The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West

by Tom Holland

  True, things did not appear quite as terminal for Alexius Comnenus as they had done at the start of his reign. The young emperor, clawing the fortunes of his people back from the very brink, had recovered well from his initial defeat at the hands of Robert Guiscard. Total ruin had been averted. It helped that Guiscard himself had died on campaign back in 1085, a bare two months after Gregory VII; and it had helped that the nomadic Pechenegs, whose talent for spreading mayhem was second to none, had been brought in 1091 to a resounding defeat. Even the Turks, those most menacing adversaries of all, had lately begun to show an encouraging taste for in-fighting. Alexius, tracking developments carefully from beyond the Bosphorus, had been positively itching to capitalise on their squabbling. With Turkish settlers digging in along the length of the Aegean coast, and one warlord even established inside Nicaea, within striking distance of the Queen of Cities herself, he was painfully aware that the opportunity for staging an imperial comeback in the East might soon have passed him by for good. Yet Alexius could not afford to take any risks. The raising of an army large enough to storm Nicaea, let alone attempt the recovery of the lost provinces beyond it, would require the stripping of every last reserve from the rest of the empire. The very survival of Constantinople would then be left hanging in the balance. A second Manzikert, and everything would be lost. And so it was, looking around for reinforcements that might offer him a reasonable prospect of success, while also remaining safely expendable, that Alexius’s gaze had turned towards the West.

  Where Urban, brooding on the global scale of Christendom’s problems, had his own agenda. To be sure, no less than Alexius, he dreaded that Constantinople might fall: for he shared in the anguished conviction of the Basileus that the collapse of the eastern front was a mortal danger to the Christian people everywhere. Simultaneously, however, he would not have forgotten what it was that Gregory, twenty years before, had identified in the self-same crisis: the symptoms of a universal disorder, and the stirrings of Antichrist. Clearly, then, although the great labour of reforming the world had already come far, it still had a long way to go. Whether it was to be seen in the trampling down of a Christian frontier by infidel horsemen, or in the pretensions of an excommunicated Caesar, or in the sweaty fumblings of a priest with his concubine, shadow still persisted everywhere across the fallen world.

  Indeed, if anything, in that summer of 1095, it appeared to be thickening and threatening a truly cosmic darkness – for the universe itself had been taken sick. Back in the spring, even as delegates from the Council of Piacenza were heading homewards, bright stars, “all crowded together and dense, like hail or snowflakes,” had begun to plummet earthwards. “A short while later a fiery way appeared in the heavens; and then after another short period half the sky turned the colour of blood.”122 Meanwhile, in France, along the very roads taken by the Pope, there were marks of famine to be seen everywhere, and reports of strange visions to be heard, and prophecies of fabulous wonders. “And this,” in the opinion of many, “was because already, in every nation, the evangelical trumpet was sounding the coming of the Just Judge.”123

  Where better, then, amid such feverish expectations, for Urban to pause and take stock of things than in the holy abbey of Cluny? On 25 October, one week after his first sighting of Abbot Hugh’s stupefying church, the Pope formally dedicated its two great altars to the service of God. Simultaneously, in solemn and ringing tones, he confirmed the abbey in its status as a bridgehead of the celestial on earth. Not just the abbey either – for the new altars, awesomely charged with the supernatural as they were, appeared to Urban a source of light fit to radiate far beyond the bounds of the church itself. Far beyond the valley in which they stood as well, far beyond Burgundy, far beyond France. Any assemblage of brick and mortar, in short, provided that it took Cluny as its head and model, could be reckoned to share in the fearsome blaze of its purity. So, at any rate, Urban pronounced – as perhaps, with his responsibilities to the whole of Christendom, he was bound to do. For if, as the Holy Father devoutly believed, Cluny offered to those who approached it a reflection of the heavenly Jerusalem, then why should not all the beleaguered Christian people, no matter where they might be, share in at least some of its power?

