God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  The military orders formed just one aspect of the great revival and extension of institutional religious life in the twelfth century. What rendered them distinctive was their function and their inspiration, the war of the cross. However, those who joined the orders as the small elite of professed knights, sometimes, especially in the early years, after long careers of secular knighthood, were not crucesignati in the ordinary sense; their crosses were signs of a lifetime vocation not a temporary act of penance. Entry to a military order was not an alternative to becoming a crucesignatus; the alternative to becoming a Templar or Hospitaller was to become a monk, an altogether more serious step into a new life not merely a temporary gesture of faith and chivalry. Even St Bernard, who repeatedly drew analogies between crucesignati and monks – vows, profession, liturgical entry ceremonies, special clothing, communal living – recognized that becoming a monk, or, by extension, a Templar or Hospitaller, and becoming a crucesignatus were neither genuine alternatives nor synonymous.

  NEW WARFARE?

  With the exception of the military orders, the development of new crusading institutions in the west in the early twelfth century is confused and obscure. There were few general calls to repeat the penitential warfare of 1095: Bohemund’s war in 1106–8; the eastern campaign promoted by Calixtus II in 1119–20; Fulk of Anjou’s expedition of 1129; the campaigns in Spain of 1114–16, 1118 and 1125–6 also attracted papal authority and indulgences. Even with these and other explicit associations of holy war and the armed pilgrimage of 1096–9, there appears little radical departure from pre-existing social and religious activities or attitudes connected with pilgrimage and church-sanctioned holy war. Little coherence existed between large-scale expeditions east (1107 or 1120–24); small, private armed and unarmed pilgrimages, many lacking any papal authority; the interests of Outremer settlers such as Fulcher of Chartres to create a process of constant reinforcement; and the emergence of the military orders. Each appeared distinct in operation even if related in terms of motive and appeal while reflecting extremely traditional responses of obligation, honour, service (to God or terrestrial lord), adventure or penitential anxiety. The First Crusade confirmed and extended existing acceptance of holy war but created no new settled legal framework, the hot rhetoric of its apologists bereft of accepted canonical formulae. In the great digest of Canon Law, Gratian of Bologna’s Decretum (c.1140), the extensive discussion of legitimate just warfare (Causa 23) ignored anything that could be regarded as specifically flowing from any new institutions established during or after the holy war of 1095–9, a silence pointedly filled by an Anglo-Norman commentary on the Decretum later in the century that referred explicitly to crucesignati and the manner in which the faithful should pray for them.37

  These new institutions scarcely amounted to a revolution in Christian habits. The legacy of the First Crusade included spiritual and temporal privileges previously associated with those enjoyed by pilgrims, which by 1145 had become recognized by the pope as comprising remission of confessed sins (not just, as in some of Urban II’s pronouncements, the penalties of sin), protection by the church, legal immunity for the duration of the expedition, permission to raise mortgages and a moratorium on repayment of debts.38 In addition the ceremony of taking the cross asserted itself as characteristic of a certain form of pilgrimage. However, implementation was erratic and at times baffling to contemporaries faced with novelty. In 1107, a committee of clerics set up to investigate a claim for protection by a recruit for Bohemund’s campaign in the east failed to give a verdict because ‘the institution of committing to the church’s care the possessions of milites going to Jerusalem was new’.39 Uncertainty was explicable. With Jerusalem in Christian hands, no incentive existed to elaborate a new form of holy war to recover it. Thus repeated calls to arms simply evoked the precedent of Urban II and Clermont rather than developing it. Pilgrimage, not war, constituted the overwhelming response to the capture of the Holy Land, the language and practice of crusading and pilgrimage increasingly fused together, pilgrims and holy warriors indiscriminately described as peregrini (pilgrims), a dilution of any novel aspects of Urban’s holy war. This reflected reality. Not all armed pilgrims fought (e.g. Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, in 1172) and not all who fought had taken the cross (e.g. the pilgrims employed by Baldwin I in 1102 and 1107). Crucesignati bore the staff and satchel of the pilgrim: pilgrims bore crosses and carried arms. Both shared the vocabulary of the peregrinatio, some of the same privileges and status as quasi-ecclesiastics. In twelfth-century charters it is rarely possible to distinguish the two activities. Taking the cross appeared to mark involvement in penitential warfare, yet chroniclers applied the word pilgrim. Notions of unarmed pilgrimage and armed penitential war were less discrete than the contradiction in purpose and function might imply. The cross tended to suggest violence, yet the English hermit Godric of Finchale (d. 1170) twice took the cross, the vexillum crucis, before visiting Palestine and yet each time, according to his contemporary biographer, he contented himself with sight-seeing, fasting and penance. In a charter of 1120 Guillaume le Veneur (i.e. huntsman) from Maine was said to have ‘accepted the cross as a sign of his pilgrimage (in signum peregrinationis)’. A liturgical rite for taking the cross survived the events of 1095–6. Some evidence suggests that it was perceived as separate from the adoption of the signs of pilgrimage; other the opposite: for Guillaume le Veneur in 1120 and Fulk of Anjou in 1128, taking the cross was said to follow ‘the custom of such pilgrimages’.40 This may indicate regional differences similar to those found in the liturgies themselves: no standard liturgical rite for taking the cross existed for the rest of the middle ages. Such disparity, while typical of the practice if not the rhetoric of the high medieval church, hardly confirms the creation of a homogeneous movement, more a changing series of modified and conservative associations, habits and responses, stimulated by new political and ecclesiastical circumstances but rooted in tradition. Even the novel military orders grew out of existing attitudes to holy knighthood. If the new penitential warfare, especially to the east, was innovative in its eschatological resonance and its physical demands, the spiritual, social, political or economic tensions assuaged were not.

