God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Christopher Tyerman

  The Las Navas de Tolosa campaign was instrumental in this process. The battle of 16 July 1212 was won by a coalition of Spanish kings, Alfonso VIII of Castile, Peter II of Aragon, and Sancho VII of Navarre. Although a few northern allies under Archbishop Arnaud Amaury of Narbonne remained in the Christian army for the battle, the bulk of the French recruits had deserted the campaign a fortnight earlier, disappointed at the lack of action or booty and oppressed by the summer heat, while the duke of Austria had not yet arrived. The victory over al-Nasir (1199–1214) and his large Almohad force could thus be proclaimed as a specifically Spanish achievement and fitted into a providential narrative of Spanish revenge for the ‘Spanish’ defeat of 711. Although surrounded by the panoply of crusading, the campaign relied on the secular resources of Castile. Alfonso VIII bankrolled the whole enterprise, paying for the bulk of the coalition troops, including stipends for Peter II and his Aragonese army, and providing the unreliable French with horses. To allow him to do this, Alfonso had extracted a massive forced aid of 50 per cent of annual revenues from the Castilian church. The muster had been fixed at Castilian Toledo for Pentecost 1212. The consequences of the Las Navas campaign were profound, if equivocal. The Reconquest’s association with crusading institutions failed to disguise the dependence for success on the national strength of, in particular, Castile, re-emphasized following the death during the Albigensian crusade at Muret in 1213 of Peter II, a crusader killed by crusaders. The victory of Las Navas opened Andalucia to Castilian aggression. It fatally undermined Almohad prestige and power both in Spain and Morocco, where a demoralized al-Nasir died in 1214. The financial precedent exerted possibly the most direct material influence as successive Iberian monarchs exploited the church to fund their wars, in particular appropriating a third of ecclesiastical tithe income (tercias) as well as attempting to syphon off clerical taxation designed to help the Holy Land. Combined with a range of extraordinary lay levies and forced loans, the needs of the Reconquest materially strengthened the fiscal and hence political power of the state in thirteenth-century Iberia, a lasting legacy of the expedients that won the triumph at Las Navas.38

  Within forty years, all that remained of Muslim al-Andalus politically was the emirate of Granada, reduced to a Castilian tributary. As the disintegrating Almohad empire fell with accelerating rapidity into Christian hands, crusading in Spain adopted a settled local flavour. There were no more Muslim counter-attacks to excite the fear of all western Christendom. When the kingdom of Navarre devolved on to Theobald IV count of Champagne (1201–53) in 1234, its new French ruler preferred to take the cross for the Holy Land, not Andalucia. The great warrior kings of the thirteenth century, Ferdinand III of Castile (and of León from 1230) and James I, ‘the Conqueror’ of Aragon, rolled back the Muslim frontier self-consciously in the name of God. Each flirted with carrying the fight beyond the peninsula, to Africa or Palestine. Yet neither found the commitment that led their contemporary Louis IX of France to the Nile (1249–50), even though, as Christendom’s elder statesman, James I sent an Aragonese regiment east in 1269 and played a central if hardly positive role in plans for a new eastern crusade in 1274. Some conquests were accompanied by gestures of religious restoration and purification, with a stated goal of extending the Christian faith. When Ferdinand III captured Cordoba in 1236, he returned to the cathedral of St James in Compostela the bells al-Mansur had seized in 997, which had been housed in the Cordoban great mosque ever since. Elsewhere, the siege of Valencia (1238) attracted English and French recruits and Seville (captured 1248), was partly settled by foreign Christians to replace the expelled Muslims. Yet much of the Reconquest involved negotiation and accommodation of the religious, legal and civil liberties of the conquered, as with James I’s annexation of Mallorca (1229) and Valencia (1231–8) and Ferdinand III’s occupation of Murcia in 1243. In the kingdom of Valencia, the majority Muslim population remained, despite James having taken the cross in 1232 to symbolize his religious credentials. The few attempts at conversion amounted to little, although some Muslims apostatized, such as Abu Zayd, the king of Valencia deposed in 1229 and ally of James I. He adopted the Christian name Vincent. In 1245, his son, al-Hasan, by then governor of the Moroccan Atlantic port of Sale, abortively offered to convert and turn his city over to the Order of Santiago as a start to the conversion of the Maghrib.39 In many ways, after the conquests, Muslims and Christians changed roles, the mudejars now becoming the protected second-class citizens. The sound of calls of the muezzin to prayer persisted in some areas for centuries, to the growing annoyance of their Christian neighbours. Although new sacred and secular landscapes and spaces were created, from encouraging Christian immigration and changing Arabic place names to converting mosques into churches, initially, at least, holy war did not impose a holy settlement on the ancient Muslim communities of conquered al-Andalus. Accommodation survived. In regions such as Valencia, non-Christian communities negotiated their own futures, their subordinate status only very slowly succumbing to concerted discrimination. However, the status and rights of the mudejars did deteriorate, until the recrudescence of militant neo-crusading led to the imposition of intolerant and increasingly racist Christian uniformity under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile and their heirs Charles V and Philip II. Yet, the expulsions and persecutions of mudejars and moriscos testified to the hold not of the crusading ideals familiar to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but to a newly configured aggressive militancy that engaged the crusade tradition as well as the Reconquest myth to drive its chariot’s wheels.

