by John France
The impact of the preaching of the great expedition by Urban in 1095, which inspired so many to leave their homes for the east, probably owed something to new and dynamic ideas about war in Christian society which had been formulated in the course of the eleventh century. Urban’s idea of an expedition to the east was a novelty but one whose component elements were already known to his audience. The difficulty of knowing precisely what Urban said at Clermont in 1095 has, of course, complicated discussion, but he probably called for an expedition to Jerusalem which would aid the Byzantine emperor and liberate the churches of the east from the yoke of Islam. He presented the task as a pilgrimage. Fulcher of Chartres’ important account of Clermont does not mention Jerusalem as the objective of the expedition, but the balance of scholarly opinion sees this as an aberration on Fulcher’s part.9 To contemporaries, the most astonishing thing about his speech was his offer of ‘the remission of sin’ to all who took the cross. This was not a new idea as it had been offered to those undertaking expeditions to Spain, but it was now widely publicised and clearly linked to the powerful notion of the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre.10 But why did this idea appeal? Gregory VII had wanted to liberate the Holy Sepulchre and help the Christians of the east in response to a request for aid from the Byzantine emperor, and had written a series of letters to that effect in 1074, evoking little success. Appeals for the Holy War in Spain had even been supported by an offer of indulgence without great responses.11 In 1095 Urban II was very organised in his approach. Before Clermont he consulted with at least one major secular leader who was later to join the crusade, Raymond IV of Toulouse, and acquired the support of a great ecclesiastical magnate, Adhémar of Le Puy. To the Council he called bishops from a considerable area of France.12 Afterwards he set out on what appears to have been a well-prepared tour of southern and western France, arousing enthusiasm and commissioning preachers to spread the word. He wrote to areas he had not visited in person soliciting their support. But something much more powerful than mere organisation was at work, for, by the time of his letter to Bologna, Urban IPs tone was changing and he was evidently seeking to restrict an enthusiasm which was getting out of hand, and the same feeling comes across in other source material.13 Urban probably did not expect Germans to join his movement because of the Investiture Contest, so the participation of Godfrey de Bouillon, duke of Lorraine and an important supporter of Henry IV, must have caused special pleasure. The appeal of Clermont spread like wildfire in the west and such was its moral authority that even the Capetian king, at odds with the pope over his marriage, sent his brother, Hugh of Vermandois to show the Capetian family flag. Clearly at the heart of this spontaneous reaction lay a powerful religious conviction.
It is not difficult to find evidence for a new and deeper religious belief in eleventh-century society. The cult of relics, a devotion which involved all sections of society, reached extraordinary heights. The mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem at the millennia of the Nativity and Passion of Christ, and the contemporaneous wave of church building were clear evidence of a new tenor in Christian society.14 The spread of reform in the church and the bitterness of the war of ideas, which was an element of the ‘Investiture Contest’, attest to the continuing force of this new spirit whose temper was puritan. A plethora of religious houses endowed by laymen, the popularity of eremeticism and the foundation of Cîteaux all suggest a widespread piety which touched poor as well as rich.15 In the great crowds of pilgrims along the roads to the shrines of saints, and above all on the road to Jerusalem, we see the forerunners of the crusaders. In the Peace Movement, and the tumults of the Investiture Contest, the church was mobilising the masses in her chosen cause. But the masses were not the primary target of Pope Urban’s appeal for he wanted soldiers, and that meant knights and lords. The kings of the West were preoccupied, but some very important magnates were persuaded to join the expedition. Raymond of Toulouse, Robert of Normandy, Robert of Flanders, Stephen of Blois, Hugh of Vermandois, Godfrey of Bouillon and Bohemond were ‘Princes’, men of the very highest standing, truly quasi-monarchs, and they were followed by significant numbers of their own vassals and others of equivalent rank.16 It was once fashionable to see them simply as ruthless seekers after land and loot, covering their greed with the cloak of the cross. Recent research has inclined to the view that as participation was costly, the possibility of gain in the East was ‘a stupid gamble’, leading to the conclusion that ‘it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism’… It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalise about them, that they were moved by an idealism’.17 It is not difficult to trace the development of a powerful piety amongst the European upper class in the eleventh century. Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou who slew a rival for the royal favour before King Robert’s very eyes, made three pilgrimages to Jerusalem and founded Beaulieu-lès-Loches.18 Some lay lords were renowned for their piety, while under Cluniac influence a steady trickle, most famously the duke of Burgundy in 1078, joined religious orders.19