  Yet to cast Cluny in such a role did rather beg a further question: what of the earthly Jerusalem? Abbot Hugh’s church might be gloriously qualified to serve as a light to the world, yet not even the altars of the maior ecclesia could compare for sheer holiness with the spot where Christ Himself had hung upon a cross and then risen in triumph over death. To Urban, listening to his former brethren as they filled Christendom’s most majestic space with the strains of their angelic singing, this reflection could hardly help but appear a troubling one. If it were true that monasteries far and wide derived their sanctity from that of Cluny, then so likewise did the world itself take its character from the holy city that stood at its head; a holy city that for centuries had been positively leprous with the pollution of pagan rule. How, then, to a pope who had devoted his entire life to the heroic labour of setting Christendom upon a proper order, could the knowledge of this not serve as both a torment and a ferocious reproach? Great things had certainly been achieved over the previous decades; but Urban, praying before the altars of the maior ecclesia, would have known deep within his soul that the cause of reform could never truly be completed until the Holy Sepulchre had been wrested from Saracen control. “For if the head is diseased, then there is not a limb but will suffer pain from its ailing.”124 A great and terrible challenge – but not one, in the final reckoning, that Urban was prepared to duck.

  And the time was fast approaching for him to demonstrate as much. A month after his dedication of the maior ecclesia, and Urban was presiding over his second council of the year: an even larger assembly of reform-minded bishops and abbots than Piacenza had seen. The setting was a potent one: the ancient town of Clermont, in the rugged heart of the Auvergne. Here, as the delegates to the council busied themselves with looking to the future of the Church, reminders of the past were all around them. Looming on the eastern horizon, for instance, there rose a great dome of volcanic rock, where a pagan temple still stood: a sobering memorial to a time when there had been no Christian people at all, but only worshippers of demons. Long and gruelling had been the task of reordering the world, and bringing it under the protection of Christ. In Clermont, as if to bear witness to the process by which Christendom had been fashioned, almost every church contained within its walls antique stonework, or columns, or sarcophagi.125 Nor was the labour of constructing a truly Christian order completed yet. Much still remained to be done – and Clermont could testify to this. Back in 958, the town had hosted the first assembly to be directed specifically against the predations of bullying lords; and although, since the millennial anniversary of Christ’s Resurrection, the Peace of God had faded as a mass movement, it had certainly not been forgotten. Violence continued endemic across much of France. Urban, with his background, knew this well enough. Accordingly, during the week of the Council of Clermont, he sought not only to resurrect the Peace, but to extend it throughout Christendom.

  To all those without weapons, wherever and whoever they might be – whether women or peasants, merchants or monks – the full and fearsome protection of the Roman Church was now officially extended. Son of a French nobleman that he was, however, Urban made sure to appeal as well to the lords themselves, and the castellans, and their followers. To the old dream of the peace campaigners – that braggart knights might somehow be transfigured into warriors of Christ – he was preparing to add a novel and fateful twist. On 27 November, with the council drawing to a close, the Pope announced that he would do as the leaders of the Peace of God had done decades previously, and address an assembly of the Christian people in an open field. The number of those who gathered there in the mud and cold of the early Auvergnat winter was not large – perhaps no more than three or four hundred – but what they heard was fated to echo far beyond the limits
of Clermont. No accurate record of Urban’s sermon was made; but as to the core of its message there could be no doubt. Listed as an official decree of the council, here was a startling and wholly electrifying formula for salvation: “If any man sets out from pure devotion, not for reputation or monetary gain, to liberate the Church of God at Jerusalem, his journey shall be reckoned in place of all penance.”126

  Only a century before, contemplating how “infidels had won the ruling of the sacred places,” another Frenchman, a native of the Auvergne who had grown up not a hundred miles from Clermont, had despaired of Christian arms ever winning back the Holy Sepulchre. They were, so Gerbert of Aurillac had flatly declared, “too weak.”127 Certainly, by any objective standard, the ambition of securing Jerusalem for Christendom appeared no less impractical in 1095 than it had done back in the lifetime of the first French pope. To embark on a mission that would require the average lord to raise perhaps four or five times his annual income;128 to aim at the defeat of enemies who had already brought the oldest and most powerful state in Christendom to the very brink of ruin; and to attempt it all for the sake of a city that had not the slightest strategic or military value: here were considerations, it might have been thought, fit to weigh on the mind of any adventurer.

