The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

  Latin Europe’s fervent reaction to the preaching of the Second Crusade can only be understood properly against a backdrop of earlier twelfth-century developments in crusading. The First Crusaders’ ‘miraculous’ conquest of the Holy Land in 1099 established a fragile Latin outpost in the Levant and seemed to provide conclusive proof that God endorsed this novel fusion of pilgrimage and warfare. Under the circumstances, one might expect the opening decades of the twelfth century to have been marked by a flood of ‘crusading’ activity, as western Europe rushed to embrace this extension of Christian holy war and to defend Outremer. This was not the case. The memory of the First Crusade certainly burned brightly, but the years leading to 1144 witnessed only a sporadic clutch of small-scale crusades. In part this was because many regarded the First Crusade as a singularly astonishing event that was essentially unrepeatable. Drawing upon centuries of hindsight, later historians identified the mass armed pilgrimage stimulated by Pope Urban II’s preaching in 1095 as the first of an ongoing succession of crusades and, thus, as the start of a crusading movement. But this ‘future’ was by no means apparent in the early twelfth century and the idea of crusading had yet to coalesce.

  To some extent, this relative lack of enthusiasm and limited ideological refinement can be explained by mitigating factors. The papacy’s ability to harness and develop crusading was curtailed by a succession of crippling upheavals: the onset of a papal schism between 1124 and 1138 that saw the appointment of a number of alternative anti-popes; and the mounting pressure upon Rome from the rival powers of imperial Germany to the north and the emerging Norman kingdom of Sicily to the south. Some of these problems lingered at the time of the Second Crusade, and the pope was not even able to enter Rome in 1145. Similar convulsions afflicted the secular laity. Germany was racked by internal rivalry, with two dynasties, the Hohenstaufen and the Welfs, challenging for power. England, meanwhile, was unhinged by civil war during the tumultuous reign of King Stephen (1135–54), the son of the First Crusader Stephen of Blois. Under the Capetian dynasty, the French monarchy enjoyed greater stability, but only now was beginning to manifest its authority beyond the heartlands of royal territory centred on Paris.

  One feature of crusade ideology may also have served to constrain recruitment. Preachers of the First Crusade may have played upon a sense of spiritual or social obligation to repatriate the Holy Land, but at an essential level the 1095 expedition resonated with Latin Christians because it was presented as an intensely personal devotional enterprise. Thousands took the cross seeking redemption of sin through the pursuit of holy war. Crusading was driven by religious devotion, but a self-serving form of devotion. Given the particularly arduous, dangerous, frightening and expensive nature of armed pilgrimages to the East, participation in a crusade represented an extreme path to salvation. For many, more obvious and immediate penitential activities–prayer, almsgiving, localised pilgrimage–were often preferable. The decades and centuries to come would prove that, in general, only seismic catastrophes married to forceful preaching and active involvement of the upper aristocracy could produce large-scale crusades.

  This should not lead us to imagine that there were no crusades between 1101 and 1145. Some members of the Church, and of the laity, undoubtedly made sporadic attempts to replicate or imitate the First Crusade in this period, preaching or participating in ventures that included some, or all, of the features that would eventually become more stable elements in the make-up of a crusade: papal promulgation; the taking of a defined vow and the symbol of the cross; the promise of a spiritual reward (or indulgence) in return for military service. But, at the same time, the fundamental nature of crusading remained relatively fluid and ill defined. Basic questions such as who was empowered to invoke a crusade, what rewards could be offered to participants and against whom this form of sanctified warfare might be waged were left largely unresolved.

