as a mere expedient. Arab emirs had ruled the island for centuries, and even under Roger II western Sicily’s population was heavily Arabic. The Church therefore could not enforce Latin Christianity on its own, and the Norman rulers oversaw the new episcopal administration established at Palermo, Syracuse and Agrigento. Nonetheless, the papacy insisted that kings of Sicily were its vassals and that the office of apostolic legate, claimed by Roger II as his father’s successor, could not be inherited. Still, Roger now had his crown, and popes agreed that Roger was “king of Sicily, of the duchy of Apulia, and the principality of Capua.” In 1131 he established military control over Amalfi which, although part of Norman Puglia since 1073, had tried to retain some autonomy. In 1139 the duchy of Naples was incorporated within Roger’s kingdom, which by now was a major European power.

  IMPOSING BUREAUCRATIC POWER

  Roger II’s strategies had one consistent aim: that his kingdom should be run as a single and independent territorial unit. He might delegate some powers to feudal lords, but military service was expected in return. Furthermore, since Roger controlled the rights of inheritance to fiefs, he could bar vassals he deemed unsuitable. Only the king’s courts, rather than those of abbots and counts, could try capital cases. Justiciars—judges appointed by the Crown—traveled into the remote southern Italian countryside to dispense Roger’s justice. Baronial power remained significant on most of the mainland, but things were different on the island of Sicily and in Calabria. Since most of the island consisted of royal demesne land under direct government control, the king was also its landlord. A Norman bureaucracy controlled the towns’ administration, the activities of their merchants and the organization of supplies. The monarchy also had extensive rights over salt production, while iron and steel manufacture was an exclusive regalian right. This gave Roger an unusually concentrated degree of economic power regulated by a civil service built on Norman foundations and supplemented by Greek and Arab influences.

  The emperor Justinian’s heritage was a major intellectual resource for Roger, since his jurists showed how rebellion against a divinely instituted ruler was a form of sacrilege. The emperor’s law codes—the basis of Roman law—were circulated widely in 11th-century southern Italy, and they heavily influenced Roger’s own code promulgated at the Assizes of Ariano in 1140. Notions of lordship, by now common in Western Europe, could also be pressed into service. In 1129 Roger assembled his barons at Melfi in central southern Italy and proclaimed a land peace at this parliamentum or gathering of nobles. This was a very Norman baronial endorsement of a feudal overlord. And the mixture of influences deployed to confirm Roger’s rule did not end there. If he seemed like a Greek basileus or king to his Greek subjects, his Arab ones looked on him as the latest emir set over them.

  Sicily’s agricultural fertility and buoyant trade produced the revenues that enabled Roger to reign over the Mediterranean’s most sophisticated courtly milieu. His monarchy also bribed on a grand scale—especially in Lombardy where Sicily needed the local towns to maintain their resistance to the encroaching German emperors. If Lombardy fell, it was thought that Sicily would be next. The marriage in 1184 of Roger’s posthumous daughter Constance to Henry VI, son and heir to the German emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, changed the political and military landscape of the central Mediterranean. Sicily and the empire were reconciled by a personal union between the dynasty of Sicilian Normans and that of the Staufen, although Sicily’s Crown retained its independence within the empire. The marriage produced the emperor Frederick II, who inherited the abilities of both his grandfathers as well as their defining ambitions: Barbarossa’s southward thrust into Italy and Roger’s exalted notion of a supreme kinship.

  A POLICY OF LATINIZATION

  Sicily’s unusually polyglot nature meant that Roger’s government had to issue its documents in Greek, Latin and Arabic if the king’s will was to be understood. The cultural variety of his kingdom was further reflected in its ruler’s harem, Saracen bodyguard and Arab chef. Muslim poets benefited from royal patronage, and Sicily was an important 12th-century center for the translation of Greek texts into Latin. Roger’s chief intellectual interest lay in science, and he commissioned the north African Muslim al-Idrisi to produce the Kitab Rujar (Book of Roger), which aimed to describe the known world’s natural resources.

  This disc is the preface to Muhammad al-Idrisi’s world atlas, the Tabula Rogeriana, which was produced in 1154.

  Royal policy was, nonetheless, directed toward making Sicily culturally more Latin at the expense of its earlier Arab and Greek components, and Roger’s aims were hardly multicultural. The king’s smattering of Arabic helped him to negotiate trade agreements with the Fatimid rulers of Egypt, and he promoted some Muslims at his court. That patronage was, however, Roger’s method of keeping the local Greek and Norman nobility in their place, and Muslims promoted to the highest levels in his service were expected to convert to the Latin church. Palermo’s Palatine Chapel shows the Sicilian cultural mix: a Latin church design, a typically Arabic stalactite roof, and Byzantine mosaics that portray Roger as a new David returned to rule on Earth. He claimed to rule as God’s own deputy within the Sicilian kingdom, and when attending major church services Roger was both dressed as a king and robed as a priest. On these high festivals he wore a tunic and dalmatic made of Sicilian silk. The king’s mantle, just like his silk shoes and stockings, was deep red—a color evoking the purple worn by the emperors of ancient Rome and Byzantium. The royal tombs he commissioned made the same insistent point, since they were made of porphyry, the purple marble used by Roman emperors. Roger’s calculated fusion of temporal might with spiritual authority was intended to inspire awe, and the zest with which he developed the iconography of power showed a typically Norman blend of wiliness and aggression.

