The Crusades 1095-1197

by Jonathan Phillips

  These pleas had an effect because there was some effort to re-emphasise the Hospitallers’ spiritual and pastoral activities. In spite of this concern about militarisation, the Hospitallers continued to develop this role, in part drawn along by the gathering strategic tension in the Levant. The period 1170 to 1187 saw the order involved in numerous battles, skirmishes and sieges and they acquired even more fortifications, including a series of castles in northern Tripoli which came with the promise of full rights over still-to-be conquered land around the city of Homs. In 1186 the Hospitallers took over the powerful castle of Marqab from its lord, Bernard Le Mazoir, and the terms of the agreement reveal their power by this time. Bernard’s family received an annual rent for the site, but the Hospitallers held full rights over those secular knights who lived on the castle’s lands and the order was not bound by treaties made by the prince of Antioch in their absence. Conversely, however, the prince was bound to observe any agreements made by the Hospitallers and local Muslim rulers. In effect, therefore, the order had created a semi-independent palatinate (lordship) in the way the Templars held their land around Baghras.

  A further sign of the Hospitallers’ growing involvement in the secular world was their developing political influence. As major landowners and the provider of a significant proportion of the knights of the armies of the Latin States it was inevitable that their interest in political affairs would rise, particularly during the turbulent reign of the leper-king, Baldwin IV of Jerusalem (1174-85). The master of the Hospital became an increasingly powerful figure at royal councils and in decisions over matters of regency and diplomacy. With their large territories in Tripoli it was unsurprising that the Hospitallers favoured Count Raymond in the political struggle of the 1180s and the order supported him in his advice not to engage Saladin at Hattin in 1187.

  The military orders in the West

  While the Hospitallers and the Templars were founded for different reasons, they came to share a great many features in terms of structure and organisation. The need to maintain contact with their European estates meant there must have been a steady flow of messengers and information between the West and the Levant. The existence of landholdings in Europe made Templars and Hospitallers familiar figures in the West and they acted as a constant reminder of the struggle in the Holy Land. Evidence of this remains today with place-names such as Temple Meads in Bristol, Temple Cressing in Essex and St John’s Gate in London which were all properties of the military orders. This close relationship with Europe meant that brothers were often used by the settlers as official envoys to convey requests for military help and money. As possessors of the cachet of both monk and warrior, and as defenders of the Holy Land, they were respected and trusted figures. In 1166, for example, Gilbert d’Assailly (prior to his fall from grace) carried letters of endorsement from the patriarch of Jerusalem as he toured France to persuade men to come to liberate the land and the Church of the East before they were destroyed. In 1169 the mission led by Archbishop Frederick of Tyre included the Hospitaller Geoffrey Fulcher, an experienced diplomat, who had written appeals to Louis VII of France and visited the king in the early 1160s as well as taking part in negotiations with the Fatimid Egyptians in 1167. The mission of 1184-85 was the most high-profile embassy sent to the West and was striking for the presence of the masters of both the Templars and the Hospitallers. This may have been calculated to demonstrate the gravity of the situation and would also show that recent bad feeling between the two orders — which was known about in the West — had been resolved.

  The concept of the military order was sufficiently attractive that it was soon adopted in the other main arena of Christian Muslim conflict, the Iberian peninsula. We have seen Alfonso I of Aragon’s interest in the Templars and Hospitallers, and after the orders received various properties in Spain the next step was direct involvement in military activities. They may have been reluctant to commit themselves to such a responsibility because it is not until 1143 that the Templars formally participated in the reconquista, followed five years later by the Hospitallers. Soon, however, new military orders were founded in the peninsula itself, in part because the idea was so attractive to twelfth-century knights, but also for a number of practical reasons: first, local men and resources would not be siphoned off to the Holy Land as was the case with the Templars and the Hospitallers; and secondly, there may have been a wish to limit the influence of outside powers in Iberian affairs. The first military order to be founded in Spain was the Order of Calatrava in 1158 and the next two decades saw similar institutions emerge, namely Santiago (1170), Montjoy in Aragon (1173), Alcantara (1176) and Evora in Portugal (c. 1178). As instruments of the reconquista these groups enjoyed strong patronage from the rulers of the peninsula and they came to form a central part in the struggle against Islam there. Intriguingly, some attempts were made to involve the Spanish orders in the Levant, but these never came to reality and they remained focused on the conflict in the peninsula, leaving the Templars and the Hospitallers to take centre stage in the conflict against the rise of Saladin.

