God's Armies

by Malcolm Lambert

  And yet nothing happened. No dog barked after the Sepulchre was broken into pieces. No expedition set out. There were no ships dispatched. No military effort was made. Sergius’s encyclical had outlined in essence all the features of later crusading – armed force to recover the Sepulchre, papal leadership, heavenly reward for those who died – but without moving those who read or heard it. There ought, on the face of it, to have been a response. Jerusalem, known to all Christians through Scripture and liturgy, was becoming increasingly a place of pilgrimage. Rome, and the tombs of Peter and Paul, the prime objective in earlier centuries, was now giving way to Jerusalem. Monasteries speculated about the role of a Last World Emperor who at Jerusalem would inaugurate the end of the world. Pilgrimage to Jerusalem increased; hosts went on the occasion of the millennium of Christ’s Passion in 1033. New shrine chapels to accommodate pilgrims were built in about 1037 when a Byzantine emperor, collaborating with a Fatimid caliph who valued pilgrim traffic, built a smaller Church of the Holy Sepulchre on the site of the destroyed Constantinian basilica in the aftermath of an earthquake.

  There is a startling contrast between the response in 1009 and that in 1095. In 1095–6 the First Crusade set off to make the arduous journey to Jerusalem, but in 1009 nothing happened. The cause must lie in events and changes in attitudes in the West rather than the East.

  Localism in the West

  The historian of the First Crusade, John France, puzzled by the ‘curious incident’ of the lack of response of Western Christendom to the destruction of the Sepulchre by al-Hakim, set himself in 1996 to work out just why nothing stirred after 1009, and systematically worked through the chronicles of the time for clues.† He concluded that at the heart of the matter lay the intense localism of the sources. Authors, sponsored by local aristocrats, wrote about local saints and were themselves devoted to particular limited objectives – the history of one monastic house, the story of its founders or the career of one bishop who interested them or of one notable, probably a local benefactor – and saw no farther. However, two chroniclers, Adémar of Chabannes and Raoul Glaber, monks from south-central France, report the destruction with dismay. Glaber says the Sepulchre was destroyed by the ruler of Babylon, a common term for Islamic Egypt, but, like Adémar, he attributes the motive for the destruction to Western Jews. It was they, both chroniclers assert, who egged on Muslims. It was an extraordinarily unhistorical piece of anti-Semitism and was accompanied by pogroms. Despite their limited historical sense, both chroniclers cared greatly about Jerusalem and Adémar himself died on pilgrimage there in 1043. There is no reason to doubt the reality of the attacks on Jews reported by both chroniclers but, beyond that, the al-Hakim destruction had no further impact. Historical understanding was very limited. A number of other chroniclers never mention the destruction by al-Hakim at all and it is striking that Fleury on the Loire, a reforming monastery and a leading intellectual centre, has no word on it. Further to the east, German authors developed a genre of world history based on compiling biblical and classical sources to illustrate the working of God’s providence in history but had no awareness of a wider Christian world. The Annals of Hildesheim record the death of Gunther, bishop of Bamberg, in 1065 but do not say that he was on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Western Europe had turned in on itself: intensely local, it had very little awareness of events in the East, even so vivid an atrocity as the destruction of the Sepulchre.

  Pope Sergius had an exclusively Italian emphasis and this dampened his appeal. Italian cities were participants in far-flung trade: Venice had established privileges in the Byzantine Empire and although the leading municipalities – Venice, Pisa and Genoa – later developed a true crusading zeal themselves, they were at this time preoccupied and involved in peaceful trading ventures. Sergius does not seem to have touched the aristocracy of northern Italy who also had their own preoccupations. Popes of Sergius’s day moreover mattered little and tended to be victims of faction politics in Rome and its locality. Passive guardians of the shrines of St Peter and St Paul, they had scant means of publicising their views.

