God's Wolf

by Jeffrey Lee

  For the rulers and great lords there were obvious risks to going on crusade, and the Pope recognized these by expressly guaranteeing protection to the lands and goods of anyone who took the cross. These great leaders were among those who would typically sail to the Holy Land in the spring, campaign for a season and then return home. Their wealth was back in Europe, and the Holy Land offered few additional prospects and much greater risk. Exceptions – such as the powerful Count Fulk of Anjou, who gave up his fief for life in the Holy Land – were few, and Fulk was compensated with the kingship of Jerusalem itself.

  For those with little to lose, however, the potential rewards of a crusade were compelling and well worth the gamble. As Flora wryly observes to Phillis in the twelfth-century poem The Debate of the Knight and the Clerk, ‘It is not love that makes young knights brave. It is poverty.’10 The ambitious Reynald fell into this category, for although the Old French version of William of Tyre, the Estoire d’Eracles, tells us that Reynald was ‘well-born’, he was also ‘not a very rich man’. The lords of Donzy were affluent, middle-ranking barons and the family’s fortunes were on the up, but Reynald was a younger son. He had no fortune of his own and, critically, no certainty of inheriting land. His most valuable possessions were probably the tools of his trade: chainmail, longsword and, if he was lucky, a good warhorse. Indeed, as a landless younger son in the twelfth century, Reynald would have had little hope of a prosperous future. The tyranny of primogeniture meant that his oldest brother would inherit the family titles and property. For a man like Reynald, the crusade was literally a God-given opportunity to win a fief of his own in the East, settle down there and achieve a social standing and lifestyle far beyond his expectations in France.

  The First Crusade provided brilliant, tempting examples of what could be achieved by an energetic, ambitious younger son who was prepared to take the cross – and a few risks. Bohemond of Taranto, the great Norman hero of the First Crusade and first Frankish Prince of Antioch, had been without a patrimony in his native Italy. Godfrey de Bouillon himself – Reynald’s model – was also a younger son. Peter of Blois, who penned an idealized portrait of Reynald in which he is depicted as a kind of warrior saint, tried to suggest that Reynald was not moved by earthly gain; he claimed that Reynald chose the crusade over worldly wealth by abandoning an advantageous marriage to go to Outremer.11 From what we know of Reynald’s later life in the East, this story seems very unlikely, and we can be sure that the desire for worldly advancement – in social rank and wealth – figured highly in his decision to take the cross.

  An alternative course for younger sons was to enter the Church; this was the career path of Baldwin of Boulogne, younger brother of Godfrey de Bouillon. By the time of the First Crusade, Baldwin was already a wealthy and powerful bishop, but he cast the cloister aside for the crusade. He became the first crusader Count of Edessa and, in 1100, succeeded his brother to become King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Like the ambitious Baldwin, Reynald was clearly not suited to the peaceful, contemplative life.

  Indeed, completely the opposite.

  If not destined for the priesthood, a young nobleman had one profession open to him – warrior. Young aristocrats were bred and raised to fight. These days it is hard to imagine what this entailed. It was not a matter of rough-and-tumble horseplay to toughen the youngster up, interspersed with some fencing and sparring. No, horseplay meant the serious horsemanship of the joust, with sharpened spears, and rough-and-tumble the lethal business of the tournament mêlée. A squire’s upbringing was more than just a school of hard knocks. It was the creation of a killing machine, where the paramount virtues were bravery, honour, skill at arms and the ability to deliver the telling blow with the greatest effectiveness, with ruthless intent and without scruple or hesitation. No double maths, followed by biology, for Reynald. His lessons were: charging with the couched lance, hunting with spear and crossbow, wrestling in full armour, killing with the longsword, killing with the dagger.