  Conclusion

  The military orders evolved to play a leading part in the military and political life of the Levant and held large areas of territory. The continued importance of the Hospitallers’ medical function should not be ignored, and it must also be noted that the Templars became a powerful financial institution that could number King Louis VII of France among their debtors as early as 1147. The orders were feared and respected by the Muslims who, on account of the brothers’ strict training and their sworn vocation to fight Islam, saw them as their most deadly enemies. For these reasons it was customary to kill Templars and the Hospitallers captured after battle. The report of the Battle of Hattin written by Saladin’s secretary, Imad ad-Din, bears testimony to this point. The Sultan sought out the Templars and Hospitallers who had been captured and said: ‘I shall purify the land of these two impure races.’ He assigned fifty dinars to every man who had taken one of them prisoner and immediately the army brought forward at least one hundred of them. He ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison. Saladin saw it as essential to cull the military orders because he viewed them as a profoundly serious threat to Islam — a judgement that reveals how successful the idea of the warrior-monk had become and how important the military orders were to the Latin settlement of the Holy Land.

  6

  The Second Crusade

  On 24 December 1144 Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, captured the Frankish city of Edessa. The settlers in the Levant sent messages to the West appealing for help and the result was what has become known as the Second Crusade (as we saw earlier, the expeditions of 1101, 1106-8, 1120-24 and 1127-29 were also crusades). What was originally designed as a campaign to defend the Holy Land was transformed into a wider movement of Christian liberation and encompassed military activity in the Iberian peninsula and the Baltic as well.

  Quantum praedecessores: the crusade appeal of Pope Eugenius III

  In response to the settlers’ requests, Pope Eugenius III issued the crusade bull Quantum praedecessores on 1 December 1145 (see Document 11). This landmark work is the first papal bull for a crusade to the Holy Land to survive and it formed the basis of crusade appeals for decades to come. Such an important piece of evidence is worth examining in detail, but first we must remember the way in which such a document would have been used. The bull was addressed to King Louis VII of France and his subjects. Doubtless it was read out at great assemblies such as that held at Vezelay on Easter Sunday, 31 March 1146, when the king and many of his nobles gathered to take the cross. These meetings were highly orchestrated affairs, often timed to coincide with important religious festivals and the majority of those present were prepared to be stirred into a frenzy of enthusiasm by men like Bernard of Clairvaux, the greatest orator of the age. In addition to these larger meetings the bull would also be distributed to other preachers who had been officially d
elegated to recruit for the expedition.

  Quantum praedecessores was at the heart of the Church authorities’ formal pitch to persuade people to take the cross. It was, therefore, a carefully structured and comprehensive document designed to communicate information to as wide an audience as possible. Using vivid and emotive language, in conjunction with the device of repetition, it conveyed clearly and precisely the reasons why people should crusade and the rewards that they would receive for doing so. A number of key themes emerge. The first of these concerns the originator of the First Crusade, Pope Urban II, who was mentioned by name on three occasions in the document. Eugenius was careful to draw a direct line between his own ideas and those of his ‘predecessor of happy memory’, thus emphasising the historical weight behind his actions and, more importantly, drawing on the association with the God-given triumph of the First Crusade. Reference to the success of that expedition played a large part in the most striking image used in the bull, that of responsibilities binding ‘Fathers and Sons’, a theme raised four times, albeit in subtly different ways. Eugenius evoked the efforts of the First Crusaders, their sacrifices and their shedding of blood in freeing the Christian Church in the East. Interestingly, he also noted the work of those ‘who strove to defend them [the Holy Places] over the years’, a reference to the smaller crusading expeditions that followed the First Crusade, and to the one- or two- year service offered by individuals in defence of the Holy Land. Eugenius’s most potent use of the image of Fathers and Sons followed the crux of his appeal: having stirred up outrage in his audience with an account of the devastation wrought by the Muslims, he linked the fall of Edessa with a threat to ‘the Church and all Christianity’. Then he issued a challenge, because ‘if, God forbid’, the Holy Land was lost, ‘the bravery of the fathers will have proved to be diminished in the sons’. Eugenius also employed the biblical story of Mattathias of the Maccabees — the leader of a people who fought the Romans to hold on to their faith — to show fathers and sons working together in justified Christian violence.

