Urban called for a penitential holy war rather than, as many have maintained, specifically an armed pilgrimage. While no authentic account of the Clermont speech exists, the council’s Jerusalem decree and Urban’s surviving letters from the period emphasized the spiritually meritorious temporal goal of the expedition, the liberation of the eastern churches and that of Jerusalem. The method to be employed was unequivocally military. In a letter to his supporters in Flanders written days after the end of the Clermont assembly, Urban talked of the expedition in terms of a procinctus, a military undertaking.34 To the monks of Vallembrosa a year later he referred to his hope that the knights who set out ‘might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom’, warning the monks not to join up ‘either to bear arms or go on this journey’. Urban was remembered as calling for an armed struggle in his preaching at Limoges in December 1095. Count Fulk of Anjou, who entertained Urban in March 1096, shortly afterwards noted how the pope had exhorted recruits ‘to go to Jerusalem to hunt the pagan people who had occupied the city’. Many of those who received the pope’s message of liberating Jersualem by force understood his meaning clearly enough, as a Gascon charter put it, ‘to fight and to kill’ those who had defiled the scene of the Resurrection. The countess of Flanders recalled in 1097 how the Holy Spirit had inflamed the heart of her husband, Count Robert II, to curb the perfidy of the Turks with armed force. In the surviving letters of the crusaders, the sense of the army as a militia rather than a pilgrimage is strong. When Pope Paschal II announced the capture of Jerusalem to the French clergy in December 1099, he described the expedition as a Christiana militia, only the following April adding the word peregrinatio and the language of pilgrimage.35
For Urban, holy war and its associated remission of confessed sin needed no additional justification; he claimed the authority of God. The Clermont decree avoided any direct reference to pilgrimage. The Clermont ceremony of taking the cross appeared deliberately novel, independent of the rite performed by departing pilgrims. Libertas ecclesiae by force needed no further sanction, as the Investiture Wars of Gregory VII had shown – at least to the radicals at the Papal Curia, of whom Urban was one. It has been argued that the oblique language of Urban’s letters, using words such as labor, via and iter, implied pilgrimage. Rather, they implied an equally meritorious penitential military alternative to pilgrimage. Overt language of pilgrimage was avoided or ignored by Urban in his own correspondence, the closest evidence for what he may have been thinking. Urban’s own words explicitly and unequivocally described holy war, in the style of Gregory VII; they did not refer explicitly to an armed pilgrimage even if he were conscious of the tempting parallel. However, the sacralizing of war in all its aspects, shedding blood, killing, securing booty and plunder, appeared extreme and for some, especially among the clergy, no doubt disconcerting. The point was made by the famous battle cry of the hard-pressed crusaders at the battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097 as recorded by a widely circulated anonymous author who gave the impression of being an eyewitness: ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in God and the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’.36 This was not, as many have assumed, a surrender to material greed. Instead, the chronicler was attempting to convince his audience of the spiritual legitimacy of the form of warfare in all its practical ramifications, in recognition, perhaps, of its contentious nature.
Other witnesses, such as Bishop Gaston of Cahors or Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme, took Urban’s holy war and, whether or not the pope intended it, by analogy interpreted it as a form of pilgrimage, a familiar and more clerically palatable model.37 This was facilitated by the goal of the enterprise being the supreme pilgrimage destination, Jerusalem. The association with pilgrimage diluted the radicalism of Urban’s message, even if it set up an inherent conceptual contradiction by linking extreme violence with a previously pacific activity. Earlier stories of pilgrims carrying arms for defence and fighting attackers, as on the German pilgrimage of 1064–5, simply did not embrace the idea of pilgrims whose whole purpose was to fight. The appeal of thinking of the Jerusalem expedition as a pilgrimage was obvious; the typology of journeying, penance and remission of sins was recognizable, demonstrated by the hordes of non-combatant pilgrims who tagged along with the armed forces. From the evidence of some charters, a few crusaders’ letters, such as those of Count Stephen of Blois, and early chronicle accounts, it is clear that this conservative approach, probably peddled by local clergy in search of a means of comprehending this novel phenomenon, possessed force and acquired ready adherents.38 Thereafter, pilgrimage and the holy wars of the cross became almost inseparable. This may not have been Urban’s doing. His vision was more radical, more disturbing and more penetrating.
