God's War: A New History of the Crusades Read online

  In the early eighth century, the Byzantine emperors’ flirtation with Iconoclasm (rejecting the religious efficacy of images, icons, etc.) and their inability to protect Rome and the pope from the Lombard rulers of northern Italy persuaded Popes Gregory III (731–41), Zacharias (741–52) and Stephen II (752–7) to enter into alliances with the Franks, the rulers of a large kingdom that stretched from modern south-west France to the Rhineland and the Low Countries. As part of this new orientation of policy, the papal court (or Curia) concocted the so-called Donation of Constantine, one of the most powerful forgeries in world history only properly exposed in the fifteenth century. This claimed that, on becoming a Christian, the Emperor Constantine surrendered his imperial authority to Pope Sylvester I (314–35), who returned it while retaining pre-eminence over the other patriarchates, theoretical temporal jurisdiction over the western empire and direct rule of Rome, its surrounding region and Italy in general. This forgery formed one basis for the later papal insistence on its claims to a state in central Italy and its wider assertion of primacy over imperial authority in western Europe.

  The papal–Frankish alliance proved mutually advantageous. The papacy gained effective protection in Italy; the Franks legitimacy for their mid- to late-eighth-century conquests in Lombardy, Gascony, Bavaria and Saxony between the Rhine and Elbe. The culmination of the alliance came on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned the king of the Franks, Charles the Great or Charlemagne (768–814), as the new Roman emperor in the west, inaugurating what came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, which survived, with various interruptions and changes of fortune, nature and substance, until abolished in 1806 on the insistence of Napoleon. While the Frankish, or Carolingian (i.e. family of Charles), empire lasted, until the 880s, the papacy remained rather overshadowed. Thereafter the throne of St Peter tended to be the preserve of a dim succession of Roman nobles, some youthful, dissolute, even irreligious. Yet the reputation of their office remained high, especially in northern Europe, where papal authority still appeared as a final arbiter of ecclesiastical and spiritual issues; the newly converted King Miesco I of Poland sought papal protection in 991. In 962, the king of Germany, Otto I, who had recently conquered northern Italy, revived the western empire by being crowned in Rome by Pope John XII (955–64), a notoriously debauched twenty-five-year-old nobleman and libertine who apparently met his death, still only about twenty-seven, after a stroke suffered during intercourse with a married woman.

  By the early eleventh century the papacy alternated between grand protégés of the German emperors, such as the scholar Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II, 999–1003), and a succession of local appointees of distinctly uneven calibre usually taking the names Benedict or John. Increasingly elements within the Roman church and elsewhere in Christendom sought to reform both the papacy and the wider secular church in the west by re-emphasizing the separation and dominance of the spiritual over the secular in church appointments, management, finance and behaviour. Under the patronage of Emperor Henry III (1039–56), the reformers seized control of the papacy. A succession of German, Italian and French popes in the half-century after 1048 transformed both the papacy and western Christendom. Deliberately and innovatively international in outlook and personnel, central in the policies of the reforming papal Curia came the understanding that the church of Rome was synonymous with the universal church; that the pope held temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction on earth as the heir to St Peter, to whom, according to the so-called Petrine texts in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ entrusted the keys of heaven and the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven (Matthew 16:19). The more general reformist agenda included the improving of the morals and education of the clergy and the eradication of simony (paying for church office) and clerical marriage (a move both moral and economic, to protect church land from being inherited by non-clerical clergy children). An attempt was made to make secular priests more like monks, wholly distinctive from their lay neighbours and relatives, and loyally obedient to Rome.

  This programme met fierce local opposition as it threatened the vested interests of lay and clerical patrons of private churches and monasteries; the habits of the mass of the secular priesthood; and the power of secular rulers to control the richest landed corporations in their regions. The most acute and bitter dispute developed with the king of Germany, Henry IV, whose accession as a minor had forced the reforming popes to seek independence from the German throne in order to protect themselves from Italian enemies. At issue were imperial rights in choosing a new pope; papal rights in approving the choice of emperor; and, more directly, the authority over appointments and control of the church in imperial lands in Germany and north Italy. The dispute was encapsulated in the ceremony of investing, i.e. giving newly consecrated bishops the ring and staff, symbols of their spiritual dignity. Traditionally in Germany, and elsewhere, kings performed this ceremony. Uniquely for a layman – and inconveniently for church reformers – kings were also consecrated, ‘the Lord’s Anointed’. The right to invest with the ring and staff became iconic, hence the name given to the dispute and the wars it generated, the Investiture Contest, although in reality the disagreements were both more mundane – control of church wealth and patronage – and sublime – the spiritual health of those who administered the Sacraments and ‘the right order in Christendom’.

