Текст книги "The Crusades. The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land"

Автор книги: Thomas Asbridge

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THE COMING OF THE CRUSADES

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HOLY WAR, HOLY LAND

On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe. His rousing words transfixed the crowd that had gathered in a small field outside the southern French town of Clermont, and in the months that followed his message reverberated across the West, igniting an embittered holy war that would endure for centuries to come.

Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim world in the First Crusade.¹

POPE URBAN AND THE IDEA OF CRUSADING

Urban II was perhaps sixty years old when he launched the First Crusade in 1095. The son of northern French nobility, and a former cleric and Cluniac monk, he became pope in 1088, at a time when the papacy, reeling from a rancorous and protracted power struggle with the emperor of Germany, stood on the brink of overthrow. So parlous was Urban’s position that it took him six years to reassert control over Rome’s Lateran Palace, the traditional seat of papal authority. Yet, through cautious diplomacy and the adoption of measured, rather than confrontational, policies of reform, the new pope oversaw a gradual renaissance in the prestige and influence of his office. By 1095 this slow rejuvenation had begun, but the papacy’s notional right to act as head of the Latin Church and spiritual overlord to every Christian in western Europe was still far from realised.

It was against this background of partial recovery that the idea of the First Crusade was born. In March 1095 Urban was presiding over an ecclesiastical council in the northern Italian city of Piacenza when ambassadors from Byzantium arrived. They bore an appeal from the Greek Christian Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, a ruler whose astute and assertive governance had arrested decades of internal decline within the great eastern empire. Exorbitant programmes of taxation had refilled the imperial treasury in Constantinople, restoring Byzantium’s aura of authority and munificence, but Alexius still faced an array of foreign enemies, including the Muslim Turks of Asia Minor. He thus dispatched a petition for military aid to the council in Piacenza, urging Urban to send a detachment of Latin troops to help repel the threat posed by Islam. Alexius probably hoped for little more than a token force of Frankish mercenaries, a small army that could be readily shaped and directed. In fact, over the next two years, his empire would be practically overrun by a tide of humankind.

The Greek emperor’s request appears to have chimed with notions already fermenting in Urban II’s mind, and through the spring and summer that followed the pope refined and developed these ideas, envisaging an endeavour that might fulfil a broader array of ambitions: a form of armed pilgrimage to the East, what is now called a ‘crusade’. Historians have sometimes characterised Urban as the unwitting instigator of this momentous venture, suggesting that he expected only a few hundred knights to answer his call to arms. But in reality he seems to have had a fairly shrewd sense of the potential scale and scope of this enterprise and to have laid the foundations of widespread recruitment with some assiduity.

Urban recognised that developing the idea of an expedition to aid Byzantium offered a chance not only to defend eastern Christendom and improve relations with the Greek Church, but also to reaffirm and expand Rome’s authority and to harness and redirect the destructive bellicosity of Christians living in the Latin West. This grand scheme would be launched as part of a broader campaign to extend the reach of papal influence beyond the confines of central Italy, into Urban’s birthplace and homeland, France. From July 1095 onwards he began a lengthy preaching tour north of the Alps–the first such visit by a pope for close to half a century–and announced that a major Church council would be held in November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France. Through the summer and early autumn Urban visited a succession of prominent monasteries, including his own former house of Cluny, cultivating support for Rome and preparing the ground for the unveiling of his ‘crusading’ idea. He also primed two men who would play central roles in the coming expedition: Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, a leading Provençal churchman and an ardent supporter of the papacy; and Count Raymond of Toulouse, southern France’s richest and most powerful secular lord.

By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon. On 27 November, hundreds of spectators crowded into a field outside the city to hear him speak.²

The sermon at Clermont

At Clermont Urban called upon the Latin West to take up arms in pursuit of two linked goals. First, he proclaimed the need to protect Christendom’s eastern borders in Byzantium, emphasising the bond of Christian fraternity shared with the Greeks and the supposedly imminent threat of Muslim invasion. According to one account, he urged his audience ‘to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore’ because ‘the Turks…have overrun them right up to the Mediterranean Sea’. But the epic endeavour of which Urban spoke did not end with the provision of military aid to Constantinople. Instead, in a visionary masterstroke, he broadened his appeal to include an additional target, one guaranteed to stir Frankish hearts. Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos. Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.³

In spite of the undoubted resonance of these twinned objectives, like any ruler recruiting for war the pope still needed to lend his cause an aura of legitimate justification and burning urgency, and here he faced a problem. Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam. With no appalling atrocity or immediate threat to draw upon, Urban chose to cultivate a sense of immediacy and incite a wrathful hunger for retribution by demonising the enemy of his proposed ‘crusade’.

Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture:

The cruelty of these impious men goes even to the length that, thinking the wretches have eaten gold or silver, they either put scammony in their drink and force them to vomit or void their vitals, or–and this is unspeakable–they stretch asunder the coverings of all the intestines after ripping open their stomachs with a blade and reveal with horrible mutilation whatever nature keeps secret.

