A History of the Crusades

by Jonathan Riley-Smith

  It may be, of course, that it had always been more earthbound than the sources reveal. Most of the narratives of the First, Second, and Third Crusades were written by churchmen, and it was only in the thirteenth century, when the crusade cycle, the Chevalier du Cygne with its association of crusading with magic, had entered the canon of chivalric literature, that the knights—Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Robert of Cléry, Conon of Béthune, Thibaut of Champagne, John of Joinville—found a distinctive voice in narrative and verse. But three factors could have contributed to a strengthening of chivalric elements. The first was a practice associated with the movement, the temporary service of armsbearers in the East, not as crusaders but as secular knights. The tradition of giving up time to help defend the holy places or Christian outposts began with Galdemar Carpenel of Dargoire and William V of Montpellier in 1099, reached a peak in the career of Geoffrey of Sergines in the later thirteenth century and was still being expressed in service with the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes in the sixteenth century. It was already being described in precociously chivalric terms from at least the 1120s, when the sojourn of Charles the Good of Flanders in the Holy Land for a few years after 1102 was portrayed in almost fourteenth-century language as prouesse in the service of God. After he had been belted as a knight, Charles went to Jerusalem ‘and there, bearing arms against the pagan enemies of our faith… fought vigorously for Christ the Lord and… consecrated to him the first fruits of his labours and deeds.’

  The second was the increasing part lordship seems to have been playing as an influence upon recruitment. In Chapter 3 the subtle and complex relationship between motivation and the different ties of association has been described. Of course lordship had always been a significant motivating force, but a feature of the responses to the earliest crusade appeals was that they were concentrated as much, if not more, in certain families in circles of vassals. At the time of the First Crusade clusterings of crusaders were to be found in noble, castellan, and knightly families in the Limousin, Flanders, Lorraine, Provence, the Île-de-France, Normandy, and Burgundy. Outstanding examples were the comital house of Burgundy and the castellan family of Montlhéry in the Île-de-France. Of the five sons of Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy, three were crusaders and a fourth, as Pope Calixtus II, preached the crusade of 1120–4. A grandson and granddaughter also took part. Three members of the house of Montlhéry were involved in the First Crusade, together with the members of an astonishing array of related families, of which Chaumont-en-Vexin sent four crusaders, St Valéry three, Broyes, Le Bourcq of Rethel, and Le Puiset two each, and Courtenay and Pont-Echanfray one each. Indeed the two generations of this clan active at that time produced twenty-three crusaders and settlers, all closely related, of whom six became major figures in the Latin East; we can picture a chain of enthusiasm stretching across northern France, and beyond, for more distantly related were three crusaders from the family of the counts of Boulogne, including Godfrey of Bouillon in Lorraine, and eight from the family of Hauteville in southern Italy.

  The commitment of families to the crusade is demonstrated in their response to the issue of costs. When it came to raising cash these families shared a burden that resulted from the alienation of their lands. It can be shown that many of them adopted sensible policies, disposing of properties, such as churches and tithes, over which their rights were being increasingly questioned as the reform movement gathered pace. This suggests that there must have been many conferences of the kin summoned to decide whether assets could be saved and, if not, what type of property should be offered for pledge or sale. A record of one such family conference surfaces in a Breton document. The crusader Thibaut of Ploasme informed his brother William that if he was not helped financially he would have to sell his inheritance. William did not want Thibaut’s portion of the estate to be lost, so he raised money by selling part of his share of a mill which was, in fact, already pledged. Other early family arrangements are complicated enough to suggest that similar discussions had taken place. Hugh of Chaumont-sur-Loire, the lord of Amboise, pledged his lordship to his cousin Robert of Rochecorbon in 1096, but in addition was given a substantial cash sum by his maternal uncle. The South Italian Norman Tancred was subsidized by his guardian and so did not have to sell his inheritance. Savaric of Vergy bought his nephew’s fief and then pledged it to raise the money to pay him. Before Fantin and his son Geoffrey departed from Thouars, Fantin left some land to his wife and to Geoffrey, who then sold his share of it to his mother.