  Picture the terrifying child soldiers of Africa, with a veneer of courtly manners, and you may get an idea of what was being bred in the castle courtyards of the twelfth century, or in the knights’ schools that produced masters of violence like Reynald or the unparalleled William Marshall, another ‘new man’ who hauled himself up from obscurity through force of arms. The big difference between the twelfth-century squire and the traumatized African kids is that medieval children were not doing something seen as evil. Unlike the vacant-eyed seven-year-old killers in Liberia, kidnapped and forced into senseless murder outside any existing social norms, the knight, however vicious, was a pillar of society. His development formed a vital part of the social order, and both religious and secular authorities validated the rectitude of his actions.

  What a boy is bred to do, the man will do. In twelfth-century Europe there were trained killers running wild in lands where war was unfortunately often in short supply. Tournaments were one way in which knights vented these martial passions, and these mock-battles were critical to a knight’s training. Reynald took part in tournaments and enthusiastically embraced the pageantry that went along with them. He was certainly among the target audience of crusading propaganda, such as the song Chevalier, Mult Estes Guariz. This song’s lyrics are a stirring secular call to holy war, and would have been sung in the halls of nobles such as the lords of Donzy. It was designed to appeal directly to Reynald and his ilk, by likening the coming crusade to a tournament:

  God has organized a tourney between Heaven and Hell… the Son of God the Creator has fixed a day for being at Edessa; there shall the sinners be saved… who will fight fiercely to wreak the vengeance of God12

  Of course, tournaments were never enough to sate the desires and energies of medieval warriors. The oversupply of fighting men resulted in chronic banditry and feuding, frequently led by frustrated younger sons. The crusade harnessed this pent-up violence for praiseworthy ends. As the monk Guibert of Nogent wrote:

  In our own time, God has instituted a Holy War, so that the order of knights and the unstable multitude who used to engage in mutual slaughter in the manner of ancient paganism may find a new way of gaining salvation.13

  This had also been an important feature of the First Crusade, which tried to impose the ‘Peace of God’ in Europe, while channelling the ferocity of the knightly class against the infidel. According to the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, Pope Urban II had proclaimed:

  Let those who have been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward.14

  Abbot Bernard himself, in his relentless letter-writing and preaching tours in support of the Second Crusade, repeatedly berated warring nobles and urged them to take vengeance on the heathen rather than kill each other. ‘Put a stop to it now,’ he said of their feuding:

  It is not fighting but foolery Thus to risk both soul and body is not brave but shocking, is not strength but folly. But now O mighty soldiers, O men of war, you have a cause for which you fight without danger to your souls: a cause in which to conquer is glorious and for which to die is to gain.15

  This was great news for Reynald. Raised as a warrior, he probably knew little beyond the rules of knighthood. Peace was no good for him. He had few skills and no penchant for peace. Twelfth-century warriors, like the troubadour Bertran de Born, revelled in their calling:

  Whoever may plough and cultivate his land, I have always taken trouble about how I may get bolts and darts, helmets and hauberks, horses and swords, for thus do I please myself; and I take joy in assaults and tournaments, in making gifts and making love.16

  This was what Reynald excelled at. It was what his upbringing and all his instincts drove him to do. The genius of the crusade was that it provided him with a way to get his kicks and exercise his skills in a legitimate, praiseworthy manner. For Reynald, it was an obvious choice. It is no good retrospectively, and anachronistically, criticizing him or his contemporaries for this. It was the wa
y things were. The code of chivalry put strictures on knighthood, yes; but at its core it promoted ferocity. This applied to any knight worth his salt. The knights who went on crusade were born, bred and brainwashed for the task. So too were the Saracens they fought, who saw themselves as fighting their own version of holy war, the jihad. The entire culture around Reynald was one of barely varnished brutality.

