God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  Living in Outremer did not leave Franks unmarked, even if only in superficial habits of daily existence. The memoirs of Usamah of Shaizar, whose stories are frequently too good to be precisely true, mentioned an agent of his dining in Antioch with a Greek friend at the house of a Frankish veteran of the First Crusade who employed an Egyptian cook, avoided Frankish dishes and never allowed pork under his roof.47 Such fastidious conversion to Muslim habits was uncommon; westerners in Outremer may have adopted many local comforts, but their taste for pork appeared constant. Pork butchers traded at Tyre; swineherds tended their flocks in the countryside; surviving rubbish tips evince continued consumption. A privilege of William II of Sicily in 1168 allowed the monastery of St Mary of the Latins in Jerusalem to export from Messina without paying customs 200 sides of bacon, as well as 100 barrels of tunny fish and a large shipment of lambskin cloaks, rabbit-skins, ox-hides, linen and wool: winters are chilly in the hills of Judea.48 Perhaps the greatest dietary impact of the east on the immigrants was castor sugar; exploitation of sugar cane, especially around Acre and Tyre, became a major industry in Outremer. In dress, acclimatization went with loose-fitting clothes, cool fabrics in the summer, furs in winter, protection of skin and armour from the sun by veils and surcoats; some Franks adopted the turban.49 Most notable in contrast to the west, Franks in Outremer imitated the high standards of hygiene practised by locals. The lack of washing and ignorance of bathhouse culture and etiquette was just one source of hilarity and contempt for Usamah, on a par with what he regarded as the Franks’ lax sexual mores and poor treatment of women. Care was taken in providing water supplies for domestic use as well as irrigation, via aqueducts on the coastal plain and networks of cisterns in the arid uplands and desert. Even the Hospitaller castle at Belvoir contained a bathroom. Twelfth-century domestic architecture may rarely have reached such lavish proportions as at the Ibelin palace at Beirut, built in the first years of the thirteenth century, with its fountains, airy halls, mosaics, marble and long vistas inland and out to sea, a sort of Outremer Alhambra. However, even comparatively modest houses of the well-to-do in cities and substantial properties in the countryside boasted mosaic flooring, often with inlay of antique marble, painted plaster walls, the interiors probably furnished with carpets and textile hangings, the tables laid with pottery imports from overseas. Away from the cities, such pottery probably did not circulate, the habitations of the rural peasantry being basic in design and utensils, dependent on local produce and artefacts.

  The rural economy of Outremer proved largely resistant to radical change by the western immigrants, who may nonetheless have imported their heavy ploughs to tame the thin soils of Palestine: they divided their plots of land into carrucates, as in the west, although similar land divisions and ploughs were familiar to the east. While not such a monopoly crop as in the west, cereals – wheat and barley – provided a central feature of village economy. Sesame and vegetables were planted as summer crops. The shortage of cereals apparent from imports in the early years of the century did not persist. Olives remained a staple, which would have made immigrants from southern Europe feel at home, although the orchards around the villages provided more exotic fruit. In many new villages, the central activity concentrated on winemaking.

  Most evident is the degree to which the Franks in Outremer fitted into the Levantine economy, exporting dyes, luxury textiles, castor sugar and glassware and, increasingly, spices, while importing from Europe and Islamic neighbours such things as foodstuffs, metals, wood, and cotton. Outremer stimulated cross-Mediterranean commerce, in men (i.e. pilgrims) and goods. By the 1160s, one Genoese notary was recording a higher value (almost double) in trade to Syria than to Alexandria, the greatest entrepôt of the eastern Mediterranean.50 In return, the profits of commerce increasingly sustained the economy and finances of Outremer. Thus it may have appeared to restless westerners that Outremer indeed promised a land of opportunity which its rulers and patrons of settlements struggled to realize.