  One can identify elements which may help to explain why some kin-groups were predisposed to respond strongly to the appeal to crusade, among them family traditions of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, attachment to Cluniac monasticism and the reformed papacy, and the veneration of certain saints. Female members of these kin, moreover, appear to have carried the message to the families into which they married. Of four sisters in the comital house of Burgundy, three were the wives of first crusaders and the fourth was the mother of one. Although there were probably independent traditions in the Le Puiset clan, its matriarch was one of four Montlhéry sisters, all of whom were the wives or mothers of crusaders; so were both her daughters.

  By the thirteenth century, however, the chief motivating force seems to have been lordship. Families were of course still very important, and traditions of commitment, passing down from generation to generation, pressed hard on those qualified to take the cross, but in the age when feudal bonds were at their strongest it was now patronage and clientage, often operating at a regional level, which had an even more potent influence. This seems to have affected the picture of Christ presented in the propaganda, which was always responsive to the social values of the audiences it addressed. Where Christ had been commonly described as a father who had lost his patrimony and was calling on his sons to recover it, there was now more often the portrait of a king or lord demanding service from his subjects. The image of Christ as lord is, as we shall see, already to be found in a song dating from the Second Crusade, but it was dominant by 1200.

  The Lord really has been afflicted by the loss of his patrimony. He wishes to test his friends and to see whether his vassals are faithful. If anyone holds a fief of a liege-lord and deserts him when he is attacked and loses his inheritance, that vassal should rightly be deprived of his fief. You hold your body, your soul, and everything you have from the highest emperor; today he has had you summoned to hurry to his aid in battle and, although you are not bound to him by feudal law, he offers you so many and such great rewards, that is to say the remission of all your sins, however much penalty and punishment is due, and eternal life as well, that you ought to hurry to him of your own free will.

  The third factor was the popularity of crusading in other theatres of war. Enthusiastic crusaders were often prepared to serve on several fronts: Leopold VI of Austria crusaded in Spain and Languedoc, besides fighting in the Third and Fifth Crusades and taking the cross for the Fourth; the French knight Peter Pillart was recruited for both of Louis IX’s crusades to the East and for Charles of Anjou’s crusade into southern Italy. And by the fourteenth century a feature of the attitude of noblemen to crusading was that the precise location of the combat they were going to engage in was of secondary importance. What mattered was fighting the enemies of Christ, and at times ‘they even displayed an odd nonchalance about where they would fight, and against whom’. For obvious reasons, the alternative theatres did not all share the traditions of penitential pilgrimage associated with Jerusalem, although in the early thirteenth century there was an attempt by the leader of Baltic crusading to create a cult of Our Lady at Riga and the myth that her dower land, paralleling Christ’s patrimony, was centred on Livonia. In the course of time there was a shift in the goal of crusading from the liberation or defence of Jerusalem (or aid to the Holy Land) to the defence of Christendom in general. Campaigning on behalf of the Christian Republic, as Christendom was often called, was taking on more and more the character of war in defence of a state
rather than war as a devotion. In the fourteenth century, service of God through the demonstration of prouesse, almost divorced from the idea of penance, characterized the attitude of crusaders who were engaged in campaigns in North Africa or Europe.

  It may well be that the cause célèbre of the crisis of crusading after 1291, the downfall of the Templars, which is described in Chapter 9, contributed to the partial secularization of the movement. The series of charges against them opened with articles relating to their alleged denial of Christ as God, the crucifixion, and the cross. They were accused of spitting on a crucifix at their reception into the order, of trampling it underfoot, and of urinating on it. In any Christian society these charges would have been horrific, but they also suggested a particularly violent challenge to crusading theory and traditions, to which the authority of Christ and the image of the cross were central. The charges were publicized widely by the French government and the public was presented with the appalling picture of a prestigious order, which claimed to embody in regular religious form the ideals of the crusade, blasphemously denying its central tenets. It is impossible to gauge the damage these accusations did to the movement, but they must have done some.