  An example of the dehumanizing upbringing experienced by young warriors is provided by one of Reynald’s enemies in the East, Usama Ibn Munqidh. While crusader knights are often depicted as rude, crude barbarian soldiers without any refinement, their Islamic opponents are usually shown as culturally and intellectually superior. This is inaccurate. Oriental civilization was overall undoubtedly superior in many ways; however, the Islamic Middle East at the time of the crusades – for all its relative sophistication – was riven by wars between rival princes and was ruled, like the Franks, by a bellicose warrior class, whether Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic. Usama was the archetype for these opponents of the crusaders – an Arabic ‘warrior and gentleman’ who is seen as the epitome of ‘Arab civilization as it flourished at the time of the crusades’.17 Usama, like Reynald, was brought up first and foremost as a warrior. In one of his poems he wrote:

  My whole ambition was to engage in combat with my rivals, whom

  I always took

  For prey.18

  His life was spent endlessly training for warfare. When he was not practising in arms and chainmail (Frankish mail was best), he was practising through the proxy of hunting. Instead of chasing boar and partridge along the Loing and roe deer in the rolling hills of Burgundy, Usama hunted francolin on the banks of the Orontes, leopard and lion in the dense thickets along the River Jordan. His father, who (typically for these warrior lords) was ‘greatly addicted to warfare’, taught him to kill from an early age. In his memoirs Usama describes how, using his little knife, he carefully sawed the head off a sleeping snake, while his father watched proudly.

  Another of Usama’s anecdotes is even more revealing of the moral make-up of those men who fought each other during the crusades. When he was ten years old, Usama tells us, he hit one of his family retainers with a stick. When the servant pushed back at him, Usama simply:

  pulled a knife from my belt and stabbed him with it. A big attendant of my father named Asad the Leader came, examined him and saw the wound, out of which flowed blood like bubbles of water every time the wounded man breathed Asad turned pale, shivered and fell unconscious.19

  The man Usama had stabbed died later that day.

  Remarkably, Usama does not tell us this story to shock us with his actions, or to examine the rights and wrongs of a ten-year-old boy casually killing a man on a whim. Rather, he uses it to illustrate ‘some men’s weakness of soul and faintness of heart, which I did not think possible among women’. To him, the sudden, callous murder is something that passes without comment. The ability to kill with such nonchalance had been instilled from his earliest years and would have been regarded as normal – even desirable – in a young medieval nobleman, whether Christian or Muslim. The only thing that shocks Usama about this event is the fact that his father’s big, strong attendant could faint at the sight of blood; something Usama was obviously well used to, even by the age of ten.

  Dealing with blood was also one of the things Reynald would have had to master early in his development. As the monk Roger of Hoveden wrote, first-hand experience of violence was a vital part of a knightly education in the twelfth century:

  He is not fit for battle who has never seen blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch under the blow of an opponent, or felt the full weight of his adversary upon him.20

  Once in the East, Reynald would soon reveal his propensity for decisive action and extreme violence. It was a trait that appalled and shocked his enemies and sometimes his fellow Christians, but it was far from unique.

  This is of course not to say that fighting men never thought beyond the violence of their trade. Usama was a poet and author, and so were troubadour knights like Bertran de Born and William IX of Poitiers. We do not know if Reynald was able to read – most knights could not – but even if he was not literary, a knight’s military activities had other dimensions, most importantly religious ones.

  For modern readers it is sometimes difficult to understand how Christianity – the religion of ‘turn the other cheek’ – could have condoned, let alone blessed and encouraged, such violence in its name. It is a problem that the Church wrestled with as well, and the crusade was one of their solutions. Ever since St Augustine’s theory of a ‘just war’ in the fifth century AD, a Christian justification of aggression had been available.21 Many theorists had developed these ideas after Augustine, and by the twelfth century ‘the duty of the duly ordained soldiery’ was well accepted as a vital part of society. In his pioneering work of political science, Policraticus, the brilliant cleric John of Salisbury, Reynald’s contemporary, wrote that a knight’s duties were:

  To defend the Church, to assail infidelity, to venerate the priesthood, to protect the poor from injuries, to pacify the province, to pour out their blood for their brothers (as the formula of their oath instructs them).22

  Clearly twelfth-century Christendom saw no contradiction in mixing religion and violence.