  Despite acculturation, the comparative brevity of the Frankish presence in the Syrian and Palestinian countryside and the truncated occupation of the coastal cities precluded further developments towards either social integration or the creation of a distinctive cohesive cultural identity. The cosmopolitan backgrounds of the settlers, their lack of numbers and the constant influx of visitors and new immigrants was reflected in the diversity of art and architecture. Outremer has been described as a fragmentary colony of western Europe, displaying only disjointed facets or incomplete bits of the mother culture.51 Equally, it developed only a fragmentary unity with the indigenous Christian population and none at all with the Muslims. The divides of language, law, religion and status failed to coincide. Concerted attempts to convert Muslim subjects were limited. Owners resented the freeing of converted Muslim slaves. Elsewhere, conversions appeared as individual responses to circumstances, although there may have been some pull towards accepting the faith of the rulers of a confessional state, as there was in the later multi-faith Ottoman or Habsburg empires. Yet the ambiguity, if not of the Latin settlement than of the evidence for it, is well expressed in some surviving capitals from the cathedral of the Annunciation in Nazareth. While some have regarded their formalized, unrealistic depiction of Syrians as quintessential proof of the Franks’ colonial blindness and policy of apartheid, two of the capitals, depicting apocryphal conversion missions of the apostles Bartholomew and Matthew, have prompted suggestions that some of the Nazarene clergy desired the Christianization of their Muslim neighbours.52

  Twelfth-century Frankish Outremer did not disappear in the face of Saladin’s conquest of 1187–9. Some of the rural population must have survived. In places, on the plain of Acre perhaps, villages may have sustained themselves, subjugated but intact, surrounded as they were by other Christian communities; certainly with the reconquest of the coast after 1191, some settlements resorted to their previous ownership and inhabitants to their former privileges. In such a geographically diverse and complicated region, numbers of Franks may have stayed, survival not necessarily dependent on the fate of the lords or even of the cities. The castle of Montréal had held out against Saladin for a year and a half before surrendering early in 1189. Twenty-eight years later, in 1217, when a German pilgrim, Thietmar, visited the town beneath the castle, still in Muslim hands and inhabited by Muslims and Syrian Christians, he stayed with a Frankish widow. On Thietmar’s departure, she provided him with directions on the best route towards his destination of Mt Sinai and supplied him with provisions for his journey: twice-baked bread, cheese, raisins, figs and wine.53 Here, at least, was one Frankish settler whose stay in the east was not temporary, superficial, transient or destitute. As Fulcher of Chartres had trumpeted optimistically a century before, the widow of Montréal was indeed an Occidental who had become an Oriental.

  The Second Crusade

  8

  A New Path to Salvation? Western Christendom and Holy War 1100–1145

  To the snobbish, mother-fixated failed abbot Guibert of Nogent, spinning his vision of ‘the Deeds of God performed by the Franks’ (Gesta Dei per Francos) before 1108, the Jerusalem campaign offered the laity a new path of salvation; the German abbot Ekkehard of Aura, a veteran of the 1101 fiasco, saw it as a new means of penitence.1 Many western observers were quick to associate the Jerusalem enterprise’s uniqueness with a general manifesto for spiritual redemption, ecclesiastical discipline and Christian expansion, such rewarded, sanctified violence exploited by a reinvigorated papacy and its supporters to reinforce the tradition of penitential war in the church’s interests. However, the radical effect of the First Crusade can be exaggerated. Secular and clerical refinements of the story of the First Crusade, in poem, song, chronicle or sermon, confirmed as much as redefined long-standing cultural acceptance of the equality of physical with spiritual religious militancy. Urban II had not invented soldiers of Christ nor spiritually beneficial and meritorious warfare, a tradition that encompassed rather than
surrendered to the First Crusade. While the first Jerusalemites basked in unique glory, their example did not lead to a succession of large expeditions east following the disasters of 1101. Some regions that had supplied large contingents between 1095 and 1101, including the Limousin, Champagne and Provence, provided few traceable military crucesignati between 1102 and 1146.2 Those who assumed the cross and departed to fight in the east attracted admiration; the cause of Outremer received close, often anxious attention; yet, despite papal commitment and sporadic local recruitment, no mass movement emerged. The images, attitudes and actions of the First Crusade were disseminated across western society widely but fitfully, often as rhetorical evangelical tropes as much as calls to arms. Jerusalem in Christian hands stimulated a wave of pilgrims with the occasional military adventurer or princely swell, their motives possibly as chivalric as pious. Meanwhile, popes integrated aspects of Urban’s expedition into their increasingly authoritarian role as leader and protector of Christendom within as well as beyond its frontiers, encouraging use of the language and institutions of this new holy war against papal enemies in Italy or bandits in northern France as well as Muslims in Outremer or Spain.