  As crusading became institutionalized and a conventional option for knights in the thirteenth century it was anyway bound to become less radical. The more secular ideals of chivalry contributed by diluting, if only slightly, the revolutionary ideal proclaimed in 1095. The concept of war as a penance and a devotion lingered, of course, and was still being expressed, although in an increasingly decorative way, by the Knights Hospitallers on Malta in the eighteenth century. But it had given way to the more conventional image of military service for God. The idea of a penitential war, one of the most radical expressions of European thought, was too uncomfortable to secure for itself a permanent place in the theology and practice of Christian violence.

  5

  Songs

  MICHAEL ROUTLEDGE

  THE literature of any period necessarily reflects the preoccupations of that period, or else it fails to be popular. However, in the Middle Ages, neither ‘literature’ nor ‘popular’ mean quite what they would mean now. The popular songs of, for example, the First and Second World Wars were popular because there was some form of mass diffusion: in the former case, sheet music, which depended on mass literacy and a relatively large number of musically literate people, and music-halls, so that something like ‘Tipperary’ reached millions of people in a relatively short time. In the case of the Second World War, diffusion of this kind of material through gramophone records and radio was even more widespread and practically instantaneous. Yet such material would hardly be labelled ‘literature’, popular though it was. On the other hand, the war-poems of Wilfrid Owen or Rupert Brooke, novels such as All Quiet on the Western Front, Le Silence de la Mer, or For Whom the Bell Tolls, would not seriously be denied the claim to literary value by anyone, despite their much more restricted diffusion.

  The difference in the Middle Ages is that restricted literacy means restricted diffusion: thus the literature will reflect the preoccupations of the literate class: the class for which and by which the literature is written. ‘Popular’ means popular in the aristocratic courts, and ‘literature’ means whatever the educated man was writing for his audience to listen to. There was still another kind of writing too: Latin material intended to be read by the highly educated clerks and court scribes. Neither this nor ‘official’ forms of writing such as annals, histories, and chronicles are the subject of this chapter. We are concerned here with what people listened to, saw performed, considered primarily as entertainment, although the possibility of other functions, such as instruction, exhortation, and propaganda will not be excluded.

  The period of the first four crusades coincides with the evolution in France and Germany of a rich vernacular literature which does indeed reflect the crusades. The period has, with some justice, at least as far as literature is concerned, been called the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’. In both France and Germany the great epic traditions are founded: the Chanson de Roland, the oldest epic in French, almost certainly dates from about the time of the First Crusade. There are versions in both French and in Occitan, the literary language of southern France, of a Chanson d’Antioche, an account of the siege of Antioch in 1098. The Canso de la Crotzada recounts in Occitan verse the so-called Albigensian Crusade. There are, in addition, the more conventionally historical accounts by Robert of Cléri and Geoffrey of Villehardouin.

  The early French verse epics were known as chansons de geste (from the Latin gesta : ‘deeds done’, extended to mean the deeds performed by a hero or by a group or clan). The extent to which they reflect the crusades is a matter of some controversy. The action of the earliest and best known, the Chanson de Roland, is based on a real historical event, although its details remain uncertain. In the year 778 Charlemagne’s troops were returning from a successful expedition into Spain when, at Renceval in the Pyrenees, they were attacked, either (according to ninth-century Christian chroniclers) by marauding Basques or (according to the thirteenth-century Arab chronicler, Ibn alAthir) by Muslims from Saragossa. The rearguard, including Eggihard the seneschal, Anselm the leader of the imperial guard, and Roland, duke of the march of Brittany, all perished. It is impossible at this distance in time and through the mists of propaganda to know whether Muslims were indeed involved or whether the fight was more than a mere skirmish. What is clear is that by the eleventh century there had been a striking change of scale: the account of events in the Chanson de Roland turns the incident into a major confrontation between Charlemagne’s empire and the forces of Islam, culminating in Charlemagne’s successful conquest of all of Spain and the enforced conversion of the citizens of Saragossa.