It is sometimes argued that Urban’s original plan had been for a limited expedition to assist Alexius I and press on to the Holy Sepulchre rather in the fashion of Gregory VII’s embryonic scheme of 1074, and that it was only the astonishing response to his call that forced him to change his rhetoric and policy. This underestimates the grandeur of his scheme. His tour of France was extensive and exhausting. At Clermont in late November and again at Tours in March, the sixty-year-old pope preached in the open air. His schedule was punishing, with the travelling followed by regular public appearances at long-winded liturgical ceremonies even without preaching. He presided over three major church councils, at Tours (March 1096) and Nîmes (July 1096) as well as Clermont. The vigour and geographic embrace of Urban’s preaching argues against modest recruitment plans; his role in local consecrations of altars and the like, the ease of passage through different provinces and lordships and the orderly crowds of notables assembled reflected careful premeditation. Despite the attempts of apologists to imply otherwise, enthusiastic crowds were not gathered by chance in the early weeks of Urban’s tour. On Christmas Day 1095 at Limoges he attended three separate services, progressing between them in full regalia. Within the week he had rededicated the cathedral and the chief local shrine of St Martial. Only then did he preach about Jerusalem.39 His visit to Poitiers coincided with the feast of that city’s patron saint, St Hilary (13 January). At Angers (January 1096) and at Tours and Marmoutier (March), his preaching was linked to local ceremonies or assemblies that were far from haphazard and probably long planned (dedications of churches, translations of bodies of local dignitaries, church councils, etc.). The liturgical theatricality, emphasized by regular processions in full ceremonial finery, was not staged at random. His successor Paschal II noted Urban’s attention to towns (civitates). While he tried to impose a southern French bishop, Adhemar of Le Puy, as leader of the expedition in his place, he still wrote to the Flemish in the north urging participation and dispatched a legate to the Anglo-Norman realms. Although the expedition lacked the cohesion Urban may have wished for, Adhemar’s authority was widely accepted on the march once the armies had combined at Nicaea in June 1097. Urban’s later injunctions to the Bolognese (September 1096), prohibiting clergy from joining and encouraging laymen to consult their parish priests or bishops, do not speak of alarm at numbers but canonical rectitude, very much part of the package from Clermont or even Piacenza onwards. The timing of the preaching, seen by some as oddly late in the year, suited elaborate recruitment. Urban’s journey to France covered two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, appropriate to his message of repentance, as well as the major Christocentric festivals of Christmas and Easter, when images and dramatic representations of Jerusalem accompanied church and civic celebrations. Urban’s announcement that the expedition would set out on 15 August 1096 provided time for armies to be raised: in the event all the main contingents north of the Alps left by October. It also recognized the importance of waiting for the harvest, traditionally begun in northern Europe on 1 August. Thus the timetable of the church year, including the departure date, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a major cult in Le Puy itself, was suited to military requirements;
logistics matched liturgy.
Urban’s own preaching seems to have been highly effective. From the admittedly partial and limited evidence of charters between recruits and monasteries, it has been observed that a ‘high proportion’ of noble recruits came from areas Urban visited or within a couple of days’ ride from his itinerary. His preaching impressed eyewitnesses, and he had an advantage that Gregory VII lacked, in that he himself came from precisely the arms-bearing aristocratic milieu of the French nobility that he sought to exploit, as did his chosen legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a nobleman reputed as an excellent horseman.40 Like many contemporary bishops, Adhemar was evidently almost as at home on a battlefield as in a cathedral, some of his colleagues even donning armour (like Odo, bishop of Bayeux at the battle of Hastings as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry) and wielding maces in deference to the canon law prohibition on clergy spilling blood, a ban that apparently did not include crushing and bruising.