  This was much more than a theological spat. The power of the German kings relied heavily on control of the church, especially in Saxony. A revolt there in 1076 gave the most belligerent of the reforming popes, Gregory VII, an opportunity to put pressure on Henry IV to make concessions by publicly challenging his right to rule, claiming the pope possessed a plenitude of power that included the right to depose unsuitable monarchs, including emperors. The intransigent Henry IV was excommunicated in 1076 and again in 1080. Rival kings were put up by the papalist and anti-imperialist party in Germany. The ensuing war spilt over into Italy. In 1084 Henry IV invaded, captured Rome, installed his own anti-pope and forced Gregory VII to find refuge with the Norman conquerors of southern Italy. Over the subsequent decade, Henry’s anti-pope held sway in Rome, supported by repeated imperial forays south of the Alps. The background to the First Crusade lay in this conflict, as Urban II sought to use the mobilization of the expedition as a cover to reclaim the pope’s position in Italy and demonstrate his practical leadership of Christendom, independent of secular monarchs. The slogan of the papal reformers was ‘libertas ecclesiae’, ‘church freedom/liberty/rights’. This provided the central appeal of Urban II’s summons of 1095, when he called on the faithful to go to ‘liberate’ the churches of the east and Jerusalem. The crusade is impossible to understand outside of this context of more general church and papal reform. It was ironic that, at the very time they were asserting universalist claims, the reforming popes could never be entirely secure in Rome itself. Local nobles, deprived of control of the lucrative office of the papacy, German and pro-imperialist invaders and other Italian political rivals forced successive popes into temporary or near-permanent exile over the century following Gregory VII’s exile. It was only after he had launched the First Crusade in 1095–6 that Urban II was himself able to establish his residence in the Eternal City.

  The Investiture Contest, only resolved by compromise in 1122, exposed some of the weaknesses in the material and ideological positions of both papacy and empire, as well as highlighting the limitations of centralized political authority more generally. The papacy was, with the English government of the time, one of the leaders in western Europe pioneering the development of written techniques of government – communicating with local agents, subordinates and representatives abroad by standardized letters; systematic, retrievable record keeping; the creation of a bureaucratic tradition. Yet, as was later famously remarked, the pope lacked legions, having to rely on secular protectors to secure papal independence and integrity. By contrast, the German emperor was politically the most powerful ruler in western Europe, wielding vast
theoretical and potential power over territories that stretched from southern Denmark to central Italy. Yet these lands, based on the eastern portion of the old Carolingian empire (known from the ninth century as East Francia), were held together by networks of dynastic alliance, personal relations, tradition, ideology, convenience and brute force, not institutional routine. This made the building of political consensus, the basis to all effective authority, a full-time and precarious exercise for German rulers in the eleventh century. Since 962, the king of Germany could hope to be crowned by the pope as Roman emperor. Despite the Investiture Contest and continued tension thereafter, most kings succeeded in persuading popes to perform this highly symbolic and important ceremony. However, some did not. King Conrad III of Germany, commander of the Second Crusade (1145–9), was one of the few medieval German kings after Otto I not to be crowned emperor, although he nonetheless exercised many of the imperial prerogatives and gave himself some of the formal titles of an emperor. The lack of imperial title reduced a German king’s claims to jurisdiction in North Italy, one of the wealthiest regions of western Europe, which formed a significant and lasting element in imperial pretensions. However, Conrad’s power, like that of his predecessors, depended on his position in Germany.

  Politically, Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comprised a number of disparate regions each dominated by its own duke and closely integrated nobilities: Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Saxony, Lorraine. Eastward expansion, although temporarily halted in the north by a great Slav rebellion in 983 against German rule east of the Elbe, had created marcher lordships such as in Austria, Styria and Meissen, giving local entrepreneurial margraves considerable autonomy. The power of the king depended on his own personal dynastic lands – Otto I had been duke of Saxony – coupled with a range of imperial lands, cities and rights, and alliance with the church, the only truly imperial institution (hence the threat presented by the Investiture dispute). Although tending to descend within one family – the Saxons 911–1024; Salians 1024–1125; Hohenstaufen 1138–1254 – the German kingship was elective, a right the electors, composed of the leading dukes and ecclesiastical magnates such as the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, stubbornly maintained. While the elective element in other kingdoms, such as England, France or the Christian states of northern Iberia, withered, repeated dynastic interruptions, through either lack of direct heirs (1002, 1024, 1125, 1138, 1152) or the succession of minors (1056, 1197), entrenched an active elective principle in Germany. Nonetheless, the German kings were – and were recognized by their neighbours as being – not just sentimentally the secular heads of western Christendom by virtue of the imperial title, but practically the leading secular rulers in western Christendom.

