by John France
40 Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, p. 40 n. 37 quoting Pflugk-Harttung, Acta Pontificum Romanorum indeita 2. 205.
41 H. Liebeschütz, ‘The crusading movement and its bearing on the Christian attitude to Jewry’, Journal of Jewish Studies, 10 (1959), 97–9; R. Chazan, ‘The initial crisis for northern European Jewry’, Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 38–39 (1970–71), 101–17 points to earlier persecutions in northern France; Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, PP. 54–7.
42 H. E. Mayer, Mélanges sur l’histoire du royaume latin de Jérusalem, Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 5 (Paris, 1984), 10–48.
43 On social mobility amongst the knights see A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages, (Oxford, 1990), pp. 9a 4.
44 FC, p. 150; William of Tyre, Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, RHC Oc. 1 (hereafter cited as WT), p. 392; Albert of Aachen, Historia Iherosolimitana, RHC Oc. 4 [hereafter cited as AA], pp. 503, 507, 517. For discussion of numbers in the armies see above pp. 2–3 and below pp. 122–42.
45 J. Riley-Smith, ‘The motives of the earliest crusaders and the settlement of Latin Palestine, 1095–1100’, English Historical Review, 98 (1983), 721–36; A. V. Murray, ‘The origins of the Frankish nobility of the kingdom of Jerusalem, 1100–1118’, Mediterranean Historical Review, 4 (1989), 290–2.
46 Ekkehard of Aura, Chronicon Universale, MGH SS 6. 17.
47 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 155–56. The decision to send a fleet to the aid of the First Crusade was virtually the foundation of the greatness of Genoa: E. H. Byrne, ‘The Genoese colonies in Syria’ in L. J. Paetow, ed., The Crusades and other Historical Essays presented to D. C. Munro (New York, 1928), pp. 139–40.
48 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 137–8, 165–7; Anna Gomnena, Alexiad, tr. E. R. A. Sewter (London, 1969), (hereafter cited as Alexiad), p. 329; GF, p. 12 says that he was promised a principality around Antioch, though the passage is suspect on which see A. G. Krey, ‘A neglected passage in the Gesta and its bearing on the literature of the First Crusade’, Paetow, Munro, pp. 57–79.
49 RA, p. 143.
50 GF, pp. 19–20.
51 See below p. 126–7.
52 On those who probably had little choice see below pp. 126–7. On the nature of the vow see J. A. Brundage, ‘The army of the First Crusade and the crusade vow: some reflections on a recent book’, Medieval Studies, 33 (1971), 334–43 and especially 337–9 and more generally his Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Wisconsin, 1969).
53 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 130–6; RA, p. 152.
54 RA, p. 54, 137, 145, 81, 125; GF, p. 67.
55 GF, p. 58. On their view of divine intervention see E. O. Blake, ‘The formation of the “Crusade Idea”’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 21 (1970), 11–31.
56 Albert of Aix records an early example, though Baldwin of Edessa had already paved the way in his treaty with Balduk; AA, pp. 436, 386.
57 J. France, ‘The crisis of the First Crusade: from the defeat of Kerbogah to the departure from Arqa’, Byzantion, 40 (1970), 276–308. See also C. Morris, ‘Policy and Visions. The case of the Holy Lance at Antioch’, in J. Gillingham and J. C. Holt eds., War and Government in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honour of J. O. Prestwich (Woodbridge, 1984), pp. 33–45.
58 RA, pp. 52, 79.
59 Bauldry of Dol, Historia Jerosolimitana, RHC OC. 4 [hereafter cited as BD], 28, 33; R. A. Brown, ‘Battle of Hastings’ Battle, 3 (1980), 1–21.
60 GF, pp. 12–13; RA, p. 145.
61 William of Poitiers, Gesta Guillelmi ducis Normannorum et regis Anglorum, ed. R. Foreville (Paris, 1952) [hereafter cited as WP], p. 67. On the ‘Princes’ see J. Dunbabin, France in the Making 843–1180, (Oxford, 1985), pp. 162–222.
62 AA, 331; RA, p. 126. Riley-Smith, Motives, pp. 721–36, discusses these groups interestingly but A. V. Murray, ‘The origins of the Frankish nobility’, 281–99, can find only three people who may have been vassals of Godfrey before he went to the east and his kinsman Warner de Grez.
63 RA, p. 75; C. de Vic et J. J. Vaissette, Histoire Générale de Languedoc, 5 vols. (Paris, 1743–5), 2. 309; Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, p. 76: Dunbabin, France, p. 202.