  With the fall of Seville in 1248, the main thrust of the Reconquest had been completed. Thereafter, and arguably for years before, the crusade in Spain was almost entirely subsumed in the mainstream of Spanish life, distinguishable largely in name only as a separate exercise of religious devotion, military enterprise or financial expedient. The occasional recrudescence of war, such as the campaign against the Marinid invaders from Morocco, which ended with their defeat by Alfonso XI of Castile at the river Salado in 1340, still elicited crusade bulls. The religious mentality crusading fostered and bequeathed to the conquerors was more truly reflected in the fiscal and penitential instruments it had created, such as the bula de la cruzada. These became obstinately cherished elements of Spanish public life, especially in Castile, after the early thirteenth century the only Christian kingdom with a land border with the Moors of Granada. The ideology of crusade and Reconquest, reflected in the continued material prominence of the military orders, induced a providential tinge to the rhetoric of state power and national identity.

  Although the decline in active frontier militarism after c.1300 may be traced in the fading of the cult of Santiago before that of the Virgin Mary, the holy war tradition remained available in its crusading wrapping. Despite intimate social and economic exchange across confessional divides in Andalucia, Murcia and Valencia, for the knightly and noble classes and their royal and ecclesiastical sponsors engaged in wars against infidels – Muslim or heathen – in Granada, the Mediterranean, north Africa or the Atlantic, identification with the crusade remained a living cultural force as well as a stereotype. While his captains were observing west Africans outside the straitjacket of crusading aesthetics, the Portuguese prince Henry the Navigator (1394–1460) embraced crusading aspirations and campaigned in north Africa.40 As late as 1578, a Portuguese king, Sebastian, died commanding an international force, armed with indulgences and papal legates, fighting the Moors of Morocco at the battle of Alcazar. The penetration of Latin Christendom into the islands of the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries attracted papal grants for the extension of Christianity.41 The Iberian tradition ensured a sympathetic hearing for the Genoese crusade enthusiast Christopher Columbus. The crusade provided one strand in the conceptual justification for the conquest of the Americas and, more tenuously, in the mentality of the slave trade, which some saw as a vehicle for expanding Christianity. This was made possible b
y the idea popular by c.1500 that Spain itself constituted a Holy Land, its Christian inhabitants new Israelites, tempered and proved in the fire of the Reconquest, champions of God’s cause against infidels outside Christendom or heretics within.42

