The Crusades Read online

  Even shorn of present prejudices and preoccupations, the history of the Crusades throws up concerns central to all societies, from the forging of identities through the communal force of shared faith and the use and abuse of legitimate violence to the nature of political authority and organized religion. Crusading exemplifies the exploitation of the fear of what sociologists call “the other,” alien peoples or concepts ranged against which social groups can find or be given cohesion: Communism and Capitalism; Democracy and Fascism; Christians and non-Christians; Whites and Non-Whites; Them and Us. There can be no indifference to such issues. That is why the study of the Crusades possesses an importance beyond the confines of academic scholarship. Equally, there can be no summoning of the past to take sides in the present. Plundering history to deliver modern indictments serves no rational or benign purpose. To observe the past through the lens of the present invites delusion; so too does ignoring the existence of that lens. However, the burden of understanding lies on us to appreciate the world of the past, not on the past to provide ours with facile precedents or good stories, although of the latter the Crusades supply plenty.

  “At last my dream comes true.” This cartoon is Punch’s response to the entry of General Allenby into Jerusalem in December 1917, as the Union Jack flies over the Jaffa Gate. In actuality, Allenby carefully avoided any overt demonstration of imperialist or Christian triumph, making his entry on foot.

  A fifteenth-century depiction shows the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. The Holy Sepulchre, enclosed within the Edicule (small house) had been the destination of many pilgrims and crusaders over the previous four centuries.

  ONE

  Definition

  AT A COUNCIL OF THE CHURCH HELD at Clermont in the French Auvergne in November 1095 a decree was issued that marked a new beginning in western Christianity’s use of war to further its religious mission.

  Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honor or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.

  This decree did not invent Christian violence. Nor did it define precise terms of a revolution in thought or practice, or determine how future generations would employ the precedent. Coming half way through a preaching tour of France conducted by Pope Urban II (1088–95), the Clermont assembly was best remembered not for the legal authority granted by the decree but for the pope’s sermon at the end of the council on November 27. What the pope said is not known. Witnesses and later commentators subsequently depicted him as delivering a rousing call to arms to the fighting classes of western Europe to recover the Holy City of Jerusalem, insisting that this was no ordinary act of temporal warfare but a task enjoined on the faithful by God Himself, a message echoed back in the cries of “Deus lo volt!”—“God wills it!”—said to have greeted Urban’s words. To provide a focus for commitment and a sign of distinction, Urban instituted the ceremonial granting of crosses to those who had sworn to undertake the Jerusalem journey. Thus they became “signed with the cross,” crucesignati.

  This fifteenth-century image shows Pope Urban II preaching to kings and knights, urging a crusade to the Holy Land.

  Over the following century writers in western European vernaculars began to describe these wars in similar terms—crozeia, crozea, or even crozada in early thirteenth-century southern French (langue d’oc). The appropriation of Christianity’s most numinous symbol, as badge, banner, and talisman, followed naturally from the pope’s conception of the enterprise to liberate “the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection.” Observers and veterans of the enterprise understood the pope to have called for Christ-like sacrifice in obedience to the gospel command: “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). All Hebrew accounts of the 1096 massacres of Rhineland Jews by the passing Christian armies emphasized that the butchers wore the sign of the cross.

  The memory of Urban’s rhetoric at Clermont played a central role in how the events prompted by his speech were later portrayed, providing a convenient start to narratives of the startling consequences of the pope’s preaching. Urban’s decree explicitly proclaimed a holy war in which the effort of the campaign, including the fighting and the inevitable slaughter, could be regarded as equivalent to strenuous performance of penance provided it had been undertaken devoutly. The cause may have been seen as just, but that was not the point. This was an act of total self-abnegating faith demanded by God, hence the language of unrealistic absolutes that failed to match military, social, and psychological reality, an ideal to inspire and against which deeds could be judged. The Clermont decree instituted a holy war, its cause and motive religious, an act of Christian charity for “the love of God and their neighbor” (the eastern Christians). As well as combining violence with a transcendent moral imperative, Urban appealed to a form of “primitive religious nostalgia” embodied in the ambiguously liminal Holy City of Jerusalem, lost to Christendom since its capture by the Muslims in 638 yet central to Christian imagination as the scene of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. Here, according to Christian texts familiar through the Mass and liturgy, earth touched heaven. In a short space, the Clermont decree identified reasons for the massive response: the certainties of faith; fear of damnation; temporal self-image; material, social, and supernatural profit; the attraction of warfare for a military aristocracy; an unequivocally good cause; and an iconic objective of loud resonance in the imaginative world of western Christians. It proved to be a formula of sustained power for the rest of the Middle Ages.