  Compostela and Cluny

  How did this change? One part of the story is the rise in popularity of an old pilgrimage route over the Pyrenees to the shrine of the Apostle James (Sant’Iago) in Galicia in remote north-western Spain, fruit of the mysterious discovery of his bones on this site by a ninth-century bishop. It could be an arduous journey over the mountain range, comparable to the austerities of the ascent of the Alps to reach Rome, and its austerity could have been an attraction. By the second half of the eleventh century there had come to be three important pilgrimages: Jerusalem outstripping the rest, Rome still there for traditionalists and then Compostela itself. The new route was taking pilgrims into or close to Muslim-dominated lands in Spain and the hostels and refuges on the journey were outlets for anti-Muslim sentiments and seed-ground for the indignation at the Muslim hold on Jerusalem, which issued finally in the ‘stirring of hearts’ of the West and the First Crusade.

  The abbey of Cluny, in Burgundy, gave the lead to the growing pilgrimage and was itself an outstanding example of the new Romanesque architecture of the eleventh century, roofing over great spans, providing for a flow of pilgrims up to a dominant high altar and giving room for massive choirs. Cluny in its glory days had 200 choir-monks and the beauty of its liturgy, its chanting of masses and its skilled management moved military men, who felt that this was the liturgy performed as it should be. Aristocrats were drawn to join the monastic life and to seek the prayers of Cluny and its priories for their dead relatives. It was a focus for a new and peaceful piety. Cluny had been generously endowed by a duke of Aquitaine, William the Pious, and given freedom from secular ties. It was exempt from the power of bishops, at this time only too often secular in their interests in sees which they had bought. It acquired a great congregation of reformed monastic houses, some 2,000 by 1109, all of which accepted its leadership. It was a forerunner of the fully fledged monastic orders of later times. Other leading abbeys, such as Hirsau in the Black Forest or Jumieges in Normandy, followed similar courses with dependent monasteries. Cluny and its fellows exercised spiritual influence over the fighting elite and imposed on them penances often of a very demanding kind. When the call came to go to Jerusalem and fight for it, it appeared to many of the elite a means of doing penance all in one go and saving their souls.

  The sculpture of the time produced dramatic images of the suffering of those condemned to hell. Sculpture in Romanesque churches of the pilgrim route also showed cavalrymen riding against enemies – a stimulus to the great cavalry-led expedition of 1095. The great churches of the Compostela route had their own saints whose monuments stand to this day in obscure country places in south-western France as a reminder of the piety of the pre-crusade age.

  Anti-Muslim Conventions

  Anti-Muslim sentiment was static in the early Middle Ages; the Compostela route did not increase it but did keep it alive. The Church of the day was preoccupied with the task of converting barbarians in the after-math of the collapse of Rome and consequently had little to say about Muslims. It was aware that death was the penalty for attempting to draw Muslims into Christianity, just as death was the penalty for apostasy by Muslims; sometimes Christians deliberately sought martyrdom by publicly abusing Muhammad and Islam and there were executions. Intellectual life was dominated by monks who were preoccupied with recovery of the legacy of Greece and Rome and had no eyes for anything else; consequently conciliatory and understanding writing which came from Byzantium or other Eastern Christians was disregarded and a crude polemic prevailed on the cruelty, idolatry and sexual misbehaviour of Muslims. Hagiography treated Islam in unsympathetic terms. A convention that Saracens were evil was established and nothing dislodged it. When Urban II, launching the crusade, spoke of Muslim atrocities against Christians, he was echoing a well-established genre of stories.

  The Reform Papacy

  Cluny and its affiliated priories, their exemption
s and their influence in public life, mattered in another way as they buttressed the developing reform papacy emerging in the course of the eleventh century and provided reformers. The story began as the Holy Roman Emperor Henry III, seeking in the traditional way coronation by the pope and concerned that the existence of three rival candidates for the papacy might invalidate his crowning, descended on Rome in 1046, dismissed the candidates and appointed a German bishop of his own, who reigned as Clement II. Henry’s action launched a sequence of German or north Italian reforming popes, who declared war on simony, the regular practice of payment to kings in return for appointment to high ecclesiastical office, especially bishoprics. They also opened a campaign against nicolaitism, the marriage of clergy – again a regular practice involving the continuance of a hereditary priesthood in which no issue of merit or vocation arose and fathers instructed sons on their ceremonial duties in a form of apprenticeship. Initiatives of this kind from an emperor were not controversial, for he was solemnly anointed as he took office, conferring on him a special status with authority over clergy and the right to deliver to bishops their symbols of office, the ring and the shepherd’s staff.