  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  1071–1109

  In March 1095 ambassadors from the Greek emperor Alexius I Commenus delivered a message to Pope Urban II, who was presiding at the Church council convened in Piacenza. The Byzantine empire had lost most of Anatolia to the Se
ljuk Turks following the Greeks’ defeat in the Battle of Manzikert (August 26, 1071), and Alexius wanted Western military aid in order to regain his lands. His emissaries had also been instructed to remind the pope and council that Jerusalem was Muslim-controlled, and that Western pilgrims’ access to the Holy City was being frustrated as a result. This call to arms was to lead to the series of fierce struggles between Christian and Muslim forces known as the crusades.

  When the Greek emperor Alexius requested military aid to help expel the Muslims from Jerusalem, his timing could not have been better. Seljuk princes were quarreling among themselves, and the Turks’ advance had stalled. The papacy’s confrontation with the German empire was proof of its new self-confidence, and relations between the Greek and Latin Churches were once again relatively amicable. The East-West split had become a formal schism in 1054, and the Greeks were resolute in denying primacy to the Roman see over their patriarchates at Constantinople, Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem. Following his election to the papacy Urban was, however, keen to end the divide. He had lifted the sentence of excommunication imposed on Alexius by Gregory VII and was also sympathetic to the plight of Greek Christians subjected to persecution by the Turks.

  HOLY WAR

  The pope’s formal and public response to Alexius’s missive came in November 1095 at the synod held in Clermont in the Auvergne. Urban had spent the intervening months in his native France drumming up support for intervention in Palestine and Syria. His discussions with Adhemar, the bishop of Le Puy, as well as with Raymond IV of Toulouse, prepared the ground for his announcement at Clermont, and their influential support gave a powerful leadership in southern France to the crusading cause. Urban’s impassioned speech of November 27 proclaimed the vision of an armed pilgrimage whose adherents would fight for the liberation of the holy places. His statement guaranteeing that the pilgrims’ sins would be remitted if they died fighting for so sacred a cause gave an original, and highly appealing, twist to this declaration of war. From late 1095 onward the message was spread by the clergy not only in the rest of France but also in Italy and Germany. Most who “took the cross” were poor and pious peasants, and their vow committed them to a pilgrimage that would only end on arrival at Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. During 1096 a group of knights and nobles emerged to lead and organize the vast and French dominated army of devout peasants that had been created so suddenly.

  ABOVE Pope Urban II presides over the Council of Clermont in 1095, as shown in this manuscript of Livres des Passages d’Outre-mer, c.1490.

  ABOVE 15th-century woodcut engraving of Godfrey of Bouillon arriving in Jerusalem on horseback in 1099.

  This, then, was the crusade that would lead to the establishment of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the counties of Tripoli and of Edessa. These crusader states would help to relieve Byzantium of the pressure it had been under in the late 11th century, while the Greeks re-established control of much of Western Asia Minor. However, the victorious Latins refused to hand back to the Greeks territories in Palestine and Syria that had been in Byzantine control before the Arab armies’ seventh-century conquests in the region. Western European rulers would direct eight further crusades toward the Middle East in the next two centuries, but none enjoyed the success that came to the first of these ventures—a campaign whose mass appeal surprised even its own leadership.

  Following the Battle of Manzikert, the Greek empire was mostly confined to the Balkans and a narrow strip of land in northwest Anatolia. But the Seljuk Turks failed to maintain a coordinated impetus, and in the 1090s there were separate, and often quarrelsome, principalities located in Anatolia, Aleppo and Damascus. Further south the Seljuks confronted a major enemy in the Fatimids, an Arab dynasty that had ruled Egypt since the late tenth century and which had subsequently expanded into parts of Palestine. The Fatimids’ regime seems to have been a tolerant one so far as Christian areas within Palestine were concerned. However, their Shiite Muslim faith divided them from the Seljuks—who were followers of Sunni Islam—and the military conflict between the two powers caused massive disruption to the Christians of the Palestinian region. Jerusalem was Fatimid controlled until the early 1070s, and the dynasty regained the city from the Turks in 1098, just before the crusaders’ arrival. It was the Turkish occupation of Anatolia and the Syrian south that formed the immediate background to the First Crusade. Accounts of the suffering inflicted on the regions’ Christians reached Western Europe and gained a wide circulation by the 1090s. But the Seljuk occupation of Palestine from c.1073 onward had a similarly destructive impact on Christian lives and property.

