God's War: A New History of the Crusades

by Tyerman, Christopher

  However closely associated, the Reconquest and crusading were not synonyms. The conquest of Muslim Spain by Christian princes was a long political process; regarding it as a re-conquest, a state of mind. A crusade was an event, Spanish crusades punctuating the larger narrative of conquest and settlement. Crusaders conquered but if subsequently they settled in these newly acquired lands, they did so not as crusaders per se. Frontier settlements may have been established by warriors of the cross but they were not ‘crusading communities’, with the possible exception of those areas and castles controlled by the military orders. Some historians have designated certain regions in terms of the ideology of conquest, as in the thirteenth-century ‘Crusader Kingdom of Valencia’.6 This may appear something of a misnomer. The ideology of penitential warfare lent an edge to pre-existing reconquest mentalities, but it is notable that the development of communal and religious intolerance and the rise of a new biological racism that marked the persecution of Jews, Muslims and Muslim converts (moriscos) in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries post-dated the period when crusades were a regular feature of Iberian politics.

  Early versions of the Reconquest myth emerged among propagandists associated with the royal court of the Asturias in the late ninth century. Their object lay in asserting a legitimate continuity for Asturian kingship from the Visigothic past, the purging of the former sins that had lost Spain to Christendom and the providential mission to restore Christian rule and liberty to the peninsula. Ninth-century concerns fashioned accounts of the creation of the Asturian kingdom by a King Pelayo, ostensibly of Visigothic royal blood, after a victory over the Moors in 722. In this triumph against the odds, so the myth insisted, the inevitable recovery of Christian Spain was born. Although such claims were fictive, this fashioning of perceptions established important and lasting traditions. Wars of defence and conquest against the Moors were projected as possessing a fundamental religious purpose, the salvation (salus) of Spain.7 Aggression, portrayed as recapturing territory lost by Visigothic predecessors, was intrinsically just. The struggle with Muslim neighbours became elevated into a sort of Manichaean contest of religions and cultures which bore very little actual relation to the nature of frontier competition and exchange, still less to the continuous internecine conflicts between the Christian lordlings of the north. As elsewhere in western Europe, the church, its bishops and its saints became intensely involved in promoting political identity. The permanent presence of the infidel aided the development of religious warfare, in ways parallel to contemporary war rhetoric in Alfredian Wessex or late Carolingian Francia. Religious symbolism and church liturgy had long been incorporated into the rituals of war. There was an elaborate liturgy blessing a departing warrior king in the Visigothic Liber ordinum, and it is possible that the tradition of bearing into battle a cross, or a relic of the True Cross, survived in the Christian kingdoms.8

  However, warfare framed by religious language is hardly the same as a self-conscious religiously backed Reconquest or even religious war. Religious approval of war was a commonplace to inspire loyalty, establish united purpose, salve consciences and assuage doubts on both sides of the Iberian frontier. The great Cordoban vizier al-Mansur (i.e. ‘the Victorious’, 976–1002) attacked churches and monasteries during his devastating raids into Christian territory (985–1102), in which he plundered from Barcelona and Pamplona to León, the Duero valley and Coimbra. In 997, he carried off the bells of the basilica of St James at Compostela to adorn the mosque at Cordoba. Al-Mansur made a public virtue of his piety, allegedly carrying his own autograph fair copy of the Koran on campaigns, which he publicized as jihad. This did not prevent him from employing Christians as mercenaries and guides or being remembered by his own people as ‘our provider of slaves’.9 All Iberian rulers conducted aggressive warfare for profit. Although by 1000 much of this was conducted across the frontier region around the Duero valley stretching north-east towards the Upper Ebro and the foothills of the Pyrenees, there existed many petty frontiers in early eleventh-century Iberia, those caused by religion only the most obvious. The political authority and material resources of the Cordoban caliphate rather than its religious complexion made it a threat and a target for its Christian neighbours. Competition for resources and power pitted Christian against Christian and induced political alliances across religious divides. This was not how it looked to later observers and some foreign contemporaries, such as the Burgundian monk Ralph Glaber (c.980–1046), who wrote of resistance to al-Mansur in terms of faith and heavenly reward.10 However, recourse to the encouragement of religion in an idealized vision of a conflict of faiths ignored the realities of eleventh-century Spain.