  Perhaps even Urban himself, well aware as he would have been of how Gregory’s attempt to win the Holy Sepulchre had subsided into fiasco, was initially braced for a less than enthusiastic response. Certainly, it seemed never to have crossed his mind that the gauntlet which he had flung down with such gusto at Clermont, a challenge targeted squarely at the men of his own class, might prove irresistible as well to those who did not belong to the ranks of the nobility or the castellans. There were forces in play much greater than the Pope had ever appreciated – and now, despite all his reputation for prudence, it was he who had set them loose. The disciple and heir of Gregory he may have been – and yet still, even for Urban, the full scale of the recent changes in Christendom, and of the revolution in the affairs of the Christian people, appeared almost too great to grasp.

  “Deus vult!” the crowds had shouted at Clermont: “God wills it!”129 The utter conviction of this, spreading like wildfire wherever the Pope’s message was reported, spoke partly of excitement – and partly as well of sheer relief. To be cleansed, to be spotless, to be at one with the celestial host of the angels: here was a yearning that any man or woman might share. No longer, if it had ever been, was it confined to the ranks of monks, or of those who had sought, over the course of many decades now, and at the cost of unprecedented convulsions, to secure the reform of the Church. A warrior too, one at the service of his lord, and armed with weapons soon to be sticky with blood, might feel it – and feeling it, shiver with dread, knowing the crossroads before which he stood. “For which of the two paths was he to follow: that of the Gospels or of the world?”130

  Such a question, even for those secure in the righteousness of their own cause, even for those fighting beneath a banner of St. Peter, had never been a simple one to answer. No matter, for instance, back in 1066, that William’s men had been following their duke to war against a usurper, and with the full blessing of the Pope himself: they had still been obliged, in the wake of the slaughter at Hastings, to undertake penance or else to remain filthy with the sin of murder. A great and excruciating tension, then: for it had set the desperation for salvation against the need – and perhaps the longing – to fight. Now, however, with a single sermon, a single ordinance, that tension appeared resolved. No wonder, then, as news of what had been decreed by Urban spread, that there should have been “a great stirring of heart throughout all the Frankish lands”131 – and far beyond. A whole new road to the City of God had suddenly opened up before the Christian people. The heroic labour of buttressing the world against Antichrist, and of preparing for the dreadful hour of Judgement, had all of a sudden become one in which the great mass of them could share. Not a pilgrim but he could know, as he set off for the Holy Sepulchre, that he was helping to set the universe to rights.

  “Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.”132 Sure enough, five months after the Council of Clermont, and even as the Pope was celebrating Easter in central France, a mysterious cross mat erialised in the sky. Just as it had done many centuries before, during the fabled reign of the first Christian Caesar, now it struck those who saw it as a certain portent of victory. Yet as thousands upon thousands of pilgrims set to sewing the image of it upon their clothes, or branding it on their flesh, or, as Guiscard’s eldest son would do, ripping up their cloaks to fashion crosses out of the shredded fabric, they were preparing for war unprompted by any Constantine. The crusaders, as they would come to be known, followed no emperor.133 Henry, still an excommunicate, still cooped up haplessly in northern Italy, would hardly have deigned to set himself at the head of anything summoned by Urban – even had he not been impotent to do so. Alexius, informed to his consternation that “the whole of the West was on the march”134 and descending directly on Constantinople, worked hard to bribe and browbeat the leaders of the pilgrimage into a nominal obedience to himself – but hardly with the intention of leading them onwards to Jerusalem. Better than anyone else, he knew what such a venture would demand.