  Of these new-style popes the most notable was Leo IX (1048–54), a Lorrainer, for many years bishop of Toul and a relative of the emperor. He was distinguished in his tireless journeying out of Rome in the cause of reform through Florence, Pavia and Cologne and then to the diocese of Rheims. There he was to consecrate a new church for the translation of the relics of St Remigius, the most important saint for all the Franks as he was the missionary who had baptised their king, Clovis. In an unusual move, Leo exposed the saint’s relics on the high altar and then confronted the bishops and abbots whom he had summoned to a great council there and asked them one by one if they had paid money for their respective offices. In dramatic scenes bishops were confounded; one bishop was even struck dumb. Some bishops were deposed and all who had failed to heed Leo’s summons to the council were automatically dismissed from office. The moral authority of the papacy was established at a stroke. The pope also sought a concomitant reform for the laity by the institution in the Rheims diocese of the Peace of God, restricting fighting and requiring protection for the vulnerable, women, monks and merchants.

  The pope led his own forces against marauders attempting to conquer papal lands, and was defeated by Norman rulers of south Italy at Civitate in 1053. He died in the year following this catastrophe, but not before he had established that force could be used on behalf of the see of Peter. One error lay in his use of the Cluniac monk Humbert of Silva Candida, who in an irritable and careless fashion issued a declaration of excommunication with far-reaching consequences for the patriarch of the Byzantine Church over a trivial issue, leaving it on the altar of the great church Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

  Pope Gregory VII (1073–84) was inspired by Leo, to whom he habitually referred in conversation. Passionate, devoted to St Peter in a long career dedicated to Rome, a monk and a man of relatively humble origin in contrast to the run of aristocratic holders of the papal office, Gregory had titanic energy and turned the world upside down. Force, he believed, was necessary to achieve his great objective, that ‘holy Church, the bride of Christ, Our Lady and mother should return in her true glory and stand free, chaste and catholic’. In his opposition to simoniac, unchaste clergy and their backers, he turned to all kinds of allies: he welcomed Erlembald, a street fighter in Milan, distributed banners to warriors, used barbaric Normans to fight for him and developed the notion of militias of St Peter as a fighting force for the papacy. He broke wholly with the tradition under which Leo IX and his predecessors had worked as reformers under a beneficent and reforming emperor. The Church and its ordained clergy, abbots and bishops should stand in independence of all secular power. It was a vital moment in western European and Christian history, for the division between Church and State adumbrated by Gregory lasted and it differentiated the situation in the West profoundly from the Muslim East, where the caliphate in the tradition of Muhammad exercised authority in matters both religious and secular.

  The death of Emperor Henry III and a long regency for his son Henry IV, who succeeded at the age of six, opened the way for advances in papal power and independence to the advantage of Gregory when he embarked on his extraordinary challenge to the Church and society. ‘Cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed’ was his favourite text, taken from the prophet Jeremiah, and the use of every weapon against the enemies of his reform led to dramatic clashes and a war of pamphlets. No longer would statements from the papacy be left in obscurity, as in Sergius’s day. Step by step his natural supporters deserted him, even those sympathetic to reform. He humiliated Henry IV, but then had to witness the emperor’s ravaging of his beloved Rome while he took refuge in the fortress of the Castel Sant’ Angelo. He was forced into exile and died under the protection of the Normans.