  Politics and cash, not religion, provided the impetus for the Reconquest. The collapse of the Cordoban caliphate through internecine feuding in the generation leading to its extinction in 1031 and its replacement by a patchwork of so-called taifa or ‘party’ kingdoms provided Christian rulers with a chance to intervene in affairs of the south, a reversal of the politics of al-Mansur’s time. Muslim Spain was transformed into competing principalities, many no stronger, some weaker than their Christian counterparts: Badajoz, Seville, Granada, Malaga, Toledo, Murcia, Valencia, Denia, Zaragoza, Lerida and the Balearic Islands. Strong Christian rulers, such as Ferdinand I of León-Castile, his son, Alfonso VI, and Ramon Berenguer I count of Barcelona (1035–76), exploited these divisions by establishing a network of proprietorial protection rackets. Formal treaties were drawn up under which the Christian ruler would agree to defend his taifa client in return for vast quantities of the key commodity that fuelled these relationships, gold. Although the material weakness of taifa emirs allowed for territorial expansion, such as Ferdinand I’s annexation of Coimbra in 1064, intense competition revolved around taifa gold through annual tributes, or protection money, known as parias. Historically, the prosperous urban economy of al-Andalus had been rich in gold that came from the west African Gold Coast across the Sahara to the Mediterranean. Now the Christian kings managed to harness this wealth for themselves. By the 1060s, Ferdinand I, for example, enjoyed parias from Zaragoza, Toledo and Badajoz. Control over Zaragoza had been contested between León-Castile, Navarre and Barcelona. On Ferdinand’s death, it passed briefly to Sancho IV of Navarre. Al-Andalus became the milch-cow for Christian assertiveness. The wider circulation of large quantities of gold, in the rest of western Europe a very scarce commodity, funded the consolidation of royal power, the formation of stable states and the expansion of Christian frontiers. As well as enriching those in military, religious, civilian or commercial royal service, the influx of gold to the Christian realms attracted interest from beyond the Pyrenees, both military adventurers and diplomatic allies. In that indirect fashion, the parias system contributed to opening Spain to ideas of holy war increasingly fashionable north of the Pyrenees.11

  Religion was no determinant in these arrangements. In his deal with the emir of Zaragoza for the year 1069, Sancho IV of Navarre explicitly agreed not to assist any ‘people from France or elsewhere’ crossing his kingdom to attack Zaragoza or ally with any Christians or Muslims against the emir, with whom the king would be bound ‘in one brotherhood’. For these promises, the emir agreed to pay 1,000 gold pieces a month.12 These deals rightly assumed an inherent instability that allowed entrepreneurial freebooters to sell their swords and armed following to the highest bidder or even to establish themselves as independent rulers. This occurred across the peninsula, making it, for the first time in centuries, a single, if chaotic political system. One Muslim political entrepreneur from the south, Ibn Ammar (1031–84), had won and lost control of Murcia. After years in exile at the court of Zaragoza, he was murdered by his former boss, the emir of Seville, using an axe given by Alfonso VI of León-Castile. The most famous example of a freelance taking advantage of this fluidity of preferment and power was the Castilian nobleman Rodrigo Diaz, El Cid (c.1045–99). A valued general and diplomat under Ferdinand I, after falling out with Alfonso VI, Rodrigo s
erved the emir of Zaragoza (1081–6), becoming rich from his victories over Catalans and Aragonese. After a brief reconciliation with Alfsonso, from 1089 Rodrigo maintained a private army through successful and lucrative campaigning against Christian as well as Muslim rulers in eastern Spain before establishing his own independent taifa lordship at Valencia (1094–9), which survived until 1102.13 Such were the opportunities of political instability.

  These opportunities stimulated the ideology of Reconquest, not vice versa. Instead of relying solely on indirect exploitation, racketeers like Alfonso VI, partly to secure their income, looked to run their client states themselves. The strand of Reconquest justification came in useful, particularly, it seems, for Alfonso VI. When gathering parias, his agents talked of the strategy of ultimate recovery of lands that ‘originally belonged to the Christians’. When establishing the new archbishopric at Toledo in 1086, a year after its capture, Alfonso VI talked of restoring the city, after 376 years, ‘under the leadership of Christ… to the devotees of His faith’. Muslim rule was described as usurpation by blasphemers; the conquest of Toledo as a recreation of ‘a holy place’. Sancho I of Aragon echoed this theme, talking of his conquests as ‘the recovery and extension of the Church of Christ’. Both Gregory VII and Urban II, who like many popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries displayed particular concern for Iberian Christianity, picked up the theme of the liberation of former Christian lands. Toledo, Urban purred, was ‘restored’ by Alfonso VI ‘to the law of the Christians’.14 The Reconquest was not a war of conversion but conquest and, in places, expulsion. Yet, despite the realities of inter-faith political collaboration, the language and symbols of religion came in useful. When Peter I of Aragon attacked Zaragoza in 1101 he was described as bearing a cross (crucifer).15 By then he had a grander model to copy: the expedition to Jerusalem.