64 Anna Comnena, Alexiad, on the unknown Count Raoul, pp. 323–4, on unnamed Franks, pp. 324–6 and on Tancred who received rich gifts at Pelekanum, p. 340; GF, p. 13 says that Tancred and Richard of the Principate deliberately evaded the oath at Constantinople.
65 GF, p. 76; RA, pp. 93–4.
66 GF, p. 73.
67 GF, pp. 8, 7; RA, p. 64.
68 AA, pp. 325–7 alludes to common funds being used to finance an armoured roof during the siege of Nicaea, and Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, pp. 68–9 draws attention to Raymond of Aguilers’ references to something of the sort being used to pay for the Mahommeries Tower at Antioch and siege engines at Jerusalem; RA, pp. 62, 146.
69 Strickland, Conduct and Perception of War, p. 381.
70 He offered to compensate knights for loss of horses; J. France, ‘The departure of Tatikios from the army of the First Crusade’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 44 (1971), 144–47, and see below pp. 242–5.
71 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzusbriefe, p. 145; RA, p. 84, 101.
72 GF, p. 72–3, 26; AA, 472–8; Riley-Smith, Idea of Crusading, p. 75 shows that Bohemond held land towards Ciucia, Godfrey and Robert of Flanders towards Edessa, while Robert of Normandy held Laodicea.
73 RA, p. 62.
74 GF, pp. 57–9; RA, pp. 724.
75 Hagenmeyer, Kreuzzugsbriefe, pp. 161–5; GF, p. 75; RA, p. 93.
76 J. Riley-Smith, ‘Death on the First Crusade’, in D. M. Loades, ed., The End of Strife, (Oxford, 1984) pp. 14–31 has advanced the idea that the concept of martyrdom was developed during the First Crusade, but J. Fiori, ‘Mort et martyre des guerrieers vers 1100. L’example de la première croisade’, Cahiers de Civilisation Médiévales, 34 (1991), 121–39, establishes clearly that this was already an accepted idea. Fiori has also suggested that the ecclesiastical notion of the crusader ideal was met with some reserve in aristocratic circles in France: ‘Pur eshalcier sainte crestiënte. Croisade, guerre sainte et guerre juste dans les anciennes chansons de geste françaises’, Le Moyen Age, 5 (1991), 171–67.
CHAPTER 2
War in the West
* * *
In 1077 Robert Curthose broke with his father, William the Conqueror, after a spectacular quarrel with his brothers William and Henry. He immediately tried to seize the castle of Rouen but was foiled by the vigilance of his father’s butler, Roger of Ivry. When Godfrey de Bouillon’s enemy Albert of Namur wanted to challenge his control of the family holding at Bouillon in 1082, he tried to build a castle at Mirwart in order to menace the lands which depended on the castle at Bouillon upon which were enfeoffed the knights who formed the core of Godfrey’s mouvance.1 In both cases the first step in the campaign was to secure a fortification. Here we come face to face with a most important facet of warfare in the eleventh century – the key importance of strongpoints. The castle at Rouen would have enabled Curthose to control his father’s capital, giving a certain reality to his earlier claim to hold the duchy in his own right, and it would have provided a rallying point at which to gather all the malcontents of the duchy who, in the event, proved ready enough to rally elsewhere. Albert would probably have built a wooden castle at Mirwart and from there would have ravaged the lands of Godfrey’s vassals around Bouillon in a campaign which could have shaken their loyalty by undermining their economic base and that of Godfrey himself. Both cases illustrate another facet of contemporary warfare – exploitation of the equivocal loyalties of the feudal world. When Prince Louis of France went to war with William II of England, his biographer, Suger, complained that whilst English prisoners were quickly ransomed, French ones, being poorer, had to swear to support the English king.2 War turned on the possession of fortifications, and most military activity was related to possession of the
m; it was a warfare of position. Fighting in the open field was not uncommon, but it was rarely sought and large-scale battle was especially rare. It was, after all, a very risky business. In 992, a century before the crusade, Conan of Brittany had defeated his enemy, Fulk of Anjou, at Conquereuil, but in the pursuit he paused to strip off his armour because of the heat of the day – alas he had chosen to do so close to the hiding place of some Angevins who promptly killed him and so reversed the apparent decision of battle. Godfrey was almost certainly present in support of Henry IV at the battle of Elster in 1085, when the forces of the anti-king Rudolf triumphed on the field only to see their victory nullified because Rudolf was killed.3 But it was not merely because it was chancy and uncertain that battle was avoided. All military activity depends on luck and phrases like the ‘fog of war’ or the ‘smoke of battle’ express the proverbial uncertainty which surrounds it in all ages. Nor was it merely that in battle the commander’s own life was at risk, though that might sometimes have been a factor. Far more important was that seizure or neutralisation of an enemy strongpoint, perhaps by subverting a leader’s vassals, offered the best and surest, in so far as anything in war could be sure, method of achieving the purpose of war – the destruction of the enemy, or more commonly, his enfeeblement to the point where he could no longer resist your will.