  Two significant crusades to the Holy Land were launched in the 1120s, but while the Venetian crusade (1122–4) was certainly enacted by Pope Calixtus II, the Damascus expedition of 1129 appears to have been preached in Europe by Hugh of Payns with little or no papal involvement. In this same period, crusades were initiated in geographical regions outside the Levant and against enemies other than Near Eastern Muslims. Long established as a theatre of Muslim–Christian conflict, Iberia soon witnessed campaigns akin to crusades. The leader of a joint Catalan and Pisan offensive against the Balearic Islands (1113–15) bore the sign of the cross on his shoulder, while the pope offered a full remission of sins to all those who died in the 1118 Aragonese attack on Zaragoza. Calixtus II, who had been papal legate to Spain and was thus familiar with Iberian affairs, took a major step towards formalising the role of crusading on the peninsula. He issued a papal letter in April 1123 encouraging recruits to take a vow to fight in Catalonia with ‘the sign of the cross on their clothes’ in return for ‘the same remission of sins that we conceded to the defenders of the eastern Church’.

  Non-Muslims were likewise targeted. Bohemond of Taranto’s crusade (1106–8) was waged against Christian Byzantium. In 1135 Pope Innocent II even sought to extend crusade privileges to those fighting against his political enemies, affirming that his allies would be granted ‘the same remission…which Pope Urban decreed at the council of Clermont for all who set out for Jerusalem to free the Christians’.

  For all these references to the ‘remission of sins’ awarded to the First Crusaders, the actual formulation of the spiritual rewards being offered remained vague and equivocal. Questions that might trouble theologians and even warriors–Would participation remit all sins or only those confessed? Was martyrdom guaranteed to all those who died on crusade?–had yet to be answered definitively. It was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and supporter of the Templars, who dealt with one of the thorniest theological consequences of crusading. With the preaching of the First Crusade, the papacy had, in a sense, unwittingly opened Pandora’s Box. The call for a crusading army to manifest God’s divine will on earth might suggest that God actually needed man, and therefore could not be truly omnipotent–a train of thought that obviously had explosive potential. Bernard countered this problem with typical intellectual agility. He argued that God only pretended to be in need as an act of charity, deliberately engineering the threat to the Holy Land so that Christians could have another chance to tap into this new mode of spiritual purification. In one step the abbot defended the idea of crusading and promoted its devotional efficacy. Bernard would play a central role in the promulgation of the Second Crusade, but in the first instance the work of launching the expedition was undertaken by others.98

  LAUNCHING THE SECOND CRUSADE

  In 1145 the Levantine Christian petitions for European aid targeted both ecclesiastical and secular leaders. One recipient of the appeals was Pope Eugenius III, a former Cistercian monk and protégé of Bernard of Clairvaux, who had just ascended to the papal office that February. Eugenius’ situation was not ideal. From the start of his pontificate, the new pope was mired in a long-running dispute with the people of Rome over the secular governance of the city, and he was forced to live in exile. Even as Eugenius laid plans to launch a grand new crusade, he was forced to spend most of 1145 in Viterbo, some fifty miles north of the Lateran Palace.

  Emissaries from Outremer also visited Louis VII, the Capetian monarch of France–one of the heartlands of crusade enthusiasm. Now in his mid-twenties, Louis had been crowned in 1137, bringing a lease of youthful vitality to the throne. He has often been described, rather blandly, as pious. In fact, Louis’ early reign had been marked by heated disputes with Rome over French ecclesiastical appointments and a caustic squabble with the count of Champagne. Pope Eugenius’ predecessor actually placed Capetian lands under papal interdict (temporarily excommunicating the entire realm). In 1143, at the height of the conflict with Champagne, Louis’ troops took the brutal step of burning to the ground a church in Vitry containing more than 1,000 people, an atrocity for which the king seems
to have shown remorse. By 1145 the young king had been reconciled with the papacy, and his brand of fevered religious devotion possessed a penitential streak. Moved by the news of Edessa’s fate, he embraced enthusiastically the idea of leading an army to relieve the crusader states.