  He left behind a multitude of initiatives, letters and schemes. Among them was a letter he sent to the young Henry IV in December 1074, before they quarrelled. This sketched out to the emperor a plan for Gregory himself to lead an army to aid Christians overseas, ‘who are being daily butchered like herds of cattle’. ‘I have been touched with great grief’, he went on, ‘and I have taken steps to stir up certain Christians who long to lay down their lives for their brethren. Already more than fifty thousand men have prepared themselves, so that, if they can have me as their Pontiff and leader they may go all the way to the Lord’s Sepulchre.’ He had been influenced, he concluded, by the desire of the Byzantines to heal quarrels, which included the major issue of the Procession of the Holy Spirit in the doctrine of the Trinity, which continues to disturb and damage the relationship between the Latin and the Greek Churches in modern times. Here Gregory, the great radical and the dynamic defender of the rights of the papacy, was surprisingly ready to seek reconciliation.

  It was all fantasy; there never were 50,000 men in readiness and the scheme got nowhere. But the man was revealed. His ‘great grief’ was typical of a man of compassion, and his scheme sketched out all the themes of the First Crusade – Saracen atrocities, relief of Eastern Christians, the journey to the Sepulchre, the will to assist Byzantium. The plan, which remained in his head, cohered with his vision of the Church as he believed it had once been, free of greedy and oppressive lay powers, its leaders openly chosen on merit and in peace with all fellow Christians. A desire for peace might seem an odd outcome of Gregory’s stormy actions, yet there was a logic and a vision to it, widening out Leo’s decree for Peace in the diocese of Rheims. Gregory was seeking the Peace of God over the whole Christian world and the action to aid Eastern Christians, healing the split with the Byzantine Church, was designed to make universal Peace a reality.

  Gregory’s tempestuous reign left an important legacy for the beginning of crusading, both positively and negatively. On the one hand, his actions alienated all crowned heads: consequently no kings responded to the summons to Jerusalem and armies had to be commanded by princes. On the other hand, he implanted in papal circles a notion of the rightfulness of war for a holy cause and of the injustices done to Eastern Christians. The sketch of a crusade lay, so to speak, on the table to be picked up later.

  Behind the localism and limited horizons of the chronicles investigated by John France lay the misery of anarchic, perennial warfare, dominant in the eleventh century as a result of the progressive disintegration of public authority after the breakdown of Charlemagne’s empire. There remained some residual awareness of the idea of the power and duty of the ruler to maintain order which had been inherited from the Roman Empire; but in practice, over the years, power had devolved only too often down to the level of the castellan. In the lands of the western Franks there was indeed a monarchy, which reached back to the insignificant figure of Hugh Capet, chosen in 987, but his power and that of his descendants for many years had remained minimal. Philip I, for example, who reigned with frailty from 1060 to 1108, towards the end of
his life remarked that his vain attempts to capture the insignifcant castle of Montlhery, to which he held a claim, had made him old before his time. The king was a landlord among many others and the real unit of power was the mouvance, a circle of influence based on landholding. Struggles to maintain or expand these circles form the stuff of history in the most anarchic regions. Raiding and plundering were central.

  A vernacular poem composed between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries describes a scene which had been typical of the eleventh century as well. As an army moved forward, preceded by scouts, fire-raisers and foragers, who were to collect the spoil and carry it away in the baggage train, villages were set on fire. Terrified inhabitants were led off to be held for ransom: ‘Everywhere’, the poem continues, ‘bells ring the alarm; a surge of fear sweeps over the countryside, wherever you look you can see helmets ... pennons ... the whole plain covered with horsemen. Money, cattle, mules and sheep are all seized. The smoke billows, flames crackle. Peasants and shepherds scatter in all directions.’

  Churchmen denounced these practices as the work of mercenaries but were aware that this was only a formula, for they knew only too well that ravaging was part of general warfare and carried out by arms-bearers who were, of course, their relatives. It fell grievously on peasants, the surplus of whose labour sustained the way of life of landholders. They were over and over again the victims in battles over mouvances as a besieging force stripped a locality of its stores of grain, seized crops to feed its horses and took away livestock. The object was to intimidate and humiliate the landholder under attack and to shake the loyalty of vassals, who viewed their lord as an effective protector. The peasant, in any case, lived precariously: the barrier between living and starving was a thin one and could be broken by climatic conditions, epidemics, murrain of cattle, poor harvests and ravaging.