Our perspective upon war is, of course, affected by recent experience in which battle has been central in war. In two terrible world wars the commanders on either side strove to bring their enemies to battle, to smash their armies in the field, to bring them, even, to ‘unconditional surrender’. Such strategies were made possible by the advance of technology which by the late nineteenth century was capable of creating, feeding, supplying and controlling a nation in arms. Without the steam engine, without tinned food and all the related technology, there could have been no Verdun, no Somme, none of the astonishing allied victories of 1918 when the great German army, ‘the motor of the war’ was smashed.4 Without the internal combustion engine there could have been no Stalingrad, no Battle of Berlin, no D-Day 6 June 1944. Allied to this technological development was conceptual development. The nation state is the product of changing ideas interacting with technical possibilities. When advanced nations go to war they provide their own vocabulary of totality – ‘the Home Front’, ‘attrition’, ‘guerre de matériele’, unknown to earlier ages. ‘Total War’, in which all the efforts of an extensive and highly organised society are geared to total victory is the creation of modern industrial society and its apogee is battle: battle on land, on the sea, in the air, or in any combination of these. The aim is to smash the enemy. Of course the second half of the twentieth century has seen more limited wars, but the major conflicts, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf, have involved the destruction and creation of whole societies. And looming over all has been the fear of the ultimate conflict between the Superpowers, in which not merely nations, but even mankind itself might be annihilated by weapons of mass-destruction. The First World War, the Second and the Cold War have accustomed all the generations of the twentieth century to see the purpose of war as violent and sudden destruction on a total scale in which battle is the necessary way by which our will can be imposed upon the enemy. It takes an enormous effort to look beyond those assumptions to a different kind of war in a different kind of society. Of course the historian’s problem always is to step out of his age and look with a clear mind at a different environment. But in the study of war this is peculiarly difficult, for the very image of war today is the image of battle. An entire experience of great complexity and length can be fused on our retinas by a single image – the Second World War by a Lancaster Bomber, for example. A military helicopter instantly recalls Vietnam for a whole generation which lived through it. Television and the media have created not merely pictures of particular moments of conflict, but symbols of combat which instantly spring to mind whenever war is discussed, clouding our minds by their sheer power. And our experience of war is reinforced to an astonishing degree by much modern writing about it. Military history has always been rather a special study in that many of its devotees hope to learn by it and implement its lessons in a direct way. Vegetius remains popular amongst military men not because of its historical value but because he provides practical advice which is still relevant.5 But the involvement of practitioners of war carries certain risks, most obviously that they will be thinking of their own world whose assumptions they will project upon the past. It is this which has particularly distorted the study of medieval military history.
Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege, which appeared shortly after his death in 1831 is not a study of medieval history, but no modern writer on war has had more widespread impact on thinkers.6 His dictum that war is ‘a continuation of political relations, a carrying out of the same by other means’ is now a cliché. His work appeared and made its greatest impact at the very time when modern scientific historical method was being developed, primarily in Germany. Hans Delbrück (1848–1929) belonged to a generation profoundly marked by such ideas and his monumental work, A history of the art of war within the framework of political history, the very title of which reflects Glausewitz’s most famous dictum, was extraordinarily influential. His approach to the subject was influenced by Clausewitz’s notion of the need to destroy the enemy’s forces in battle. The book tends to read as a series of battle descriptions, especially in Book II of the third volume which covers the period under consideration here.7 From Clausewitz has sprung a whole genre of writing on the theme of ‘great battles’ and it has coloured our view of war. In the English-speaking world this was greatly reinforced by Sir Charles Oman in his History of the art of war in the middle ages which analysed the subject in the light of the nineteenth-century theory of ‘decisive battle’. His account of war in the eleventh century turns on two battles, Hastings and Dyrrachium, in a chapter entitled ‘Last struggles of infantry’. In the true spirit of Clausewitz whose analysis of his experiences in the Napoleonic wars led him to emphasise mobility (‘It is better to act quickly and to err than to hesitate’; ‘A fundamental principle is never to remain completely passive’), Oman speaks disparagingly of the Anglo-Saxons, ‘The stationary tactic of the phalanx of axemen had failed’, and concludes that ‘The supremacy of the feudal horseman was finally established.’ Oman’s history of medieval warfare is truly battle history and his impact upon English-speaking writers has been enormous.8 This view of medieval warfare as dominated by battle has been reinforced by another trend in nineteenth-century historiography.
