A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  Fulk’s share of the tithes of Seiches had cost the nuns dear, which may be why they took a strong line in a related case. This involved a man called Geoffrey Le Râle, who had sold the tithes of the mill of Seiches to Le Ronceray when raising money for his crusade. On his return he decided to sell the mill itself, presumably to settle his debts, but he wanted the tithes to be sold with it—they would obviously enhance its value—and he was furious with the abbess of Le Ronceray when she refused to be party to the sale. He seized the mill, but he was hauled into the abbess’s court, where he pleaded guilty and was fined.

  Crusading was so unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive that the more one considers crusaders the more astonishing their motivation becomes. What did they think they were doing? And why did catastrophes, which might be expected to induce cynicism, indifference, and despair, only heighten their enthusiasm? What was in their minds?

  Over the last sixty years the theology of Christian violence has been intensively studied, and the ways it contributed, at an intellectual level, to ideas of Christian holy war in general and to crusading thought in particular, have become reasonably clear. The reactions of men and women to the call to crusade are beginning to be explained as responses to the popularization of that ideology, presented to them by preachers in ways which related to their day-to-day religious concerns. But even in terms of the history of theories of Christian violence crusading was a startling development. The First Crusade was the culminating surge towards the Holy Land of a cult of the Holy Sepulchre which had regularly spawned mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem throughout the eleventh century, but it was not only much the largest of these pilgrimages; it also differed from the others in being at the same time a war. Two Provençal brothers, Geoffrey and Guy of Signes, took the cross ‘on the one hand for the grace of the pilgrimage and on the other, under the protection of God, to wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive, and killed with barbaric fury’. And in the Limousin Aimery Brunus ‘was mindful of my sins and desired to go to fight the Muslims with the Christian people, and to visit the Sepulchre of the Lord which is in Jerusalem’.

  Making a pilgrimage is a penitential, devotional act, requiring a frame of mind which is traditionally at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of a warrior. The intentions of eleventh-century pilgrims from the arms-bearing classes, who could certainly travel with splendour and panache, had been generally purely peaceful. The crusaders, on the other hand, intended war to be an integral part of their penitential exercise. It was officially described as an expression of their love for their Christian brothers and sisters and for their God, and commitment to it was considered to be a ‘true oblation’, a sacrificial surrender of self. In spite of its often flamboyant trappings, crusading was as much a devotional as a military activity, and the notion of a devotional war suggests a form of war-service which can be compared to saying a prayer.

  In preaching the First Crusade, therefore, Pope Urban had made a revolutionary appeal. The notion that making war could be penitential seems to have evolved in the 1070s and 1080s out of a dialogue between Pope Gregory VII and a circle of reform theorists which had gathered around his supporter Mathilda of Tuscany. Urban took the idea, which was without precedent, and made it intellectually justifiable by associating warfare with pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The writer of the Monte Cassino Chronicle, probably a curial official who had accompanied the pope on his journey to France, described his initiative as a pastoral move, giving armsbearers the chance of contributing to their own salvation by undertaking an act of severe penance which did not entail the abandonment of their profession of arms or the humiliating loss of status involved in pilgrimaging without weapons, equipment, and horses. And a commentary on the crusade as something deliberately created so that nobles and knights could function as soldiers not just beneficially but devotionally, is to be found in Guibert of Nogent’s famous statement, to which reference has already been made: ‘God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in its wake… might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain in some measure God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with the liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.’

  Men definitely responded to this. In the Limousin, Brunet of Treuil had intended to enter the priory of Aureil, but now he changed his mind; he must have seen in the crusade a way of satisfying his desire for a more positive life while remaining in the world. He persuaded the priory to use the rent from his entry-gift to buy him armour and a young relative was found to take his place in the community. A similar case may have been that of Odo Bevin from near Châteaudun, who had been involved in a lengthy dispute with the abbey of Marmoutier over property. Odo fell ill and informed the local prior that he wanted to enter the community and that he would renounce his claims on the property as his entry gift. But when the prior returned from Marmoutier he found that Odo had recovered and was now saying that he preferred to go to Jerusalem. In southern Italy, the Norman knight Tancred had been troubled by the contradictions for a Christian in the life he led. His mind had been ‘divided, uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world’. He recovered his spirits ‘after the call to arms in the service of Christ, [which]… inflamed him beyond belief’.