But mere piety has not been regarded as enough to explain mass support. The make-up, the identity of that idealism seen as the driving force of the crusading movement, has been the subject of ever closer examination, in which the ideas of the great German historian Erdmann played a formative role. In essence, historians have come to believe that the crusade was the culmination of a series of impulses by which the church sought to reconcile the heroic and militant ideas of knighthood – chivalry in its crudest sense – with Christian ideology20. The Peace and Truce of God began in France as an effort to control the savagery of the knights and lords who had long usurped the power of a monarch who was confined to the Ile de France. But this was not a merely negative attitude, for in recognising the role of the knights as the bearers of arms in society, the church was giving them a special role – recognising them as an ordo in Christian society, and seeking to direct their brutality to positive ends – to protect the poor and succour the church.21 The church had always imposed penances for murder on those who killed in battle, but it had long been felt that soldiers who fought against the enemies of God, pagans and Muslims, were fighting in a cause so self-evidently just that such a punishment could not be appropriate. As the long external onslaught on Europe ended by the year 1000, so this spontaneous notion of righteous war was transferred to reconquest, in Spain and later in Sicily. In the early eleventh century, the Spanish kings began the Reconquista and established close links with the French church. In 1032 Sancho III of Navarre (1000–35) sent the monk Paternus to Cluny and the interest of that great order in Spanish reform must have brought the peninsula more closely into the European consciousness, though Cluny was never a recruiting sergeant for the Spanish wars.22 The papacy strengthened popular notions of the positive value of violence: in 1053 Leo IX led a military expedition against the Normans of South Italy. His successors supported the Spanish and Sicilian reconquests and approved the Norman conquest of England. In the Investiture Contest an entire theology of war was called into being by the papacy – assisted by such thinkers as Anselm of Lucca and Bonizo of Sutri – as Gregory VII tried to create his militia sancti Petri to wage righteous war against Henry IV. In a famous letter to Henry IV before the outbreak of the contest, Gregory sketched a plan for an armed expedition, led by himself, to aid the Greeks after the disaster of Manzikert, in return for recognition of the power of the Holy See, and he even suggested that they should go on to recover Jerusalem, though his proposal lacked the elements of the pilgrim vow and the indulgence added by Urban II.23 Gregory VII attempted to take the initiative by launching the expedition of Ebles de Roucy to Spain. His claim that lands reconquered there were papal fiefs led to a close alliance between the papacy and the kingdom of Léon which would long endure, giving the Holy See great influence in Spanish affairs.24 Such interventions show the papacy placing a positive value on violence and asserting its claim to direct it. It is significant that it was in the context of the Spanish reconqu
est that Urban II would first formulate an indulgence based upon the Jerusalem pilgrimage, for the restoration of Tarragona.25
Although there is plenty of evidence to show that the church was changing its attitude to war, and seeking to influence the military classes, it enjoyed little success. The expeditions to Spain were occasional: to Barbastro in 1064–5 and Tudela in 1086. Spiritual benefits were offered by the papacy to those who fought in Spain, though it now seems unlikely that an indulgence was offered by Alexander II.26 Few took seriously the restrictions of war proposed by the church. Ravaging was, and continued to be, an essential element in war. It was an expedient method of destroying the economic base of an enemy and undermining the loyalty of his vassals, a military tactic in an age when war was dominated by castles and an absolute necessity to support armies which had no logistic train. Yet this was war of a military upper class upon the poor and defenceless, and upon the church whose property suffered badly, the very thing against which the church inveighed. If ravaging was not exactly a path to glory for the chivalrous knight, it was no shame to perform this normal part of the business of war. Only those who engaged in horrific torture and gratuitous mass-murder, like Robert of Bellême, attracted the censure of their contemporaries and even horrors like the massacre of Vitry, did not necessarily damage reputations.27 At the end of his life William the Marshal, that very embodiment of medieval chivalry, defended his conduct as a soldier against the reproaches of the church which could hardly be obeyed ‘or else no-one would be saved’. Even the crusading movement had only a fitful effect. Only enormous efforts after the fall of Edessa in 1144 stirred Europe into the Second Crusade, while it took the collapse of the kingdom of Jerusalem after Hattin in 1187 to provoke another effort on behalf of the east. Whole areas, like England, were, for long periods of time, little effected by the crusading movement. Despite this, the appeal of 1095 made an enormous impact which was sustained, though at varying levels of intensity, for centuries. Why was this?