The figure of Charles the Great loomed large in the writings of French and German nationalists of the nineteenth century who made strenuous effort to claim him as one of their own. Discovering an explanation for the rise of the Carolingian empire was, for them, a matter of deep concern. For Delbrück there was a military explanation. Faced with attack by Muslim cavalry from Spain, Charles Martel invented the knight, the heavily armoured cavalryman, for whose support he developed the fief, the foundation of feudalism. It was this unique weapon at its most effective in the massive cavalry charge with its enormous ‘shock effect’, which enabled the Carolingians to build their empire. This view was for long repeated by orthodox text-books and its tenacious hold on historian’s minds can be explained by its extraordinary scope as an explanation. The invention of heavy cavalry explained not only the rise of the knight and the growth of the Carolingian empire, but also the development of feudalism. The depth of explanation was even further improved by the suggestion that it was the invention and dissemination of the stirrup which gave the horseman stability and made possible the armoured knight. Thus technology served as a buttress to an already impressive and symmetrical structure.9 Unfortunately there is almost no evidence to sustain this theory. We know very little about the battle of Poitiers in 732 when Charles Martel defeated an Islamic army from Spain, and the whole argument that his immediate successors used a new kind of cavalry whose shock effect shattered their enemies is a nonsense.10 The trut
h of the matter would seem to be that no-one invented the mailed cavalryman, whom we later in English call the knight and in French chevalier. Rather, cavalry had always been an element in armies. The better off preferred to ride rather than walk, and tried to protect themselves with the most effective kinds of armour. By the early tenth century, when we first hear reports of heavily armoured men being used in the mass amongst both the east and west Franks, the stirrup and the high saddle, both of which were necessary to provide security for the horseman, seem to have evolved and spread, and chain-mail appears to have been improving. More decisively the pressure of external attack and internecine conflict within the Carolingian lands led the kings and princes to disseminate land to their followers as a means of providing themselves with well-armed men. Even so, the classic mass charge with couched lance generating shock at the point of impact was not yet any kind of norm, as a glance at the Bayeux tapestry will show.11 But the real trouble with the Oman/Delbrück theory was that in focussing upon the knight it provided us all not merely with an idea but also with an image of war as an affair of battle in the open field. If warfare in the eleventh century was an affair of knights, were these surely not romantic figures whose very function was the charge in open battle? This is, after all, the image provided by the Song of Roland and much later literature such as the Arthurian cycle, which in one way or another has filtered through into the consciousness of almost all who have dealings with the medieval world. The reality of eleventh-century warfare, to which the leaders and their followers on the First Crusade were accustomed, was altogether less glamorous. The knight as a soldier was adapted to his economic and social context, to the technical possibilities available and their limitations and to the ideas of that day of what war was about.
It is clear that by the end of the tenth century the great cleavage in West Frankish society was that between men who could arm themselves properly for war and those who could not, who formed the mass of the population. But this superior group was not homogenous and the term noble was quite distinct from that of knight. The knights were, in most of Europe, an inferior group often closer to the peasantry than to the aristocracy they served. In Spain, portions of land were created for the support of both cavalrymen (caballerías) and infantry (peonías) to defend the newly-won plains and caballeros villanos subsisted with caballeros hidalgos.12 In recent years the status of the Anglo-Norman knight has been highly controversial, but the balance of discussion suggests that there were enormous differences in wealth and status in a section of society largely removed from that nobility.13 In Southern Europe, knights remained associated with the peasantry from whom they seem to have emerged, while in the Germanic lands they arose from the ministeriales. Even in the north of France knights were a very mixed class. Only in the Mâconnais had their fusion with the nobility seriously begun by the time of the crusade. Duby found that most of the knights in one area of the Mâconnais were of noble descent, but he was surveying only endowed knights.14 William of Jumièges tells the tale of a smith of Beauvais who brought a small present for Duke William who responded munificently with money and two horses; a year later the smith returned offering his two sons in service, unmistakably military, to the Conqueror.15 Such men were in the service of the castellans, counts and princes who dominated contemporary society and what they offered was council and advice, as all followers ought, but above all military service. For this they might be rewarded with cash, with maintenance in a lordly household, or with land, or indeed with all three cither at once or at various times. They were soldiers as their title proclaimed, and primarily horsemen. In the south, terms such as caballarius remained important. But although they were a military class many of them were also involved in other matters – primarily farming. Thus they were not, in the simple sense, professional soldiers and any sizeable gathering would have had something of the character of a militia.