  THE SPANISH CRUSADES

  While the convenient idea of the just political and religious war of Reconquest may be traced to indigenous peninsula origins, the stimulus to the application of holy war was probably a foreign import. In tune with papal policy elsewhere, Alexander II may have offered ‘knights destined to set out for Spain’ remission of penance and confessed sin in 1063, although the authenticity of his bull has been questioned.16 Whether or not Alexander was suggesting that war against the Moors was itself penitential, a Catalan-Aragonese campaign that briefly occupied Barbastro, north-east of Zaragoza, in 1064–5 attracted troops from Burgundy, Normandy, Aquitaine and possibly Norman Sicily who, in their short occupation of the town, committed the sort of atrocity for which western knights became notorious in the Muslim world. The Barbastro expedition, while hardly meriting the title of a ‘crusade before the crusades’,17 showed increased trans-Pyrenean interest in Spanish affairs. In its wake came harsher attitudes towards Muslims based on ignorance, unfamiliarity and the martial spirituality of the reformed papacy. Spain became something of a testing ground for the Roman church’s claims to leadership of Christendom on two fronts: the imposition of a Roman rather than Mozarab liturgy on the Spanish church and the struggle against Islam. In 1073, Gregory VII characteristically asserted that Spain ‘from ancient times belonged to St Peter’. Despite long occupation by the Moors ‘it belongs even now… to no mortal but solely to the Apostolic see’. Small wonder four years later Alfonso VI began to style himself ‘emperor of all Spain’ to retain freedom of action.18 Ecclesiastical interest was supported by the penetration of Cluniac monasticism into northern Spain during the eleventh century. In another sign of quickening religious and cultural transmission across the Pyrenees, in 1064 Ramon Berenguer I of Barcelona promulgated the Peace and Truce of God.

  By the 1080s, foreign military participation in the profitable Iberian wars had become familiar, as had the habit of Spanish princes and princesses seeking spouses north of the Pyrenees. In 1068, Sancho I Ramirez of Navarre married the sister of Count Ebles of Roucy, perhaps as part of a deal to attract the count’s military support against the taifa kings, a scheme still being promoted by the papacy five years later. Alfonso VI managed five wives over an extended and complicated marital career: a daughter of the duke of Aquitaine (William VIII, a veteran of the Barbastro campaign, 1064–5), a sister of the duke of Burgundy as well as two further Frenchwomen and an Italian. His daughters’ husbands (he had no legitimate surviving sons) included two close members of the ducal house of Burgundy and Roger II of Sicily. Of his illegitimate daughters, one married Raymond IV of Toulouse, veteran of Spanish wars and a leader of the First Crusade, another the nephew of the duke of Burgundy. Dynastically, León-Castile had entered the family of western European rulers, even if domestically Alfonso retained local tastes; one of his mistresses, Zaida, was the daughter-in-law of the emir of Seville.19

  Two events transformed the redefinition of the Reconquest apparent in some later eleventh-century texts into a tradition of holy war; the invasion of Spain by the Moroccan fundamentalist Almoravids and the development of the papal policy of penitential war that led to the First Crusade. From their original base on the fringes of the Sahara, by the early 1080s the Almoravids, a sect of austere Islamic fundamentalists, had conquered Morocco. Representing a very different cultural perspective than the Arabic Mediterranean sophistication of the rulers of al-Andalus, the Almoravids combined the fanaticism of converts with the militancy of outsiders. They were the al-Murabitun, ‘people of the ribat’, armed monasteries on the frontiers of Islam, who imposed strict observance on their followers, subjects and neighbours by force of piety and arms. Religion lay at the heart of their aggressive politics. By the mid-1080s they were ready to extend their authority across the Straits of Gibraltar into al-Andalus whether the local Muslim rulers welcomed them or, as was almost universally the case, not. The Almoravids regarded what they saw as the corrupt decadence of the taifa kings with as much contempt as they despised the Christian infidels. In return, the emirs of al-Andalus no less than their Christian neighbours and partners saw the Moroccan invaders as threatening their power and the whole mutually beneficial political system. However, with the pressure growing from the north, in the aftermath of Alfonso VI’s capture of Toledo in 1085, the taifa emirs, led by Seville, had little option but to invite Almoravid aid. The invasion, led by Yusuf Ibn Tashfin, led to the defeat of Alfonso at Sagrajas in 1086. Over the next quarter of a century, by force, coercion and diplomacy, the Almoravids absorbed remaining taifa emirates into their empire, the last, Zaragoza, falling in 1110. The adoption of a newly aggressive idea of Christian holy war came in direct response to this new threat to territory and the cosy system of parias. However, despite official ecclesiastical pronouncements, this was not perceived as a simple blanket religious conflict. Twelfth-century Christian Spanish writers repeatedly drew the distinction between the Muslims of al-Andalus, sometimes called ‘Hagarenes’, with whom business could be done, and the alien invaders, referred to as ‘Moabites’, with whom it could not.20