  Potentially the new exercise possessed wide implications if the privileged legal and fiscal immunities claimed for crucesignati found guarantee with the church and support from secular power. There is little evidence before the very end of the twelfth century, from the period of the Third Crusade (1188–92) and later, for the active operation, either in church or lay courts, of these immunities. Despite a decree of the First Lateran Council (1123), the first general council of the western church in the middle ages, reinforcing the church’s duty to protect crusaders’ property, much depended on the local secular context and the willingness of interested parties to cooperate. When they did not, confusion ensued, as in the case of the property dispute between Hugh II of Le Puiset and Routrou of Perche in 1107, which exposed the ecclesiastical authorities as both muddled and ineffective as the case ping-ponged between secular and clerical courts, with one of the best canon lawyers of the time manifestly unable to identify clear legal cause let alone remedy.41 Even after 1123, uncertainty persisted. As late as November 1146, Pope Eugenius III had to inform the bishop of Salisbury that the immunity only operated in regard to law suits and seizure of property after the cross had been taken. During the Second Crusade, the pope received numerous complaints that church protection simply did not work. It took another half-century for the immunities of crucesignati to find a place in accounts of law courts and in the records of secular government.42 For much of the earlier twelfth century, in any given region, taking the cross was uncommon and military expeditions of the cross rare: hardly the dawn of a new age.

  WARS OF THE CROSS

  This ephemeral nature of the wars of the cross can partly be explained by lack of occasion. The disastrous campaigns of 1101 killed extravagant optimism. Jerusalem remained in Christian hands. The very success
of the Franks of Outremer in carving out principalities militated against any sense of crisis, relatively few laymen thinking in terms of permanent holy war, fewer even than those wishing to settle in the east. Pilgrimage and later the military orders provided the main connection between the two parts of Catholic Christendom, not crusading. Yet sporadic attempts were made to summon up enthusiasm for the old cause as well as to apply its forms to conflicts elsewhere.