  An implicit part of Eugenius’s reference to a threat to ‘all Christianity’ was the danger to the Eastern Church. Again this reflected a part of Pope Urban’s appeal in 1095 and was probably meant to include all Christians, not just Catholics, and was an idea mentioned three times in Quantum praedecessores. The reward for such actions — the remission of all sins — was spelt out clearly and repeated three times in the course of the document, thereby ensuring that the prime attraction of the crusade was made plain. Other privileges were outlined too: Eugenius promised that those who died en route would also gain remission of all sins, thus clarifying what may have been a worry for potential participants, that is whether their efforts would be rewarded if they failed to reach the Levant. The pope set out the legal protection offered by the Church to crusading families and their property, while interest on debts owed by the crusaders was suspended as well. We know from legal cases that these measures were in place at the time of the First Crusade, but this is the first time we can see them laid out so formally. Eugenius, who was a protege of St Bernard, was also keen to ensure the moral probity of the crusaders and in tones reminiscent of the Rule of the Templars, written by Bernard, he forbad ostentatious display by the knights and he urged them to seek heavenly rather than secular glory.

  The preaching of the crusade

  Quantum praedecessores and other official letters were not the only ways to encourage support for the crusade. Popular songs circulated widely. Eleven crusading songs survive from the Second Crusade, ten in Occitan (the language of southern France) and one in French. Obviously the wishes of a patron had to be satisfied in the composition of a song, but the content often reflects many wider preoccupations and offers a blend of the religious and the secular. The anonymous author of the song in Document 12, written c. 1146-47, included the familiar notions of feudal obligation, vengeance and a tournament, but placed them in the context of the crusade — God as the overlord, Edessa the venue for the tournament, and salvation the prize. In the chorus we see King Louis acting with the right intent, renouncing earthly riches and striving for heavenly glory.

  Visual imagery might also act as a spur to take the cross. It is extraordinarily rare for such evidence to survive, but a series of engravings made before the French Revolution testifies to the presence of a crusading window at the abbey of Saint Denis in Paris. Fourteen roundels depicted, variously, Charlemagne, Constantine, martyrs, pilgrims and the events of the First Crusade. Given stylistic considerations, Louis VII’s participation in the crusade and the role of Saint Denis as the venue for a final rally before the expedition set out, it is likely that the window dates from the time of the Second Crusade. Once again, therefore, we can see a commemoration of the triumph of 1099 and its use as a spur to the targets of the preaching campaign of the mid-1140s.

  3. Panels from the Crusading Window of Saint-Denis, Paris, constructed 1146-47

  Eugenius delegated recruitment of the crusade to St Bernard and the extraordinary charisma of the abbot of Clairvaux, allied to careful control of official preachers and the circulation of official letters, yielded excellent results. Bernard himself embarked upon an intensive seven-month tour of the Low Countries and the Rhineland — a gruelling schedule for a man often weakened by his ascetic lifestyle. His message laid great emphasis on the need for personal salvation and the opportunity that God had so graciously presented to this ‘lucky generation’, a generation that would be foolish to spurn such a heaven-sent chance. Many thousands responded to Bernard’s appeals and flocked to the cause of the crusade. The atmosphere at his preaching rallies could become highly charged and his tour was accompanied by widespread reports of miracles. Part of his energies were diverted because Ralph, an unauthorised preacher in northern Germany, had re-ignited the anti-semitic feeling seen in the Rhineland during the First Crusade, although the attacks on the Jews were on a smaller scale than those seen in 1096-97. The abbot objected to the crusade being diverted against the Jews because, first, Ralph lacked the proper authorisation to preach and, secondly, the Bible forbad the killing of Jews in order that one day they might be converted.

  In outcome the Second Crusade would fall far short of the aims of its originators, but in terms of recruitment it was a great success. King Conrad III of Germany and Louis VII of France led the main armies overland to Constantinople and then across Asia Minor to the Levant. Their forces included nobles such as the count of Flanders, the count of Nevers and the future count of Champagne, as well as papal legates. They were joined in the East by contingents from southern France and northern Italy who had opted to sail to the Holy Land, and by a group of north European crusaders who sailed around the Iberian peninsula via Lisbon (see below).

  The scale and scope of the Second Crusade

  The expedition to the Eastern Mediterranean was not the sole element of the Second Crusade and other campaigns took place in the Iberian peninsula and the Baltic. It seems that the crusade evolved into this ambitious enterprise through the papacy showing both proactive leadership and a positive response to appeals by secular powers who wanted to harness the spiritual benefits of the crusade to their own territorial ambitions.

  The crusade began as a response to the fall of Edessa in December 1144. A year later Eugenius launched the crusade appeal and almost simultaneously Louis VII proposed a campaign to help the Latin settlers to his Christmas court at Bourges. The king’s plan was initially rejected, probably out of concern for the young (and heirless) monarch’s absence — no king of a major western power had yet risked the rigours of a crusade — and because the formal authorisation of Quantum praedecessores had not yet arrived in northern France. Once pope and king were properly co-ordinated, recruitment in France began in earnest.