  Eugenius III and Louis VII seem to have laid coordinated plans to initiate a crusade, but to begin with these fell flat. The papal curia (administrative court) drafted an encyclical (general letter of proclamation) announcing a new call to arms on 1 December 1145, but this did not reach Louis in time for his Christmas court at Bourges (in central France). When the monarch declared his intention to take the cross and wage war in the Holy Land, the response was muted. Eugenius III reissued his encyclical, in almost identical form, three months later, and its message was broadcast to much greater effect at a second Capetian assembly in Vézelay at Easter 1146. From that moment the spark of crusading passion was reignited and for the next year or more it burned its way across Europe. The pope’s official letter–conventionally known as Quantum praedecessores (the Latin words with which it began)–was essential to this process. Widely circulated throughout the Latin West between 1146 and 1147, recited at numerous public assemblies and mass rallies, it became the template for the preaching of the Second Crusade across Europe. The encyclical set out to fulfil two interlocking objectives: to define official papal thinking on the expedition, in particular specifying who, it was hoped, would participate and what privileges and rewards they would receive; and to stimulate recruitment by establishing the crusade’s causes and appeal.

  Half a century earlier, Pope Urban II had initiated the First Crusade with his sermon at Clermont, but because no exact record of this speech survives, attempts to reconstruct his ideas and intentions involve a degree of speculation. In contrast, while the genesis of the Second Crusade cannot be traced to a single grand address, extant copies of Quantum praedecessores do allow us to explore the thinking behind the expedition and the manner in which it was promoted with far greater precision.

  One striking fact is immediately apparent from Eugenius’ encyclical–the memory of the First Crusade was central to his vision of this new campaign. Seeking both to legitimate and to empower his own call to arms, the Pope made repeated references to the 1095 expedition. Eugenius stated that he was inspired to summon the Second Crusade by the example of ‘our predecessor of happy memory, Pope Urban’ and made it clear that the spiritual rewards now on offer were exactly the same as ‘those instituted by our aforesaid predecessor’. Some of the ideas employed by Urban at Clermont were likewise echoed. Eugenius took care to emphasise repeatedly that he had a divine mandate, ‘the authority given us by God’, to initiate this holy war. He also depicted the crusade as a just response to Muslim aggression: affirming that Edessa had been ‘taken by the enemies of the cross of Christ’ describing how clerics had been killed and saintly relics ‘trampled under the infidels’ feet’. These events were said to pose a ‘great danger [to] all Christianity’.

  At the same time, the themes of recollection and past precedent were redeployed in Quantum praedecessores in a manner that was both innovative and extraordinarily effective. The Pope declared that Christians should be moved to take the cross by the memory of their forebears who had sacrificed ‘their own blood’ to liberate Jerusalem ‘from the filth of the pagans’. ‘Those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers [should be] vigorously defended by you’, he exhorted, for, if not, ‘the bravery of the fathers will have proved to be diminished in the sons.’ This potent imagery harnessed the collective memory of the First Crusade and sought to tap into notions of honour and familial obligation.

  While explicitly projecting this new campaign as a recreation of the First Crusade, Eugenius’ encyclical actually adjusted or developed many of Urban II’s ideas. Enlisting the right type of crusaders (namely, those capable of fighting) in sufficient numbers had been an obvious problem from the start. The 1095 expedition was presented as a form of pilgrimage, but because this penitential practice was traditionally voluntary and open to all, the papacy found it difficult to restrict the number of non-combatant recruits–from women and children to monks and paupers. Crusades in the early twelfth century, meanwhile, had struggled to attract mass recruitment. By the 1140s there was an evident tension between the popular, ecstatic element of crusading and the increasing push towards prescribed definition and papal control. The Church would wrestle with this conundrum for decades to come, seeking to contain and direct enthusiasm without extinguishing fervour. Quantum praedecessores made a rather half-hearted attempt to address this issue, counselling that ‘those who are on God’s side and especially the more powerful and the nobles’ should join the crusade, but the difficulty of balancing selectivity and mass appeal remained largely unresolved.

  Eugenius also made significant refinements to the array of protections and privileges offered to those taking the cross. His encyclical proclaimed that, in a crusader’s absence, the Church would protect ‘their wives and children, goods and possessions’, while legal suits regarding a crusader’s property were banned ‘until there is absolute certain knowledge of their return or death’. Likewise, interest on debts owed by a crusader was cancelled.