  Bohemund of Antioch’s campaign of 1107–8 demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of attempts to revive the spirit of 1096. On his release from Danishmend captivity in 1103, Bohemund was faced by the loss of much of his conquests in Cilicia to the Byzantines and, in 1104, of his eastern provinces to Ridwan of Aleppo. Western assistance provided an obvious solution; Bohemund’s reputation would act as the chief recruiting officer. Arriving in Italy in 1105, after securing the approval of Paschal II, Bohemund proceeded to France early in 1106, accompanied by a papal legate, Bruno of Segni, a veteran of Urban II’s preaching tour a decade before. Bohemund planned to harness concern for the Holy Land to an attack on the Byzantine empire, a sleight of hand highlighted by the presence with him on his triumphal tour of France of a spurious pretender to the Byzantine throne and other Greek exiles. During his sermon at Chartres in early April, Alexius I was identified as a target, those who joined up being promised ‘wealthy towns and castles’. Writing to the pope in 1107, Bohemund argued that he sought, in the general context of aiding the Holy Land, to resolve the supposed Greek problem by ending Alexius’s usurpation, the ecclesiastical schism and Byzantine hostility to crusaders. Yet Bohemund’s official line during 1106–7 focused on the via Sancti Sepulchri. One eyewitness remembered the papal legate at a council at Poitiers in June 1106 particularly emphasizing the need to arouse enthusiasm for the journey to Jerusalem.43 Whatever his motives, Bohemund used his fame to acquire a high-class wife, Constance, daughter of King Philip of France, and create a mood of excitement. Nobles apparently queued up to persuade him to become godfather to their children. King Henry of England, preparing his attempt to conquer Normandy from his crusader brother Duke Robert, was sufficiently alarmed as to ban him from crossing the Channel lest too many knights joined the eastern adventure. The number, geographic range and social standing of Bohemund’s recruits testified to his charisma and successful propaganda. Not only did they come from lands associated with the leader’s ancestry, Italy, Normandy, England, but also from large swathes of France from the Limousin and Poitou northwards across the Loire through the Chartrain and Ile de France to Flanders and imperial Burgundy. The rumour of war may also have inspired more distant interest in Jerusalem, including that of King Sigurd of Norway, although he had no practical involvement in Bohemund’s plans. While piety may have played a significant part in the success of Bohemund’s carefully orchestrated appeal, at least one later observer noted, perhaps with the cynicism of hindsight, that many ‘set out on the road for Jerusalem like men hastening to a feast’.44

  By October 1107, even the most purblind of his followers could see that Bohemund’s intention was to revisit the battlefields of his youth in the western Balkans. Landing in Albania on 9 October, Bohemund directed his army, which marched under a papal banner, to besiege Durazzo. For all his famed military skill, Bohemund found himself completely outmanoeuvred. By the spring of 1108, his force was surrounded and cut off from reinforcements across the Adriatic. It is testimony to his determination and generalship that he resisted the logic to surrender until September. Writing a generation later of Bohemund’s final interview with Alexius I before agreeing to the humiliating Treaty of Devol, Alexius’s daughter, Anna, was prompted to include her famous description of this dangerous but attractive barbarian: tall, muscular, broad chest, slim waist, ‘perfectly proportioned’, pale skin, short, light-brown hair verging on reddish, shaven face, light blue eyes, a man of disconcerting charm, with a ‘hard, savage quality’ about him such that ‘even his laugh sounded like a threat to others’. To rub Bohemund’s nose in his failure, Alexius ensured that the Byzantine witnesses to the treaty included a number of leading Normans in his service.45 The Treaty of Devol ended Bohemund’s remarkable career. Returning to Apulia with the remnant of his army, he skulked in the west until his death in 1111, leaving a son, a famous legacy but little else. A few of those who took the cross in 1106–7 may have pursued their goal of Jerusalem after the debacle at Durazzo. Most found only disillusionment, as one commentator understated it: ‘in that expedition things did not fall out as the peregrinationes desired’.46

  Bohemund’s failure was more than a defeat, it was an embarrassment, tarnishing not only his reputation but also the use of the via Sancti Sepulchri, especially sensitive precisely because of the extent of genuine devotion to Jerusalem, witnessed by pilgrimages as well as by Bohemund’s own recruiting. Yet the extension by analogy of the Jerusalem expedition to other theatres of conflict with the infidel continued to flourish. In the same year as the Treaty of Devol, a Flemish propagandist associated with the archbishop of Magdeburg explicitly linked war against the pagan Wends of the south Baltic with the Jerusalem expedition, calling on his audience to ‘follow the good example of the Gauls… sally forth and come, all lovers of Christ and the Church, and prepare yourselves just as did the men of Gaul for the liberation of Jerusalem’. By analogy, the German church became ‘our Jerusalem’.47