  Into this new political situation arrived foreign soldiers with the ideology and institutions of penitential warfare. In 1089, perhaps in response to news of the Almoravid invasion of that year, Urban II offered the same remission of sins to those who helped rebuild the city and church of Tarragona as that granted to those on penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, an offer repeated in 1091. Contributing to the defence of Tarragona, over the border on the coast fifty miles south of Barcelona, constituted a penance, as the city was intended as a ‘wall and bastion (literally ‘ante-mural’) against the Saracens for the Christian people’.21 Such mingling of defensive religious just war and remission of sins defined by analogy with the extreme penance of the Jerusalem pilgrimage showed how papal ideas were moving. The launch of the First Crusade did not deflect Urban from support of the Tarragona enterprise. He tried to insist that local counts should not fulfil their Jerusalem vow in the east but fight the Muslims nearer home. This hope was not entirely successful. There is little evidence that the cause of Tarragona proved popular but rather more for Spanish invo
lvement in the Jerusalem campaign itself. However, the success of the First Crusade had its impact on Spain as elsewhere. Peter I of Aragon had taken the cross to go to Jerusalem in 1100. A year later, still trying to annexe Zaragoza, he displayed banners of the cross at the siege of the city and built a castle to intimidate the citizens nicknamed ‘Juslibol’, i.e. ‘God Wills It’, the slogan of Clermont.22

  The incorporation of the formal apparatus of crusading – bull, indulgence, temporal privileges, cross – sprang from the wider, older association of Christian conquest and religious war. The past, as revealed by twelfth-century accounts of earlier campaigns against the Moors, was reconfigured to include holy war. From c.1115, the patronal saint, James the Apostle, began to be referred to as a ‘knight of Christ’, apparently shocking a visiting Greek, a story that suggested the novelty of the saint’s new role.23 Other saints, such as George in Aragon and Catalonia, and even, bizarrely, the seventh-century scholar Isidore of Seville, popular in León, were recruited to the providential mission of reconquest, as was the cult of the Virgin Mary. These local or adopted celestial allies outflanked papal arguments promoting St Peter as the peninsula’s proprietary saint. There were other limits to the acceptance of the crusade. Twelfth-century writers close to the action continued to chronicle the non-violent interaction between Christian and al-Andalus Muslims. Even the early thirteenth-century epic on Rodrigo Diaz, the Poema de Mio Cid (The Poem of the Cid) admits to the hero’s friendship with Muslims and catalogues the deficiencies of Rodrigo’s Christian associates as much as those of the Moors. As with the Historia Roderici of a century before, this is hardly ‘crusading’ literature.24 Despite the trickle of papal bulls from the early decades of the twelfth century, holy war was grafted on to the Spanish conflicts only gradually and, from an Iberian perspective, incompletely. Not all subsequent wars against Muslims were crusades. Crusading did not, as often in the eastern Mediterranean, set the military and political agenda but followed it, shaping mentalities, not strategy. The association of holiness to defence and conquest paid practical dividends, in the use of military orders in front-line settlements as well on campaign, or in the access to ecclesiastical and lay taxation. However, Iberian Muslims rarely attracted from Iberian Christians the consistent demonization concocted by western rhetoric far from the crusade frontier. Spanish convivencia, while never the Edenic state of multicultural harmony some have imagined, precluded the worst excesses of religious hatred in the contest for supremacy that rumbled and spat for a century and half after the First Crusade. The tainted legacy of entrenched intolerance and the racist persecution and expulsion of non-Catholic Spaniards belonged more to the period after the effective completion of the Reconquest, Granada excepted, in the mid-thirteenth century than to the previous period of active crusading.25 Nonetheless, crusade stereotypes did influence the creation of Spanish Catholic exceptionalism in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, providing a justification for internal discrimination with an abiding external incentive, the recovery of Jerusalem. The self-image of warriors of Christ, specially favoured and specially commissioned, that permeated Spanish official culture by 1500 was thus an indirect product of the historical Reconquest crusade experience.26