  So radical was the notion of a devotional war that it is surprising that there seem to have been no protests from senior churchmen. If the First Crusade had failed, there would surely have been criticism of the association of war with pilgrimage, but its triumph confirmed for participants and observers alike that it really was a manifestation of God’s will. ‘The Lord has certainly revived his miracles of old’, wrote Pope Paschal II. One of the most striking features of the letters from crusaders and the eyewitness narratives is the growing feeling of astonishment that prevailed in the army which crossed into Syria in 1097 and proceeded to Antioch and eventually to Jerusalem, with the heavens glittering with coincidental but actual pyrotechnics—comets, auroras, shooting stars—and the nights disturbed by visitations: Christ, the saints, and ghosts of crusading dead who returned to assure the living of the validity of relics or the certainty of heavenly rewards. The crusaders became convinced that the only explanation for their victorious progress was that God’s hand was intervening to help them physically and that God did approve of holy war’s association with penance and pilgrimage. The eyewitness reporters of the crusade came to use of it phrases which until then had been usually applied only to the monastic profession—the knighthood of Christ, the way of the cross, the heavenly Jerusalem, spiritual warfare—and most of these were taken up and refined by commentators, who dwelt on the crusade’s penitential character and stressed the unique way its course had demonstrated divine approval. The weakness of more conventional theology in the face of all the euphoria is demonstrated in a letter written by Sigebert of Gembloux in 1103. Always an opponent of radical reform, Sigebert attacked the idea of penitential war expressed in a letter from Pope Paschal II to Robert of Flanders. Although he quoted Paschal’s letter, which referred specifically to Robert’s return from the liberation of Jerusalem, Sigebert did not once mention the crusade.

  In the preaching of war as a devotion in 1096 and in the response of so many of the faithful to it, western Europe took an unexpected turning and the crusaders a step into the dark. In Chapter 2 it has been shown that they did so because they were convinced that the effort and suffering would do them good. Their exertions could also benefit their relations: in 1100 Herbert of Thouars, who went to the bishop of Poitiers to receive the ‘dress of pilgrimage’, wanted an assurance that the rigours of the coming expedition would assist his father’s soul. The Council of Clermont and Pope Urban had summarized the benefits this penitential act would bring in the indulgence.
As we have seen, Urban seems to have intended this to be an authoritative statement that the penance the crusaders were going to undertake was likely to be so severe that it would be fully satisfactory, paying back to God not only the debts of punishment owed on account of their recent sins, for which penances had not yet been performed, but also any residue left over from earlier penances which had not been satisfactory enough.

  One has the impression, however, that in the aftermath of the First Crusade the crusading idea became dormant in a large part of western Europe after all the efforts associated with the liberation of Jerusalem, to be revived forty-four years later in the recruiting drive for the Second Crusade. Crusades to the East were preached, as we have seen, in 1106–7, 1120, 1128, and 1139, and to Spain in 1114, 1118, and 1122, but a regular and consistent response to these appeals was to be found only in Flanders and in a belt of territory running from northern Poitou through Anjou to the Chartrain, southern Normandy, and the Île-de-France. It was in those two regions that the traditions must have been kept alive. Elsewhere, recruitment was isolated and sporadic, or non-existent. The Limousin, where there had been a very large response to the preaching of the First Crusade, seems to have produced no crusader between 1102 and 1146. It is not as though interest in the Holy Sepulchre had evaporated—the region provides us with the names of many pilgrims to Jerusalem in the early twelfth century—but it looks as though the old eleventh-century tradition of peaceful pilgrimaging had reasserted itself. The same was true of Champagne, another centre of recruitment for the First Crusade. Not a single crusader can be found between 1102 and 1146, but there was enthusiasm for pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Among the many pilgrims of high status was Count Hugh of Troyes, who spent four years in Jerusalem from 1104–8, and went again in 1114 and in 1125, when he became a Templar. During the same period no crusader has been identified from Provence, which again had responded generously in 1096, although there were many pilgrims to Jerusalem, especially from among the greater lords of the district of Marseilles.

  A similar picture is to be found if one turns from the geography of recruitment to families. Early crusaders tended to be concentrated in certain kin groups, and this might lead one to suppose that family traditions of commitment to the movement were established in the expeditions of 1096 and 1101; certainly many of those who were taking the cross for the Second Crusade were following, or were intending to follow, in the footsteps of fathers and grandfathers. But in many of the families in which there had been concentrations of crusaders in 1096 there was little or no further recruitment until 1146. The Bernards of Bré in the Limousin sent four men on the First Crusade and another four on the Second, but apparently none in between. Of the descendants of Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy, several were prominent in the First Crusade and seven individuals dominated the Second, but only one appears to have crusaded between 1102 and 1146. In these kin-groups it looks as though the zeal of 1096 was only regenerated in 1146.

  It seems likely that to many armsbearers in the early twelfth century the First Crusade had been a once-and-for-all effort and the chance to undertake a penance of this unique, and uniquely rewarding, kind would never occur again. After 1102 they turned back to their traditional devotional activities. Research may reveal a similar picture between 1149 and 1187, and it is possible that the history of crusading as an established institution only begins with the Third Crusade.