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  THE FIRST CRUSADE

  1071 Following the defeat of the Byzantine army at Manzikert, most of Anatolia is controlled by the Seljuk Turks.

  1095 At a synod held in Clermont, Auvergne, Pope Urban II launches a campaign for the liberation of the “holy places” in Syria and Palestine.

  1097 A crusading army is transported from Constantinople to the shores of Asia Minor: Nicaea’s Turkish garrison surrenders (June 19), and by October the crusaders are besieging Antioch.

  1098 Establishment of the county of Edessa, the first crusader state. Antioch falls (June).

  1099 The crusading army arrives at the walls of Jerusalem (early June) and besieges the city. Jerusalem falls (July 15). Godfrey of Bouillon is elected to rule the city, and establishes the Principality of Galilee and the county of Jaffa as territorial components within what will become known as the “Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.”

  1100 Baldwin, count of Edessa, succeeds his brother Godfrey and is crowned king of Jerusalem.

  1103 Raymond of Toulouse launches a military offensive in the Lebanon against the emir of Tripoli. His son Bertrand continues the campaign after Raymond’s death (1106) and, following the emir’s surrender (1109), a county of Tripoli is established.

  * * *

  CRUSADER ARISTOCRATIC FAMILY CONNECTIONS

  In the early 1080s Bohemond, prince of Taranto and the son of Robert Guiscard, had directed his fellow Normans’ campaigning against Byzantine lands in southern Italy. He was joined on the crusade by his nephew, Tancred. Although Bohemond had carved out a small principality for himself in the Italian south, he hoped to take over a larger one while on crusade. Godfrey of Bouillon also joined the crusade, despite having been a supporter of the emperor Henry IV in the imperial struggle against the papacy. He was joined in the venture by his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. The other major leaders joining the crusade included: Hugh of Vermandois, who was the younger brother of King Philip I of France; King William II of England’s younger brother Robert of Normandy; Count Robert II of Flanders; and the Count of Blois, Stephen II, who was married to William the Conqueror’s daughter.

  THE “PEOPLE’S CRUSADE”

  The crusader forces were due to congregate in Constantinople in mid-August 1096. But the enthusiasm engendered by Urban’s call to arms led many peasants to form their own crusading organizations. Peter the Hermit, a priest from near Amiens, was the most celebrated of the many populist preachers who traveled through France advocating a crusade. In the spring of 1096, assisted by a few knights, he was leading thousands of illiterate peasants toward the east when some of their number massacred Jews in the Rhine valley—an area that was the scene of much anti-Semitic violence in 1095–96. In fact, Peter’s unofficial “People’s Crusade” posed a threat to public order, and it provoked counter-attacks by the armies of both the Hungarians and the Greeks as the rabble advanced toward Constantinople. An alarmed Alexius ferried Peter’s army across the Bosphorus as quickly as possible, and most of the force was slaughtered by the Turks at the Battle of Civitate in October.

  NICAEA AND ANTIOCH—DECISIVE SIEGES

  Alexius was also keen to be rid of the official crusading army, which was camped outside his capital’s walls in the winter of 1096–97. Hungry crusaders were already pillaging in the outskirts of Constantinople. Alexius had no interest in join
ing them, but he did expect the leaders of these Latins to swear fealty to him in return for food and military supplies. Raymond of Toulouse would only go as far as promising not to damage the Greek empire’s interests. Eventually, however, all the other crusade leaders agreed to the oath, and in the opening months of 1097 the entire expedition, accompanied by two Greek generals, was transported to Asia Minor.

  The ancient Christian city of Nicaea, captured 20 years earlier by the Seljuk Turks, was now the capital of their Anatolian principality, the Sultanate of Rum. It was subjected to a month-long siege and Alexius, encamped some distance away, supplied the crusaders with military reinforcements. The Greek general Manuel Boutoumites received the surrender of Nicaea’s Turkish garrison on June 19. Boutoumites was named dux or duke of Nicaea, and the city once more became part of Byzantium’s empire.

  The crusading army, now divided into a Norman component led by Bohemond and a French division led by Raymond, advanced across the Anatolian plain. On July 1, at Dorylaeum, the reunited army gained its first victory in battle over the Seljuk Turks, but further progress was slow. The local population were mostly Christian and therefore friendly, but lack of supplies still meant that the crusaders had to resort to pillaging and looting. Leadership quarrels were also emerging, and Baldwin of Boulogne separated from his colleagues. The kingdom of Cilicia (in modern southeast coastal Turkey) was a recent foundation established by Armenians fleeing from the Seljuk invasion, and this Christian state would be a strong ally of European crusaders. To its east lay Edessa—another region populated by Armenians but ruled by Thoros, a local nobleman alienated from his subjects by his Greek Orthodox religion. Thoros was first persuaded to adopt Baldwin as his heir and was then assassinated—possibly by his protégé, who duly succeeded him as ruler in March 1098 and then took the title of count.