Urban performed only as the hub of the recruiting wheel. The mechanics of spreading the word capitalized on the networks of ecclesiastical affinity and administrative efficiency developed by the reformist papacy over the previous half-century. Urban authorized local diocesans to preach the cross but probably depended more upon a concentric circle of friends, allies and supporters, such as the archbishop of Lyons. Sympathetic abbots not only preached but used their local influence to encourage lay patrons to take the cross and to exchange property for money or war materials (e.g. pack animals). As religious centres possessed of bullion and cash, monasteries were the chief bankers for the First Crusade. The holy warriors desired their prayers and their capital. The necessary financial outlay on the expedition for each landowner was likely to represent many times his annual revenue, especially as the mid-1090s were times of agricultural depression. The price of sin was incalculable. In some cases monks deliberately – and successfully – touted for trade. Elsewhere, the process was indirect, clergy instilling into the faithful over time the sense of sin which provided the spur to many to take the cross.41
Beside the complementary efforts of the papally directed and local ecclesiastical apparatus, news of the expedition spread though informal contacts and association. The papal legate to the Anglo-Norman provinces, the abbot of St Bénigne, Dijon, in early 1096 negotiated an agreement between William II of England and his brother Duke Robert of Normandy under which Robert pledged his duchy to William for three years in return for 10,000 silver marks, a massive sum equivalent, it has been speculated, to a quarter of royal income, only available through a heavy land tax. If nothing else, this unpopular levy publicized the crusade. More direct contacts eased publicity. In southern Italy, Bohemund of Taranto apparently only learnt of the crusade from a passing band of French (or possibly Catalan) recruits in June 1096. His ignorance of the momentous events north of the Alps is surprising and, on the face of it, unlikely. Bohemund’s half-brother and nominal overlord, Roger Borsa, was married to the sister of the count of Flanders, who had taken the cross. Bohemund had close links with the pope; between 1089 and 1093 he had entertained Urban twice and had met him on at least two other occasions. His half-brother Guy was prominent in the service of Alexius I, whose attempts to recruit Italian Normans may have intensified after the completion of the Sicilian conquest in 1091–2. The anonymous writer of one of the earliest accounts of the expedition, the Gesta Francorum, perhaps a knight or cleric in Bohemund’s army, may have accurately reflected the situation of the summer of 1096 when he wrote of the widespread rumours of Urban’s message sweeping through ‘all the regions and provinces of the Gauls’.42 Even if merely relying on what he later heard from companions on the march, the author hit upon three prime recruiting officers: emulation, the courts of lay nobles and princes, and rumour.
The rapidity of the spread of news of the Jerusalem campaign is attested not only in the literary accounts but in the rate of recruitment itself. Within twelve months of Clermont perhaps as many as 70–80,000 people had already left their homes for the east. The geographical spread was wide but uneven, the bulk of known crusaders coming from a shallow crescent stretching from the Dordogne in the south-west to Flanders in the north-east, covering the Limousin, Poitou, the Loire valley, Maine, the Chartrain, Ile de France and Champagne; there were also significant groupings in Languedoc, Provence, Burgundy, parts of western Germany and in Italy. Enthusiasm for the expedition was not universal. Although support crossed the ideological and political divide between papalists and imperialists, even Henry IV’s constable joining up as well as important imperial vassals such as Godfrey of Bouillon, only a minority even in areas of greatest enthusiasm took the cross. Contemporary chroniclers emphasized the magnitude of the response, which they attributed to the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit or to the potency of rumour. Although reconstruction of the details of how information spread through a semi-literate society is difficult, certain features stand out. The focal points of recruitment were lay courts and households, especially those with close links to monasteries (although this may be a distorted impression caused by the nature of charter evidence); networks of interlaced aristocratic families and, crucially, their dependants – humbler relatives, tenants, household knights and clergy, servants; and towns. Crusading was as much an urban as a rural phenomenon. In both, wealth and status provided necessities and incentives. Just as the castellan, seigneur or count were pivotal in raising the countryside, so the ‘better sort’ (meliores), as a Genoese observer of 1096 put it, gave the lead in towns and cities.43 The expedition inspired by Urban’s preaching was not assembled at random, but followed the contours of a society dominated by wealthy lords, connected by bonds of family, obedience, locality, obligation, employment and commerce. A rural/urban divide is misleading. Many influential monasteries were situated within or just outside major urban centres; lords had rights over markets and, in areas of developed urban life, such as north Italy or Flanders, town and country were mutually bound together socially and economically as well as politically. Although managing to sell or pledge most of his properties to raise money, Godfrey of Bouillon also extorted 1,000 silver pieces from the Jewish communities of Cologne and Mainz to fund his campaign. Gossip and rumours thrive when people are in close contact; ceremonies exert maximum effect if witnessed. The success of recruitment in 1095–6 relied on wealth, social order and mobility, attributes of an underlying prosperity, as well as on skilful manipulation of cultural habits of violence and spiritual fears of damnation.