  What we today call a crusade could be described as a war answering God’s command, authorized by a legitimate authority, the pope, who, by virtue of the power seen as vested in him as Vicar of Christ, identified the war’s object and offered to those who undertook it full remission of the penalties of confessed sins and a package of related temporal privileges, including church protection of family and property, immunity from law suits and interest repayments on debt. The beneficiary earned these grants by swearing a vow symbolized in a ritual adoption of a cross, blessed by a priest and worn on the recipient’s clothing, the vow often being couched in terms parallel to those for a pilgrimage. The duration of the spiritual and temporal privileges was determined by the fulfillment of the vow, by absolution or by death. Those dying in battle or otherwise in fulfillment of their vow could expect eternal salvation and to be regarded as martyrs. At every stage, analogies with a quasi-monastic commitment were drawn, associating the activity with what remained the ideal conception of the perfect Christian spiritual life. Although details of the operation of the vow and its associated privileges developed over the following century or more to cover a multiplicity of political and ecclesiastical concerns, the first appearance and original justification for such a holy war in 1095 was the recovery of Jerusalem from Muslim rule. Thereafter, the Holy Land retained a primacy in rhetoric, imagination, and, for many centuries, ideology.

  Numbering the Crusades

  Historians organize the past to help them make sense of the evidence. In doing so they run the risk of becoming imprisoned by their own artifice. Between 1095 and, say, 1500 there were scores of military operations that attracted the privileges associated with the wars of the cross. Yet only a few later became known by a number, all of them aimed at Muslim targets in and around Syria and Palestine in the eastern Mediterranean. Obviously, the nobles, knights, foot soldiers, unarmed pilgrims, and hangers-on who answered Urban II’s appeal in 1095–96 did not know they were embarking on the first of anything; they were told their efforts were in a unique cause. Subsequent events altered perceptions. The promoters of the next comparable eastern campaign, in 1146–49, invoked the precedent of 1095–96, casting into shadow smaller expeditions that had embarked to aid the Christian cause in the east in the interim. Thus, in the eyes of later scholars, the 1146 crusade became the Second Crusade. Subsequent numbering followed suit, attached only to general, large-scale in
ternational assaults intended to reach the Holy Land. Hence the inclusion in the canon of the Fourth Crusade (1202–24) that planned to attack Egypt, although getting no further than Constantinople. Other crusades are defined by objective, location, participants, or motive. Hence the Albigensian Crusades describe the wars against religious heretics in southern France around Albi between 1209 and 1229. The Baltic Crusades were campaigns launched against local pagan tribes of the region for two and a half centuries from the mid-twelfth century. The Peasants’ (1096), Children’s (1212), and Shepherds’ (1251, 1320) Crusades speak for themselves, socially pigeon-holed by historians’ (and contemporary) snobbery. The wars directed from the thirteenth century against papal enemies in Europe are called, somewhat judgmentally, “Political,” as if all crusades, like all wars, were not political. The dozens of lesser crusades to the Holy Land not deemed large or glamorous enough have remained unnumbered. To add to the confusion, even within the canon, historians have disagreed over some numbers attached to Holy Land crusades in the thirteenth century. Some see Frederick II of Germany’s crusade of 1228–29 that briefly restored Jerusalem as the Sixth Crusade; others as the last campaign of the Fifth Crusade summoned in 1213. Louis IX of France’s Egyptian campaign of 1248-50 (the Sixth or Seventh depending on the view taken of Frederick II) and his campaign to Tunis in 1270 (the Eighth or Ninth) are not now generally described by number. Such games are not new. In the early eighteenth century some historians stuck to five (1096, 1146, 1190, 1217-29, and 1248) while others counted eight. Most modern historians, content to number crusades until the Fifth (beginning in 1213), thereafter dispense with numbering.

  Pilgrims approach the holy city of Jerusalem in this 1683 engraving by French artist Alain Manesson Mallet. The crusade as a penitential exercise was intimately linked to the practice of pilgrimage.

  “The Four Leaders of the First Crusade,” as this nineteenth-century engraving is entitled, were: Godfrey of Bouillon, first crusader to rule Jerusalem; Raymond, Count of Toulouse; Bohemond I; and Bohemond’s nephew Tancred.

  TWO

  Crusades in the Eastern Mediterranean

  The First Crusade, 1095-99

  BETWEEN 1095 AND THE END of the Middle Ages, western Europeans fought or planned wars broadly understood as being in defense or promotion of their religion throughout the eastern Mediterranean, in the Iberian peninsula, the Baltic, and within Christendom itself. Yet no campaign rivaled the first in impact or memory. Contemporaries and subsequent generations have been astonished and moved by the exploits of the armies and fleets from western Europe that forced their way into the Near East between 1096 and 1099 to capture Jerusalem in distant Palestine. Excited western intellectuals employed the language of theology: for one, “the greatest miracle since the Resurrection”; for another, “a new way of salvation,” almost a renewal of God’s covenant with His people.