  Not the least symptom and cause of this predominance lay in the role of German rulers in the expansion of Christianity to the Slavic kingdoms of eastern Europe. It says much for the damage inflicted on German monarchic power that, whereas in the tenth and eleventh centuries the initiative in reeling the new kingdoms and principalities of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary into the orbit of western Christendom had come from the German kings, from the mid-twelfth century it was left to local east German dukes and lords, aided by the ideology of holy war and their recruiting of crusaders and immigrants, who pushed the frontiers of Latin Christendom into Prussia and the north-eastern Baltic. Although many of the earliest Christian missionaries to the western Slavs, especially in Bohemia and Moravia, and to the Magyars in Hungary in the decades around 900 were Greek Orthodox, the creation of the new western empire by Otto I, not least through his defeats of Magyar invaders, opened the region to western Latin evangelists as local rulers sought to associate themselves with the new German power. The adoption of Christianity provided a cohesive force in the establishment of settled political identities and institutions, the church providing education, literacy, civil servants, a potentially pliant and dependent new landowning ecclesiastical aristocracy of bishops and abbots, a supportive ideology of transcendent kingship and convenient national saints, such as King Wenceslas in Bohemia (d. c.929) and Stephen in Hungary (king 1000–1038). Poland had adopted Latin Christianity in 966 as part of the attempts of Miesco I to expand into Pomerania as a client of Otto I, a strategy giving him, he reckoned, a better chance of making good his conquests and his desire to dominate the western Slavs. A sign of Polish determination to enter the Latin world came when, in 991, Miesco placed the kingdom under formal papal protection. Hungary’s position was far more liminal, sharing a long frontier with Byzantium as well as Germany. However, here too rulers consistently sought to place themselves within a German/Latin Christian orbit politically and hence culturally rather than become a client of the Greek empire. The Hungarian desire to maintain this western bias informed their consistently sympathetic and later active engagement with the crusades that passed through their lands in 1096, 1146 and 1189. In some senses the crusades confirmed the drift of Hungarian policy since the tenth century.

  The only competitor for influence in the vast tracts of Slavic/Magyar lands between the Elbe, Baltic, Danube and the Black Sea remained the Greek empire of east Rome, Byzantium, with its capital of Constantinople on the Bosporus, between Europe and Asia. Both Moravia and Hungary had initially seemed likely to fall into the Greek orbit in the early tenth century before the rise of Ottonian Germany proved more attractive. Even in the eleventh century, Constantine IX (1042–55) sent the Hungarian ruler a crown, although Hungary steadfastly attempted to protect its autonomy though close ties with the German empire (St Stephen had married the sister of Emperor Henry II (1002–24)). More securely, Greek influence and the desire of the local ruler to consolidate his status by a Byzantine alliance led to the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (988/9) whose confederation of the Rus incorporated the main trading centres on the Dneiper with the original northern capital of the Rus at Novgorod. However, even the Russians gradually emancipated themselves from Greek dominance. Alliances were sought in the west; Henry I of France (1031–60) married a Russian princess, with their son, Philip I, introducing a Greek first name that became popular in the French royal family down to the nineteenth century. In the 1040s the Russians even attacked Byzantium, and there were generally unavailing attempts to loosen the grip of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate over the Russian church. The ability to manipulate peoples around its frontiers played a crucial role in Byzantine foreign policy and survival. East of the Russians, the nomadic and Turkish tribes such as the Khazars, Pechenegs and Cumans of the southern Eurasian steppes north of the Black Sea presented a greater and more intractable threat, as did the Turkish tribes that penetrated the Near East in the mid-eleventh century.

  By the early eleventh century, the Byzantine empire stretched from the Danube and Adriatic, with some outposts still retained on the mainland of Italy (at Bari, for instance), to the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains of eastern Anatolia and a few strongholds in northern Syria, such as Antioch. Seemingly dominant, culturally, commercially and politically, in fact the empire had only recently reasserted its position in northern Syria and the northern Balkans, where the previously independent Bulgarian state had been painfully annexed by Emperor Basil II, ‘the Bulgar Slayer’ (976–1025), and Serbian separatist tendencies neutralized. This hegemony did not last long. In the mid-1050s, Turkish tribes led by the Seljuk family had invaded the Near East, becoming the effective rulers in Baghdad. In 1071, the Seljuks invaded Anatolia, defeating and capturing the Byzantine emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, at the battle of Manzikert. With their frontier defences breached, the Byzantines soon lost the interior of Anatolia, the Seljuks even establishing their Anatolian capital at Nicaea, within striking distance of Constantinople itself. Behind the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia other Turkish tribes took advantage of the political chaos to exploit the towns and settled agrarian economy of the region. The chief of these groups were the Danishmends, who established a so-called ghazi (i.e. holy warrior) state to the north-east of the peninsula. At much the same time,
other nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes penetrated Byzantium’s Balkan frontiers. Twenty years earlier, the Greeks had to accept the settlement of the Pechenegs south of the Danube in north-eastern Bulgaria, while another steppe people, the Cumans, established themselves just to the north of the Balkan frontier. Across the Adriatic, the final Byzantine holdings were snuffed out by the new power in the region, Norman adventurers led by Robert Guiscard. Bari, the last stronghold, fell in 1071. Guiscard followed up his victory by invading the Balkans. Only with the accession of the military usurper Alexius I Comnenus was the Norman threat repulsed at Durazzo (now Durres on the Adriatic coast of Albania) in 1085 and the Pechenegs finally defeated, at Mount Levounion (at the mouth of the Maritsa in southern Thrace near the modern Turco–Greek border) in 1091. Apart from the Italian possessions, only the losses to the Seljuks in Anatolia and northern Syria remained to be restored. That is where, in the eyes and strategy of Alexius I, the appeal to the west he made in 1095 and the First Crusade came in.