  SPREADING THE WORD

  Awareness of the First Crusade pervaded elite western culture. When, around 1143 in the midst of the backsliding and compromises of the English civil war, the Anglo-Norman baron Brian FitzCount wished to expose the mendacity of the turncoat bishop of Winchester, he naturally chose a familiar reference, the golden memory of the loyalty of the boni milites of the First Crusade.3 A monk from the Cambrésis on the northern Franco-Flemish frontier, writing c.1133, refrained from a detailed account of the Jerusalem expedition, arguing that the events were better described in books, songs and hymns, a regrettable forbearance as he claimed to have attended the Council of Clermont four decades earlier.4 There was no need for either baron or monk to elaborate; the story was well known. The scale and rapid production of histories of the First Crusade by eyewitnesses and others eager to interpret the startling events didactically finds no parallel in medieval historiography. Within a dozen years of Jerusalem’s capture, at least four full eyewitness accounts, three major western histories and part of the great Lorraine version by Albert of Aachen were being circulated along with a bevy of other accounts, more or less derivative, imaginative or polemic. While originating in monasteries and cathedrals, these texts reflected and excited secular interests, for example in local heroes or national pride. Most of the histories sculpted stirring tales of faith, bravery, suffering, danger, tenacity and triumph. The theologians distilled the message of God’s immanence and Christian duty; the no less artful eyewitnesses provided accessible tales of miracles and butchery. One of the very earliest, the Gesta Francorum, included elaborate scenes with stereotype exotic Orientals declaiming extravagant, bombastic nonsense much in the style of the verse chansons de geste. Naturalistic representation, especially of the enemy, did not feature.5

  Signifying this artificiality, accurate knowledge of Islam and the Prophet remained almost non-existent in western Europe until the translation of the Koran in the 1140s by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable. Despite a quickening of interest after 1099, accounts of Muhammed relied on translated Byzantine polemic or mangled accounts derived from Spain or returning Holy Land pilgrims. Around 1110, Guibert of Nogent’s life of the Prophet in his Gesta Dei Per Francos and that by Embrico of Mainz both provided Muhammed with a pet cow, presumably derived from a garbled false memory of the Sura of the Koran known as ‘The Cow’. Most discussion of Muslims failed to rise beyond the racist ignorance and abuse of the epics and romances, a tradition in which the Gesta Francorum, one of the most popular and copied sources, rested comfortably.

  Such texts, while sketching an increasingly fixed canon of adventure stories, fed the language of preaching, as with the invented versions of Urban II’s Clermont address (i.e. all of them). A more or less distinctive, although never prescriptive or uniform, corpus of scriptural references and paraphrases became employed by popes and later propagandists and chroniclers of Jerusalem campaigns. In this narrow vocabulary of holy war a defined set of intellectual and religious attitudes and theories emerged at the precedent-obsessed papal Curia and among the propagandists and apologists of the Second Crusade (1146–8) but, until the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 once more made the story immediately relevant, not elsewhere beyond the cloister or the study. Twelfth-century circulation of even the most prominent histories of the First Crusade may have been limited, including the most ‘popular’, the Historia of Robert of Rheims. Surviving in at least thirty-nine twelfth-century manuscripts, only during the Third Crusade (1188–92) did it clearly assume the character of an exemplar. In a famous drawing of Frederick I Barbarossa of Germany, dressed as a crucesignatus, a copy of Robert’s Historia is being presented by the provost of Schäftlarn. At about the same time the Cistercian monk Gunther of Pairis, near Basel, later one of the few western chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), rendered Robert’s work into verse. Descriptions of the First Crusade and similar later expeditions may have encouraged the application of the language of the Jerusalem holy war, much of it conventional biblical rhetoric, to other conflicts, forming a specialized literary genre. This hardly constituted a demotic movement.6