  The expedition arose out of a specific social, religious, ecclesiastical, and political context. Western Europe was held together by a military aristocracy whose power rested on control of local resources by force and inheritance as much as by civil law. The availability of large numbers of arms bearers, nobles and their retinues, with sufficient funds or patronage to undertake such an expedition, was matched by an awareness of the sinfulness of their customary activities and a desire for penance. For them, holy violence was familiar and Jerusalem possessed overwhelming numinous resonance. The invitation from the eastern Christian emperor of Byzantium (Constantinople), Alexius I Comnenus to Pope Urban suited the new papal policy of asserting supremacy over both Church and State developed over the previous half century. An earlier scheme by Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) to lead an army eastwards to Jerusalem had come to nothing in 1074. This time, Urban II, already a sponsor of war against the Muslims in Spain, seized on the opportunity to promote papal authority in temporal affairs. From its inception, crusading represented a practical expression of papal ideology, leadership, and power.

  The opportunity was no accident. Alexius I had been recruiting western knights and mercenaries for years. A usurper, he needed military success to shore up his domestic position. The death in 1092 of Malik Shah, Turkish sultan of Baghdad, was followed by the disintegration of his empire in Syria, Palestine, and Iraq. This offered Alexius a chance to restore Byzantine control over Asia Minor and northern Syria lost to the Turks since their victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071. For this he needed western troops. For political convenience the pope was an obvious and ready ally to choose. Once he had received the Byzantine ambassadors early in 1095, Urban transformed their request for military aid into a campaign of religious revivalism, its justification couched in cosmological and eschatological terms. The pope himself led the recruitment drive with a preaching tour of his homeland, France, between August 1095 and September 1096 that reached its defining moment at Clermont. With the kings of France and Germany excommunicated, the king of England, William II Rufus, in dispute with the pope, and the Spanish monarchs preoccupied with their own Muslim frontier, the pope concentrated on the higher nobility, the dukes, counts, and lords, while casting his net wide. Recruitment stretched from southern Italy and Sicily to Lombardy, across great swathes of France from Aquitaine and Provence to Normandy, Flanders and into the Low Countries, western Germany, the Rhineland, the North Sea region, and Denmark, although both Latin and Arabic sources dubbed them collectively as “Franks”—Franci, al-ifranji. A recent guess puts the number of fighting men reaching Asia Minor in 1096–97 at between fifty thousand and seventy thousand, excluding the non-combatant pilgrims who used the military exodus as protection for their own journeys.

  Medieval Europe and Its Frontiers

  The first to set out for the agreed muster point of Constantinople in spring and summer 1096 included forces from Lombardy, northern and eastern France, the Rhineland, and southern Germany. One of their leaders was a charismatic Picard preacher known as Peter the Hermit. Some contemporaries attributed the genesis of the whole enterprise to Peter, who allegedly had been badly treated by the Turkish rulers of Jerusalem when on pilgrimage some years earlier. Although unlikely to have been the expedition’s instigator, Peter certainly played a significant role in recruitment, possibly with papal approval, and was able to muster a substantial army within three and a half months of the council of Clermont. Elements of these Franco-German contingents conducted vicious anti-Jewish pogroms the length of the Rhineland in May and June 1096, before moving east down the Danube. Together, these armies have been dismissed as “the Peasants’ Crusade.” This is a misnomer. Although containing fewer nobles and mounted knights than the later armies, these forces were far from the rabbles of legend and contemporary polemic. They possessed cohesion, funds, and leadership, managing to complete the long march to Constantinople largely intact and in good time. One of the commanders, Walter Sans Avoir, was not, as many have assumed, “Penniless”—Sans Avoir is a place (in the Seine valley), not a condition. However, discipline proved hard to maintain. After crossing the Bosporus into Asia in August 1096, these armies were annihilated by the Turks in September and October, only a matter of weeks before the first of the princely-led armies reached Constantinople.

  Behind Peter’s expeditionary forces came six large armies from northern France, Lorraine, Flanders, Normandy, Provence, and southern Italy. Although the Provençal leader, Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, had been consulted by Urban II in 1095-96 and traveled with the pope’s representative, or legate, Adhemar, bishop of Le Puy, there was no single commander. The most effective field general proved to be Bohemond of Taranto, head of the Normans from southern Italy. Arriving at Constantinople between November 1096 and June 1097, each leader was persuaded or forced to offer an oath of fealty to Alexius I, who, in return, provided money, provisions, guides, and a regiment of troops. After the capture of Nicaea, capital of the Turkish sultanate of Rum (Asia Minor) in June 1097, the campaign fell into four distinct phases. An arduous march across Asia Minor to Syria (June to October 1
097) that saw a major but close-run victory over the Turks north of Doryleaum (July 1) was followed by the siege and then defense of Antioch in northern Syria (October 1097 to June 1098). One contingent from the main army under Baldwin of Boulogne established control of the Armenian city of Edessa beyond the Euphrates. As their difficulties proliferated, the depleted western army increasingly regarded themselves as under the special care of God, a view reinforced by visions, the apparently miraculous discovery at Antioch of the Holy Lance that was said to have pierced Christ’s side on the Cross, and the victory a few days later (June 28, 1098) over a numerically much superior Muslim army from Mosul. From June 1098 until January 1099, the Christian army remained in northern Syria, living off the land and squabbling over the spoils.