  The area of greatest advance came with regard to the crusade indulgence. Where Urban II’s 1095 formulation had lacked clarity, Quantum praedecessores provided specificity, affirming that the pope would ‘grant remission of and absolution from sins’ to participants, explaining that ‘whosoever devoutly begins and completes so holy a journey or dies on it will obtain absolution from all his sins of which he has made confession with a contrite and humble heart’. Eugenius was not proposing a blanket guarantee of salvation, but he was delivering an assurance that the spiritual benefit of crusading could still be enjoyed even without death.

  Through its precise formulation and broad dissemination, Quantum praedecessores shaped the Second Crusade, helping to ensure a greater degree of uniformity in preaching and going some considerable way to cement the notion that a legitimate crusade must be promulgated by the pope. The document is perhaps of even more elemental importance to crusade history because of its afterlife. The medieval papal curia was, by its nature, an institution that treasured retrospection. When wishing to formulate a decision or frame a pronouncement, Roman officials always looked to precedent. In this context, Quantum praedecessores became the benchmark for crusading, presenting an official memory of what Pope Urban II had supposedly preached in 1095 and enshrining certain ideas about the nature of the First Crusade itself. Into the second half of the twelfth century and beyond, the encyclical served to define the scope, identity and practice of crusading because future popes used the document as an exemplar. Many drew upon its style, format and substance; some simply reissued it unaltered.

  For all this, Eugenius’ encyclical was surprisingly unclear on one key issue: the precise goal of the Second Crusade. Edessa’s fate was highlighted, but no explicit demand was made that the city be recaptured, and Zangi was not named as an enemy. Instead, the crusaders were exhorted ‘to defend…the eastern Church’ and free ‘the many thousands of our captive brothers’ currently in Muslim hands. This lack of specificity was probably the result of uncertainty about a strategically realistic goal in 1145 and 1146, but it exposed the expedition to future disputes over direction and focus.99

  This shortcoming in Quantum praedecessores’ formulation also was reflective of a more profound problem in the relationship between crusading and the crusader states. The two were, in fact, tragically ill matched. Crusades were essentially spiritually self-serving, devotional expeditions of finite duration, led by individuals with their own ambitions, agendas or aims (not least to complete a pilgrimage to the Holy Places). But to survive, the Frankish settlements in the East actually needed stable, obedient military reinforcements, willing to carry out the will of Outremer’s rulers.

  A SAINT SPEAKS–BERNARD OF CLAIRVAUX AND THE SECOND CRUSADE

  Pope Eugenius I
II’s encyclical Quantum praedecessores proclaimed the Second Crusade. The text of this letter, deliberately designed as a preaching tool that could be readily translated from Latin into the common vernacular tongues of the medieval West, stood at the core of the crusade message disseminated in 1146 and 1147. Yet, unable even to control central Italy, the pope was in no real position to launch an extended preaching campaign north of the Alps. He therefore turned to Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux.

  Bernard was the most potent and influential preacher of the Second Crusade. Above all other churchmen, he must be credited for disseminating and popularising the message contained in Quantum praedecessores. Born in Burgundy around 1090, at the age of twenty-three he joined a community of Benedictine monks recently formed at Cîteaux and enjoyed a mercurial rise to prominence. After just two years he was instructed to establish a new Cistercian monastery (that is, one following the principles established at Cîteaux) at Clairvaux and his fame soon spread across the Latin West. Renowned as an orator and avid correspondent, exchanging frequent letters with many of the great political and ecclesiastical figures of his age, Bernard emerged as one of the most illustrious figures of the twelfth century.

  The abbot’s influence grew in tandem with that of the Cistercian order to which he belonged. Founded in 1098, this new monastic movement swept through Europe, advocating a fundamentalist interpretation of the Benedictine rule–the regulations governing monastic life–that ushered in a new atmosphere of austerity and simplicity. The Cistercians experienced exponential growth: from two houses in 1113 to 353 by 1151. By the mid-twelfth century, Cîteaux could challenge, even outshine, the influence of more established forms of monasticism, like that of Cluny. This shift was starkly apparent in the origins of individual popes, for while Urban II came from a Cluniac background, Eugenius III had been monk at Clairvaux before his election to the papal office.100