According to some witnesses, at the centre of the ‘great rumour’, as one contemporary called it, was the charismatic preaching of a diminutive, ageing Picard evangelist known as Peter the Hermit. In Lorraine, during and immediately after the crusade, he was regarded as having inspired the whole enterprise. This cannot entirely be dismissed, not least because, whatever his status, he managed to raise armies months before anyone else, in person led one of them to Constantinople and was thereafter accepted by the princes as a member of the expedition’s elite, if only in a minor capacity. Peter had experience as a preacher of apostolic poverty. It was later claimed that he was a pilgrim to the Holy City who had been entrusted with a letter from heaven to rouse Christians to liberate Jerusalem and a request from the patriarch of Jerusalem to send western help which he conveyed to Pope Urban. In fact, Patriarch Symeon may have been in Constantinople when Peter was supposed to have passed through on pilgrimage. It may or may not have been chance that one of the first contacts the Christian army made in northern Syria in 1097–8 was with the exiled patriarch, who then promptly wrote a letter to the west appealing for further military aid, perhaps an echo, repeat or inspiration of the Peter the Hermit story.
The hints of distinctive features in Peter’s appeal – apocalyptic, populist, visionary, charismatic – in contrast to the uniform outline of the theologically focused message emanating from the pope reflected in most chronicles and charters – authority, penance, pilgrimage, cross, war – may be taken as a sign of Peter’s insigni
ficance or the reverse. Even hostile witnesses attest to the popular if naive element in his following. Part of the motive for the massacres of the Rhineland Jews identified in Jewish sources was a crude, vindictive and violent assertion of Christian supremacy and lust for vengeance for Christ Crucified; many of these pogroms were the work of contingents associated with Peter. That there was little or no such barbaric persecution of Jews by the armies recruited by Urban and his agents may point to a distinct difference of tone and content in Peter’s preaching. However the evidence is viewed, Peter played a prominent and semi-independent role in at least some theatres of propagandizing and recruiting for the Jerusalem expedition. The Lorraine perspective contained in the chronicle of Albert of Aachen is probably as valid as others which ignore Peter.44
It is incontestable that the armies he inspired were on the road by Easter 1096 (13 April); even the anonymous chronicler attached to Bohemund placed Peter’s as part of the ‘official’ campaign.45 To organize, equip and supply perhaps up to 30,000 troops and non-combatants at the end of winter and in spring, following poor harvests, some local famines and plagues in the previous year, suggests that Peter must have begun preaching before Clermont and that his powers of organization were of an order beyond his image of a dishevelled hedge priest. It is possible that Urban appointed him to preach the Jerusalem journey weeks before Clermont: the pope had been discussing his plan with potential leaders at least as early as August 1095. It is notable that Peter’s itinerary, from Berry through the Orléannais and Champagne to Lorraine and the Rhineland, avoided those areas visited by the pope. Peter, in a more demotic style, appealed to audiences not dissimilar to the pope’s. He recruited a number of significant lords, one of whom, Walter, lord of Boissy Sans Avoir, whom he despatched with eight knights and a large company of infantry in early March, was already in Constantinople in July 1096, no mean logistical effort. The forces Peter raised lacked the tight social authority lent by the presence of many great lords. His preaching campaign, which he combined with leading an army, apparently operated apart from the hierarchy of religious houses that so crucially underpinned Urban’s efforts: unlike the pope, Peter is absent from surviving monastic charters.46 His message was revivalist, probably peppered with visions and atrocity stories. These were neither new nor exclusive to Peter. The Limousin chronicler and pilgrim Adhemar of Chabannes had peddled stories of persecution, assassination and murder of Christians by the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land seventy years earlier. The memory of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre may have formed part of a propaganda campaign by the monks of St Peter’s Moissac, visited by Urban himself in May 1096.47
God's War: A New History of the Crusades Page 11