  True, Alexius was careful not to wallow openly in pessimism. He even went so far as to float the odd rumour, hinting mysteriously that it was his destiny to lay down his crown before the Holy Sepulchre.135 Conspiratorial whisperings such as this, however, were intended exclusively for Western consumption. In reality, the beleaguered Basileus had not the slightest desire to play at being the last emperor. The preservation of Constantinople, not the liberation of Jerusalem, was his true responsibility. Fortunately, once the crusaders had all been transported across the Bosphorus, safely away from the Queen of Cities, it proved possible, albeit briefly, for the two ambitions to be squared. In June 1097, Nicaea was brought to capitulate, and the banner of the Second Rome fluttered once again over the birthplace of the Christian creed. Then, the following month, in a bloody and desperate struggle, the crusaders broke a formidable Turkish army in open battle. For the remainder of the year, even as they lumbered on their way through increasingly bleak and hostile territory, the Turks shrank from confronting them head on.

  The following spring, taking full advantage of his enemies’ reverses, Alexius dispatched his brother-in-law to mop up in the crusaders’ wake. Then, in the summer, he led out a second army himself. By June, perhaps half of the territories lost to the Turks in the wake of Manzikert had been restored to imperial rule. Meanwhile, of the crusaders themselves, the news was grim in the extreme. Alexius, who had been pondering whether to join forces with them, was reliably informed by a deserter that the entire expedition stood on the verge of utter destruction. Accordingly, rather than risk his gains, the Basileus opted to consolidate them. He withdrew to Constantinople, leaving the crusaders to their fate.

  A decision that had been, by all objective standards, the only rational one. The reports brought to Alexius that the crusade faced certain ruin were only marginally exaggerated. The odds against the winning of the Holy Sepulchre, always steep, had become, by the summer of 1098, astronomical. The Sultan of Baghdad, resolved to annihilate the invaders once and for all, had dispatched an immense army, “swarming everywhere from the mountains and along different roads like the sands of the sea.”136 Against this prodigious task force, the crusaders, who had numbered perhaps one hundred thousand the previous spring as they streamed towards Constantinople, could muster at best a threadbare twenty thousand – non-combatants included.137 Disease, starvation and casualties in battle; the loss of virtually the entire expedition’s supply of horses and mules, so that even dogs had ended up being employed as pack animals; the lack of anything approaching a unified leadership: all these factors, as the crusaders themselves freely acknowledged, should have spelled their doom. “For certainly, in my opinion,” as one contemporary put it, “what they went through was an ordeal without pre
cedent. Never before had there been among the princes of the world men who exposed their bodies to such suffering, solely in the expectation of a celestial reward.”138

  No wonder, then, when the ferociously outnumbered crusaders succeeded in yet again shattering the Turks upon their steel, when they continued to win famous cities long lost to Christendom, and when, on 7 June 1099, they finally arrived in triumph before the walls of Jerusalem, there were few among them who doubted that they had arrived as well at a turning point in the order of heaven and earth. No one could know for certain what wonders might follow their capture of the Holy Sepulchre – but merely to win it would rank as wonder enough. Ambition, greed and ingenuity: all these qualities, honed by the three long and terrible years of the pilgrimage, had served to bring the crusaders to the very brink of a miracle. Yet in the mingled sense of urgency and brutality that they had displayed, and in their conviction that there was nothing in the world that might not be changed and improved by their own labours, there lay the proof of a revolution long pre-dating their taking up of the Cross. For better and for worse, the previous century had seen Christendom, and the Christian people, transformed utterly. The arrival of the crusaders before the walls of the Holy City was merely a single – albeit the most spectacular – manifestation of a process which, since the convulsive period of the Millennium, had made of Europe something restless, and dynamic, and wholly new. Nor would it be the last.