  At any rate the situation between 1102 and 1146 explains why St Bernard presented the Second Crusade as a special opportunity for salvation open to those who took the cross: ‘[God] puts himself into a position of necessity, or pretends to be in one, while all the time he wants to help you in your need. He wants to be thought of as the debtor, so that he can award to those fighting for him wages: the remission of their sins and everlasting glory. It is because of this that I have called you a blessed generation, you who have been caught up in a time so rich in remission and are found living in this year so pleasing to the Lord, truly a year of jubilee.’ Bernard’s oratorical treatment of the indulgence was magnificent: ‘Take the sign of the cross and you will obtain in equal measure remission of all the sins you have confessed with a contrite heart. The cloth [of the cloth cross] does not fetch much if it is sold; if it is worn on a faithful shoulder it is certain to be worth the kingdom of God.’ But he was proposing a precocious interpretation, the acceptance of which was delayed by the caution with which the papacy treated a new penitential theology in which truly satisfactory penances were considered to be impossibilities. It was only to be adopted definitively by Pope Innocent III fifty years later. With Innocent the indulgence became no longer a statement about the rewards of satisfactory penance, but a guarantee of the act of grace, mercy, and love by which God consented to treat a penance as though it was satisfactory. It may not be going too far to suggest that the indulgence really came into its own in the thirteenth century, when it was formulated in a way people could understand, although there was still some confusion about it and St Thomas Aquinas had to answer worries about exactly when it became operative.

  But from the first, feeling locked into a world of sin from which they could not escape, men and women understood well enough that the crusade offered them a chance of starting afresh. The charters of endowment issued by them tended to be expressed in terms of penitence and humility. So, only even more so, were the expressions of self-abasement with which lords renounced property or rights held back by them from churchmen or extorted by them by force. As pilgrims, of course, they were reluctant to leave behind men and women, and particularly religious communities, with grudges or complaints against them. In 1101 Odo I of Burgundy, followed by an entourage of his greatest vassals, ‘entered the chapter of St Bénigne de Dijon and, with the monks sitting round the room and many members of their household standing by, I corrected the injuries which I had been accustomed to inflict until now. I recognized my fault and, having sought mercy, I asked that I should be absolved. And if I should happen to return (from the crusade) I promised amendment in future.’ He seems to have arranged another melodramatic ceremony at Gevrey-Chambertin when he renounced claims he had unjustly imposed on the Cluniac monks there.

  Preparations for a crusade were always shrouded in an atmosphere of penitence. At the time of the Second Crusade it was rumoured that King Louis VII of France had taken the cross either in sorrow for the loss of life incurred when a church was burnt down during his assault on Vitry in 1144, or to make amends for his refusal to accept a new archbishop of Bourges. King Conrad III of Germany was persuaded to join after a sermon from St Bernard reminded him that he would be subject to divine judgement. Philip of Gloucester apparently made the vow after an illness which had interrupted a vendetta in which he was engaged, and Humbert of Beaujeu after he had been warned in visions to reform his behaviour. Penitential language reached a peak when western Christendom was in a state of shock over the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. The tone was set by the papal letter Audita tremendi, which proclaimed the Third Crusade: ‘It is incumbent upon all of us to consider and to choose to amend our sins by voluntary chastisement and to turn to the Lord our God with penance and works of piety; and we should first amend in ourselves what we have done wrong and then turn our attention to the treachery and malice of the enemy.’ The letter went on to describe the crusade as an ‘opportunity for repentance and doing good’; and, following its lead, the crusade was preached everywhere in penitential terms. It is no surprise to find that sixty years later a crusader’s desire to leave no one behind with a grudge moved King Louis IX of France to establish friar- enquêteurs to collect and judge on complaints about royal officials and his companion John of Joinville to summon his feudal court to allow the airing of any grievances his vassals might have against him.

  By that time, however, another element was prominent.

  He arrived most nobly of all, for his galley came painted below the waterline and above with escutcheons of his arms: or a cross paty gules. He had at least
300 oarsmen in his galley, each with a shield on which were his arms; and to each shield was attached a pennon on which were his arms beaten in gold. And as he approached it seemed as though his galley flew as the oarsmen drove it forward, and it seemed as if lightning was falling from the skies at the sound made by the pennons and cymbals, drums, and Saracen horns.

  So John of Joinville described the arrival in Egypt, bedecked with the trappings of chivalry, of John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa. The popes had tried to discourage pomp and luxury—the letters proclaiming the Second and Third Crusades had contained strict sumptuary clauses—but the growth of chivalry, in which a Christianity more secular than ecclesiastical was interpenetrated by martial and aristocratic elements, naturally strengthened tendencies such as the desire for honour and renown which had been present in crusading from the first. From at least the time of the Fourth Crusade crusading was a chivalrous adventure, the highest function of chivalric knighthood, and its more enthusiastic practitioners were paragons of chivalry. At the very time crusading was becoming a normal feature of the European scene, it was being coloured by secular ideals, and the balance within it between devotional war and knightly enterprise was altering.