  In the later fifteenth century, a revival of the crusading mission, with papal bulls for the war against Granada in 1485, depended as heavily on this recasting of, in particular, Castile, as itself a new Holy Land with a providential task as it did on genuine Aragonese and Castilian crusading traditions. The fall of Granada in 1492 and persistent attempts in the sixteenth century to conquer the coast of Morocco and Tunisia breathed new life into the myth of the Reconquest and the manifest destiny of Catholic Spain. Domestically, this was turned to justify the expulsions of Moors, Jews and moriscos and underpinned the development of an openly exclusive and racist sectarian society. Externally, the appropriation of crusading into the projection of national identity informed the creation of the Spanish empire, sometimes with bizarre consequences. In faraway central America, local allies of the conquistadors at Tlaxcala, a city state east of Mexico, marked the treaty of Aigues Mortes between Charles V and the French king Francis I in 1538 with a lavish pageant showing the anticipated conquest of Jerusalem by the king of Spain. On Corpus Christi Day 1539, in the presence of the consecrated host, a lavish display included two Christian ‘armies’ laying siege to the Holy City, one comprising Europeans, the other commanded by the Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, with the Tlaxcalans and other ‘New Spaniards’ in their own war costumes, complete with ‘feathers, devices and shields’. Seemingly, a good time was had by all. A few weeks earlier, the Mexicans to the east had laid on a similar show depicting the Turkish siege of Rhodes.43 Through these traditional images of past and future crusading, New Spain was being assimilated into the culture and faith of the old. The association was not accidental. Peace between the great Christian powers of early sixteenth-century Europe habitually came with hopes of a new holy war against the Turks. For some Spanish propagandists, the duty to defend and extend Christendom had devolved uniquely on to Spain, ‘Mother of the heroes of war, confidant of Catholic soldiers, crucible in which the love of God is purified, land where it is seen that Heaven buries those who to Heaven will be borne as defenders of the purest faith’.44 The words are those of Miguel de Cervantes. The crusade and Reconquest fed a new national messianism that became inextricably bound into Spanish imperial ideology and, more diffusely, into cultural identity. Further in time than Mexico was in space from the medieval battlefields of the cross, but oddly closer in sentiment, the power and longevity of the Spanish crusade myth, and its practical social and political implications, still found mighty confirmation in the twentieth century through its insidious but effective appropriation by General Franco and his fascist apologists.

  21

  Frontier Crusades 2: the Baltic and the North

  ‘They shall either be converted or wiped out.’1 So Bernard of Clairvaux announced the extension of Jerusalem indulgences to the summer campaign of 1147 against the pagan Slavs, or Wends, between the rivers Elbe and Oder. This decision, reached at the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147, set the tone for perhaps the most radical and effective association of holy war and territorial expansion. Crusading in the Baltic touched the destinies of every region east of the Elbe in a great arc stretching along the coast eastwards and northwards to Livonia, Estonia, Finland and the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia. Bernard’s analogy with wars fought for the Holy Land of Palestine provided ethnic cleansing, commercial exploitation and political aggrandizement with a religious gloss, a potent, lasting and, for some, sincerely believed justification for the cruel process of land-grabbing, Christianization and Germanization that brought the pagan communities of the eastern and northern Baltic littoral into the pale of Christianity and western European culture.

  BEGINNINGS

  Yet Bernard had not invented the religious excuse for conquest in the Baltic. He had been anticipated by the Magdeburg appeal of 1108, encouraging support for an attack on the Wends, probably composed by a Flemish clerk in the archbishop’s household. The campaign being urged was to liberate ‘our Jerusalem’, an ambiguous reference to the vulnerable Christian lands along the Elbe frontier and the lost ecclesiastical provinces beyond, briefly established by the tenth-century Ottonian kings of Germany before being abandoned after the Slav rising of 983. This challenging analogy prefigured the way crusading influenced

  20. The Baltic

  German eastward expansion by exploiting the new impetus and definition given to holy war by the eastern Jerusalem campaigns in emphasizing the need to defend all Christian frontiers and by implying that, in the Baltic, as in Palestine, the battle was for the recovery of Christian lands. In a mood of realism no less prophetic of the future Baltic crusades, the Magdeburg clerk augmented these emotional triggers and legal niceties with the harsher attractions of blatant materialism and spiritual reward:

  These gentiles are most wicked, but their land is the best, rich in meat, honey, corn and birds; and if it were well cultivated none could be compared to it for wealth of its produce… And so, most renowned Saxons, French, Lorrainers and Flemings and conquerors of the world, this is an occasion for you to save your souls and, if you wish it, acquire the best land in which to live. May He who with the strength of his arm led the men of Gaul on their march from the far West in triumph against his enemies in the farthest East give you the will and power to conquer those most inhuman gentiles who are nearby and to prosper well in all things.2

  The material greed of Christian Saxon lords in their dealings with the pagan Slavs stood as an uncontested if lamented commonplace amongst even the most sympathetic regional Christian apologists.