  The emperor has captured Saragossa and has the town searched by a thousand of his Franks. In the synagogues and temples of Muhammad, with iron clubs and hand-axes, they smash Muhammad and all the other idols so that no devilry or superstition will remain. The king [Charlemagne] is a true believer and would serve God. His bishops bless the waters and lead the pagans to the baptistry. If one of them opposes the will of Charles, then he has him imprisoned, burnt, or slain. More than a hundred thousand are thus baptized, made true Christians, excepting only the queen [of Saragossa]: she is to be led captive to sweet France, for the king wishes her to be converted for love [i.e. willingly].

  (ll. 3660–74)

  The Roland makes no mention of the crusade, and it has been persuasively argued that the image of the Muslims which it offers is deliberately distorted and bears no relation to what an eleventh-century poet would have known of the Muslims of Spain or Palestine. Nevertheless, as we shall see, the image which the Roland presents of the Muslims as monsters and idolaters does find echoes elsewhere. Moreover, it seems plausible that the poet was aware that his account would have a special appeal as propaganda. It must be admitted nevertheless that specific allusions to the crusades in Palestine are rare in the Old French epic.

  But there is a form of vernacular writing in this period in which the crusades appear as a topic from about the middle of the twelfth century onwards. These are the ‘crusade songs’. No such writing survives from the period of the First Crusade—but then relatively little vernacular writing of any kind survives from this period. The earliest are associated with the Second Crusade or with the Reconquista and are written in Occitan or in Old French. There has been much discussion of what constitutes a ‘crusade song’, and it is true that songs which have crusading as their only subject are comparatively rare, but there are many surviving pieces in which the crusade plays some part as a topic, an allegory, a development of some other idea: 106 examples in Occitan, about forty in French, thirty in German, one in Spanish, and two in Italian. Whilst recognizing the problems of definition, for ease of reference we will take ‘crusade song’ to mean any song which mentions the crusades, whether to the East, in Spain, in France, or in Italy.

  It is not very help
ful to speak of crusade songs as a genre. The fact is that the poets included reference to the crusades in a wide variety of poetic forms. Among the earliest such songs, by the Occitan troubadours Marcabru and Cercamon, can be found sirventes —songs which make moral, political or personal points—and a form of the pastorela —a song in which the poet encounters a maiden lamenting for her absent lover. Later examples include courtly love-songs such as the castellan of Coucy’s, ‘A vous, amant, plus k’a nulle autre gent’ (1188/91) and almost all the German songs, laments for fallen heroes such as Gaucelm Faidit’s planh for Richard I of England (1199), panegyrics such as Rutebeuf’s ‘Complainte de monseigneur Joffroi de Sergines’ (1255–6), and debate poems such as the Monk of Montaudo’s, ‘L’autrier fui en paradis’ (1194). In short, there is no evidence that the poets devised new forms or genres in order to speak of the crusades. The latter became a subject for songs and a poetic resource.

  The number of songs surviving from the period of the Second Crusade is small: one in French and perhaps ten in Occitan. Those which do survive from this time and from succeeding decades are often as much concerned with Spain as with the expeditions to the East. In the period after 1160 the growth in numbers and popularity of troubadours and their northern French counterparts, the trouvères, means that the Third and Fourth Crusades are more abundantly reflected in songs. Most crusade songs by German Minnesänger likewise relate to these expeditions. In southern France there are allusions, often prudently indirect, to the Albigensian Crusade. Expeditions of the thirteenth century are reflected in a steady stream of songs, principally in French and German.