  More accessible to the partially literate communities of the twelfth century stood oral transmission of ideas, stories and news: sermons, the liturgy, living witness and the Cambrésis monk’s songs, cantica and carmina, chansons de geste, hymns or liturgical chants. Sermons – actual, invented or remembered – sparked ideas and aspirations: the early invented accounts of Urban’s Clermont speech; descriptions of addresses made in 1106 on behalf of Bohemund’s eastern enterprise or in 1103 by the archbishop of Würzburg concerning a plan of Henry IV to visit Jerusalem; or a recruiting circular composed at Magdeburg in 1108 to encourage support for expansion into the lands of the Slavs beyond the Elbe. It was remembered that Bohemund began his sermon in Chartres cathedral to rouse enthusiasm for a holy war against Byzantium in 1106 by relating ‘all his deeds and adventures’, prominently, no doubt, his leadership to Antioch in 1098.7 Such public performances, alive in the collective memory of historians a generation later, helped secure a crusade narrative in the minds of listeners. To reinforce his message, Bohemund may have distributed, in addition to relics, doctored copies of the Gesta Francorum which demonized the Greeks while praising him.

  Information was conveyed by oral testimony. Chroniclers of the First Crusade relied on the reminiscences of returning veterans. Guibert of Nogent picked the memory of his acquaintance Robert of Flanders; Albert of Aachen’s history depended on the testimony of returning members of Godfrey of Bouillon’s contingent. The most effective medium of popular memory remained verse. Although the great verse epics, such as the Chanson d’Antioche, found a form stable enough to be written down only later in the century, verses for singing or recitation, perhaps with musical accompaniment, were compiled much earlier. These contain little if any historical as opposed to literary value, but they provided vivid stories. Thus, in his own lifetime, Duke Robert II of Normandy (d. 1134) was confronted with wholly fictitious tales that he had killed Kerbogha at Antioch and had been offered the crown of Jerusalem, legends that the Anglo-Norman poet Gaimar had incorporated into his vernacular Estoire des Engleis by the 1140s.8 Such adventure stories fashioned the image of the First Crusade and conditioned responses to further appeals to holy war. The power of songs and verses operated on a number of levels, from taproom to court, causing disquiet even in the powerful. In 1124, Henry I of England blinded a rebel, Luke of La Barre, because of his effective slanderous songs.9 In mid-century, Gerhoh of Reichersberg credited the medium with producing a creeping puritanism: ‘The praise of God is also spreading in the mouth of laymen who fight for Christ, because there is nobody in the whole Christian realm who dares to sing dirty songs in public.’10

  Gerhoh pointed to the close connections of the warlike laity and t
heir families with religious houses, reflecting the interwoven social context for the varied channels of reminiscence, sermon, encyclical, chronicle and song as well as the physical context of visual reinforcement to the ideology of holy war in sculpture, painting and stained glass, of which only the ecclesiastical survives. In parish churches throughout western Europe, holy knights combated evil and qualified for salvation; in a fresco of the Apocalypse on the roof of the crypt of Auxerre cathedral Christ Himself appears as a mounted military hero. The work was commissioned by Bishop Humbaud (1095–1114), a protégé of Urban II who assisted at the Synod of Anse in 1100, which called on crucesignati to fulfil their vows, and who died a Jerusalem pilgrim.11 Pilgrimage as much as holy war lay behind representations of the Holy Sepulchre itself, in manuscript illuminations, pictorial decorations, ecclesiastical carving or, as at Eichstätt Bavaria, in the form of a full-scale physical copy.12