  Spain provided an active arena for such parallels. Although before 1095 Urban II had regarded the rebuilding of the frontier town of Tarragona south of Barcelona as a penitential exercise meriting offers of plenary indulgences, only after Clermont was the Jerusalem expedition equated with the Christian reconquista in Spain.48 Thereafter, this interpretation of a common conflict between Christianity and Islam lent fragmented secular wars for territorial gain and political advantage spiritual energy and coherence, a transformation reflecting papal efforts to control the Spanish church as much as any indigenous religious revival. This ideological import conveniently and importantly coincided with the dominance of Muslim al-Andalus by the Almoravids, a fundamentalist Islamic sect from north Africa. Thus there were real battles to be fought against Muslims, which, with the eye of rhetoric, could be viewed in the context of a struggle between Faiths that embraced the Holy Land. At a council held in Santiago de Compostela in January 1126, Archbishop Diego Gelmirez, ‘St James’s catapult’, urged his audience to imitate the conquerors of Jerusalem and ‘become knights of Christ and, after defeating his wicked enemies the Muslims, open the way to the same Sepulchre of the Lord through Spain, which is shorter and much less laborious’, a geographic and military fantasy with a long future.49 Thanks to the papally inspired clerical attitude, the language and props of the Jerusalem penitential holy war began to suffuse the far from idealistic conquest of al-Andalus. The holy war tradition persisted after most of al-Andalus had fallen to the Christian kings in the thirteenth century, the link with Jerusalem never entirely fading for the rest of the middle ages. Yet in the twelfth century it was fuelled as much by evocation of an older legend; in the poem on the capture of Almeria, Alfonso VII is lauded as ‘continuing the deeds of Charlemagne, with whom he is rightly compared’.50

  The interest in warring in Spain from north of the Pyrenees reflected a tradition of itinerant fighting among the affluent arms-bearing elites of western Europe that reached back far beyond 1095. In that sense, the contest with the infidel, in the eastern or western Mediterranean, scarcely altered social mores, even if it provided fresh outlets. The new focus of holy violence exerted only a sporadic, occasional, irregular and uneven hold on the activity of the fighting classes however powerful a grip it exerted on imaginations, or, at least, those recoverable parts of their thought-world which owed most to the new orthodoxies of the western church. Victims of sordid internecine political feuding, such as Duke Canute of Denmark, murdered in 1131, could be elevated into crusader saints by association with the Holy Land adventure – which in life he lacked.51 Yet, despite its iconic s
tatus as living proof of God’s immanence and favour attracting the anxious attention of clerical and monastic chroniclers, Outremer failed to provide as popular theatre for chivalry as for pilgrims. Sustained interest tended to run in families: those with claims to Outremer inheritances, such as Bohemund II, brought up in Apulia, who arrived to claim his inheritance in Antioch in 1126, or with political influence in the east, such as the extended Montlhéry or Le Puiset affinities from northern France, who dominated Jerusalem politics and patronage under Baldwin II.52 Even the army mustered in 1128 by Hugh de Payns and his colleagues revolved around the acceptance by Fulk of Anjou of the hand of Princess Melisende and the inheritance of Jerusalem. In the event, the 1129 sortie against Damascus failed, and many regarded the whole enterprise as a fraud, which was probably unfair as the campaign, involving most of the great leaders of Outremer as well as the western recruits, was thwarted by poor tactics and worse weather, not malice or indifference. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle recorded Hugh’s great recruiting success – ‘so large a number of people as never had done since the first expedition in the days of Pope Urban’ – and subsequent disappointment: ‘He [Hugh] said that thoroughgoing war was prepared between the Christians and the heathens. Then when they arrived there it was nothing but lies – thus miserably were all the people afflicted’.53 Different priorities and expectations of westerners and residents of Outremer persisted throughout subsequent dealings between the east and west. Much active campaigning by westerners in Outremer was opportunistic, a matter of local rulers fitting the martial skills and ambitions of chance visitors to desired objectives, such as Sigurd of Norway and the seizure of Sidon in 1110. However, a crisis in Outremer’s affairs could excite widespread support however uneasily eastern setbacks stood beside the providential triumphalism that the capture of Jerusalem had originally inspired.