  Along with clerical theorists like John of Salisbury, the temporal legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail – with their conjunction of religious and military images and storylines – confirm that knights saw themselves as spiritual warriors, fulfilling a holy duty. The most perfect expressions of this were of course the Military Orders, ‘the new knighthood’ championed by Abbot Bernard. The warrior monks of orders like the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar were a:

  new kind of knighthood and one unknown to the ages gone by It ceaselessly wages a twofold war both against flesh and blood and against a spiritual army of evil in the heavens23

  The righteous fervour that drove Reynald and his comrades to kill and die for the Lord is reflected in the conviction that inspires the Islamic militant of today. The ISIS suicide bomber or Al-Qaida operative sees no dichotomy between the violence he embraces and Islam, the ‘religion of peace’ (the very word ‘Islam’ has the same root as ‘salaam’, the word for peace). Similarly, for Christian knights, religion and warfare mixed without problem. This combination was most perfectly enshrined in the person of a crusader. As Abbot Bernard said, ‘If he dies, it is to his benefit. If he kills, it is for Christ.’24

  The evidence of his later actions suggests that Reynald was hardly the typical pious type, but he need not have been spiritual in any way to be inspired by the crusading ideal. Seeing the Holy City was a romantic vision, which inspired monk and warrior alike. Crusading would have fulfilled the duty of knighthood, as he saw it, and Reynald would also have been motivated by the promise of the remission of sins. Any medieval Christian would have responded to these stimuli. This was a time of fervent religious belief, when paradise was an almost tangible garden of delight, and the tormenting fires of hell burned fiercely just beyond the grave. And the grave was not far away. The papal indulgence of full remission of sins, promised by Eugenius III to all who took part in the Second Crusade, would have been an extraordinary opportunity for a young knight of Reynald’s time. Many of them already had blood on their hands and plenty of sins to expiate, by an early age. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem had long been a way for warriors to wipe the slate clean, without having to leave the world of sin and join the Church. The terrifying Fulk Nerra (‘The Black’), Count of Anjou, twice went on pilgrimage to Jerusalem as penance for murder. The great thing about the crusade, which made it even better than a pilgrimage, was the opportunity it gave for knights to earn the religious benefits of pilgrimage, but as warriors intending to fight, not as pilgrims peacefully visiting the holy places. Abbot Guibert of Nogent, a chronicler of the First Crusade, observed that:

  Now they may seek God’s grace in their wonted habit and discharge
their own office, and no longer be drawn to seek salvation by utterly renouncing the world in the profession of the monk25

  Or as the troubadour Aymer de Pegulhan wrote:

  Behold, without renouncing our rich garments, our station in life, we can obtain honour down here and joy in paradise.26

  The crusade was tailor-made for King Louis VII of France as well. As a second son, the pious Louis was not originally destined for the throne and had been brought up in the cloister. When he was thrust into the kingship after the death of his brother, the crusade suited his ardent Christian zeal, but more practically it enabled Louis to fulfil his inherited obligations and save his soul as a king and soldier, without having to retire to the contemplative life. For Louis, the crusade was also a way to expiate the terrible guilt he felt for burning the church at Vitry in 1142. During a dispute with his powerful vassal Count Theobald of Champagne, King Louis had stormed the town of Vitry and burned the church, where many citizens had taken refuge. More than 1,000 perished in the flames.

  Like kings, even crusaders (Reynald among them) sometimes went too far in their militancy, shocking priest and knight alike. But just because a man’s crusade might stray from the righteous path into one of evil did not mean there was not a godly motivation for it in the first place. Abbot Bernard himself observed that ‘Hell is full of good wishes and desires.’ Over the centuries this saying has mutated a little – ‘The road to hell is paved with good intentions.’

  Bernard of Clairvaux was canonized in 1174, just twenty-one years after his death. The holy St Bernard – abbot, oracle and spiritual warrior – was one of the embodiments of the questing twelfth-century spirit that engendered, embraced and exploited the crusade. That very earthly warrior – adventurer, social climber, pilgrim and cold-blooded killer – Reynald de Chatillon was another.