Urban cast his appeal for holy war in 1095 in the form of a pilgrimage whose reward was remission of sin. This may not have been very different from what was promised by Alexander II in about 1063, but it came thirty-two years later, during which time the Investiture Contest and the struggle for reform may well have heightened that fundamental desire around which almost all eleventh century piety had been built – deliverance from the burden of sin. The church had had little luck in influencing lay behaviour by its theology of war for ‘knights stood to gain little temporal profit … from adherence to the moral dictates of the church’.28 They had religious preoccupations – the risks of hell-fire were all too plain – but with a few individual exceptions the political and military pressures upon them counted for far more. That dichotomy between their religious preoccupations and their military direction continued, as the story about William the Marshal would reveal a century later. Chivalry in its essence was already a reality by the time Pope Urban launched his great expedition, but within the notion of the ideal knight as it emerged, there were appalling tensions and contradictions. The warrior ethic was fundamentally opposed to the church’s ideas about the behaviour of the knightly class. In an age when monarchy was weak, the church turned its attention to the ‘conversion’ of the knights and lords, seeking to give a Christian gloss to such vital ceremonies of the military class as the creation of a knight. The ‘sanctification’ of the knightly class, their conversion into a parallel order to the monks, was the goal of the church’s endeavours. The success of the process was uneven to say the least, but this religious ideology of knighthood, devoted to the support of the church and the defense of the helpless, formed a vital base upon which Urban could build, giving it a new and dynamic dimension.29 Such ideas were having an increasing impact upon the life of the upper classes and must have created an enormous tension by their contrast with the reality with which they had to live.30 It must have been made worse by the growing religious intensity of the age. Urban offered the religious sensibilities of the military class neither a solution nor a synthesis, but an escape route. In 1095 Urban created a window of opportunity – for it must be remembered that contemporaries did not know, as we know, that the crusade would have a great and continuing future – an offer to escape from the burden of sin made in the clearest possible terms by exercising that love of war and all its joys which was the central characteristic of a warrior aristocracy.31 This was proclaimed in the loudest and most public, possible way. Organisation and publicity cannot make a message popular, but they can make sure that a popular message is broadcast, and that is precisely what Urban II did in 1095. The Investiture Conflict had been a war of ideas, and the church had learned much about propaganda. Urban prepared the way for his appeal carefully, launched it in an appropriate setting ‘a gathering of influential churchmen’ and aimed it at a market he knew well – the French aristocracy to which he belonged. He then prosecuted a vigorous campaign in person and by letter. A message was forged in the simplest terms – ‘Jerusalem, Salvation – Deus Vult’ – and like so many simple messages it came across, it spread, with a momentum of its own creating a more complex phenomenon than that suggested by the description ‘religious enthusiasm’.
Discussion of crusader motivation has too long revolved around a perceived dichotomy between material and spiritual factors, booty and the love of God. This was a crudely (though not a merely) materialistic age whose spiritual perceptions were often seen in very concrete forms – not least the flames of hell. It was in the eleventh century that the person of the devil took shape, while the painful literalness of saints lives and their repeated miracles is proverbial.32 But more to the point is that war and booty were inseparable, for in medieval conditions a leader had to provide opportunities for his followers to plunder. In a modern context we see booty as an extra which the soldier seizes and enjoys on top of his pay. But then it was necessary for subsistence. And the perquisites of war – the ‘extras’ so to speak, were what war was about. The delight in Girart de Roussillon about war and plunder might be dismissed as poetic rhetoric, except that it tells us something of what contemporary knights liked to hear about themselves. Ordericus twice tells us that the prospects of rich ransom extended war and attracted others to join in – in the valley of Beugy in 1083–5 and in the Vexin in 1097. Even in the context of Holy War such considerations were extremely important. The Spanish conflict had drawn northerners since the start of the eleventh century – Adhémar de Chabannes relates how the Norman Roger de Toeni terrorised the Muslims by pretended cannibalism about 1020.33 In 1064–5 a large number of northerners led by William VIII of Aquitaine (1058–87), and the Normans William of Montreuil and Robert Crispin attacked Barbastro. There seems to have been no overall commander, and when the city was captured the foreigners killed the population, gathering an enormous booty. In 1065 the Muslims recaptured it and massacred its Christian inhabitants. In 1069 the city’s Muslim ruler and Sancho of Pamplona concluded an agreement not to ally with the French or any other foreigners.34 In 1087 another great military expedition led by Odo of Burgundy and Hugh of Lusignan came to the aid of the Spanish kingdoms after the defeat of Alfonso VI (1065–1109) by the Almoravids at the battle of Sagrajas in 1086. It achieved nothing, for the northerners declined to march deep into Spain and preferred to attack Tudela in the Ebro valley, in the hope of booty. Its siege of Tudela may have been betrayed for money by William the Carpenter, viscount of Melun, whose misdeeds were remembered later on the First Crusade.35 Love of booty drove knights far and wide. Robert Crispin, one of the leaders of the Barbastro affair, went to Constantinople and took service with the emperor who eventually poisoned him.36 He commanded a corps of Norman mercenaries which was later led by his fellow-countryman Roussel of Bailleul, who attempted to set up a Norman state in Asia Minor. Anglo-Saxons also sought their fortunes across the sea, even as far away as the Black Sea.37 It would be difficult to overestimate the lust for booty of the military classes of the later eleventh century. The importa
nce of booty to monarchs and followers alike, in early medieval conditions underlines the point made in Girart de Roussillon.38 For those who contemplated Urban II’s appeal in 1095 righteous war offered its rightful reward. The indulgence decree of the Council of Clermont implicitly recognises the magnetism of gain: ‘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’. It is a statement that can be compared with Glaber’s comment, half a century earlier, on the good pilgrim Lethbaud: ‘Truly he was free from that vanity which inspires so many to undertake the journey simply to gain the prestige of having been to Jerusalem’.39