  As much as in the Christian territories of the region, religion helped define cultural, social and political identity across the frontiers in the pagan lands that stretched along the Baltic shore to the Gulf of Finland and beyond. Although subdivided into numerous principalities, tribes or groups of extended families, the most prominent general division among the pagan peoples remained linguistic. Between Kiel and the Vistula lived the western Slavs, known to the Germans and Scandinavians as Wends, related but distinct from the Slavic Poles, Russians and Czechs and the Sorbs to the south and east. Among the Wends, tribal and political groups were sustained by an organized and resilient polytheist religion run by an ordered and powerful priesthood presiding over a network of regional cults and a system of rich local temples stocked with images and idols. Wendish paganism was closely bound up with the tensions between rural territorial princes and the market and trading towns, mainly on the coast, whose religious affiliations reflected often competitive aspirations for autonomy and power. To the Germans and Danes, Wendish princes and towns displayed recognizable political structures and habits. This was less the case further east. From the Vistula to the Dvina and up to the shores of the Gulf of Riga, the Balts were divided into four separate peoples: Prussians, Lithuanians, the Latvians and Curonians. Within these ancient tribal groups, political and religious authority operated on a smaller, less centralized scale than among the Wends. The power of local chiefs depended on their ability to organize the warrior aristocracy of their areas; to dominate the agricultural population from behind substantial earthworks rather than creating settled rural estates; and to exploit an array of fertility cults revolving around numinous places, plants, animals and the dead as well as gods. The tenacity and continued vibrancy of the paganism of the Balts testified to its importance to social and political cohesion. From the Gulf of Riga and Estonia into the Gulf of Finland and beyond were settled a range of Finno-Urgian-speaking communities, some of which existed on the very fringes of settled cultivation. Social structure rested on extended families, who combined when economically or militarily necessary into larger, although still very localized, political associations. The harshness of the environment imposed an intimacy with nature reflected in the religious cults, which helped explain the natural world and offe
red a chance to mitigate its severity.

  Although nothing seems to have come from Magdeburg’s isolated exhortation, the Wendish crusade of 1147 emerged from an indigenous German context that displayed growing interest in fusing political, ecclesiastical and religious aggression. Despite John of Würzburg’s gloom at the lack of German prominence in Palestine in the 1170s, interest in holy war penetrated German lands as much as those further west.3 The Emperor Henry IV had toyed with at least a pilgrimage and possibly a military expedition to Palestine in 1103–4. Twenty years later Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future Conrad III, campaigned in the Holy Land.4 The ideology of holy war, even if imported by westerners such as the Flemish clerk at Magdeburg, soon infected German literature as much as politics, with such familiar epic figures as Roland appearing in the unmistakable guise of a crusading miles Christi.5 On the German – Slav borderlands, the early twelfth century saw an escalation in conflict over religious and ecclesiastical orientation. Religious observance defined communal identity and political authority on both sides of the shifting frontiers. Conquerors, such as the Christian Boleslav III of Poland (1102–38) in Pomerania, regional lords, such as the Pomeranian princes who accepted baptism in the 1120s, or local rulers, such as Henry, the Christian lord of the pagan Wendish Abotrites (d. 1127), used or embraced Christianity and Christian mission to assert their power, in particular over urban elites wedded to a thriving and wellorganized paganism. Much of the progress of Christianity between the Elbe and Oder valley revolved around the subjugation of independent towns, with their civic cultic shrines and priesthood, to a more amenable church structure run by prelates and priests sponsored and employed by the landed princes. The evangelism of Bishop Otto of Bamberg in Pomerania in 1124 and 1127 involved the violent destruction of pagan temples and the submission of cities such as Stettin.6