Christians living under Muslim rule in the Levant were said to have been reduced to a state of ‘slavery’ by ‘sword, rapine and flame’. Prey to constant persecution, these unfortunates might suffer forced circumcision, protracted disembowelment or ritualised immolation. ‘Of the appalling violation of women’, the pope reportedly reflected, it would be ‘more evil to speak than to keep silent’. Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery, akin to that which, in a modern-day setting, might be associated with war crimes or genocide. His accusations bore little or no relation to the reality of Muslim rule in the Near East, but it is impossible to gauge whether the pope believed his own propaganda or entered into a conscious campaign of manipulation and distortion. Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause, and further enabled him to argue that fighting against an ‘alien’ other was preferable to war between Christians and within Europe.⁴

Pope Urban’s decision to condemn Islam would have dark and enduring consequences in the years to come. But it is important to recognise that, in reality, the notion of conflict with the Muslim world was not written into the DNA of crusading. Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.*

The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist.

Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.

From the rape of the Holy City by an alien enemy to the promise of a new path to redemption, the pope conjured a persuasive and emotive blend of images and ideas in support of his call to arms. The effect on his audience appears to have been electric, leaving ‘the eyes of some bathed with tears, [while others] trembled’. In what must have been a pre-planned move, Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, was the first to step forward to commit to the cause. On the following day the bishop was proclaimed papal legate (Urban’s official representative) for the coming expedition. As its spiritual leader, he was expected to promote the pope’s agenda, not least the policy of détente with the Greek Church of Byzantium. At the same time, messengers arrived from Raymond of Toulouse proclaiming the count’s own support for the cause. Urban’s sermon had been a resounding success, and over the next seven months he followed it up with an extended preaching tour, which saw his message crisscross France.⁵

And yet, in spite of the fact that Clermont must be regarded as the First Crusade’s moment of genesis, it would be wrong to regard Urban II as the sole architect of the ‘crusading ideal’. Previous historians have rightly emphasised his debt to the past, not least in relation to Pope Gregory VII’s pioneering exploration of holy war theory. But it is equally important to recognise that the idea of the First Crusade–its nature, intentions and rewards–underwent ongoing, largely organic development throughout the expedition. Indeed, this process even continued after the event, as the world sought to interpret and understand such an epochal episode. It is all too easy to imagine the First Crusade as a single, well-ordered host, driven on to Jerusalem by Urban’s impassioned preaching. In reality, the months and years that followed November 1095 saw disjointed waves of departure. Even what we commonly term the ‘main armies’ of the crusade began the first phase of their journey not as a single force, but rather as a rough conglomeration of smaller contingents, gradually feeling their way towards shared goals and systems of governance.

Within a month of the pope’s first sermon, popular (and often unsanctioned) preachers had begun to proclaim the call to crusade across Europe. In their demagogic hands some of the subtleties surrounding the spiritual rewards associated with the expedition–what would come to be known as the crusading ‘indulgence’–seem to have been eroded. Urban had likely intended that the remission offered would only apply to the temporal punishment for confessed sins; a rather complex formula, but one that adhered to the niceties of Church law. Later events suggest that many crusaders thought they had been given assured guarantees of heavenly salvation and thus believed that those who died during the campaign became sacred martyrs. Such notions continued to inform thinking about the crusading experience for centuries to come, establishing a gnawing rift between official and popular conceptions of these holy wars.

Notably, Pope Urban II did not invent the term ‘crusade’. The expedition he launched at Clermont was so novel, and in some ways still so embryonic in its conception, that there was no word with which it could be described. Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an iter (journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word crucesignatus (one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term croisade, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.⁶

The call of the cross

In the months that followed the Council of Clermont, the crusading message spread throughout western Europe, evoking an unprecedented reaction. While Pope Urban broadcast his message throughout France, bishops from across the Latin world who had attended his original sermon took the call back to their own dioceses.

The cause was also taken up by popular, rabble-rousing preachers, largely unsanctioned and unregulated by the Church. Most famous and remarkable of these was Peter the Hermit. Probably originating from a poor background in Amiens (north-eastern France), he became renowned for his austere, itinerant lifestyle, repellent appearance and unusual eating habits–one contemporary noted that ‘he lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, or never, ate bread’. By modern standards he might be deemed a vagabond, but among the poorer classes of eleventh-century France he was revered as a prophet. Such was his sanctity that his followers even collected the hairs of his mule as relics. A Greek contemporary noted: ‘As if he had sounded a divine voice in the hearts of all, Peter the Hermit inspired the Franks from everywhere to gather together with their weapons, horses and other military equipment.’ He must have been a truly inspirational orator–within six months of Clermont he had gathered an army, largely made up of poor rabble, numbering in excess of 15,000. In history this force, alongside a number of other contingents from Germany, has become known as the ‘People’s Crusade’. Spurred on by crusading fervour, its various elements set off for the Holy Land in spring 1096, months before any other army, making ill-disciplined progress towards Constantinople. Along the way, some of these ‘crusaders’ concluded that they might as well combat the ‘enemies of Christ’ closer to home, and thus carried out terrible massacres of Rhineland Jews. Almost as soon as the People’s Crusade crossed into Muslim territory they were annihilated, although Peter the Hermit survived.⁷

This first wave of the crusade may have ended in failure, but, back in the West, larger armies were gathering. Public rallies, in which massed audiences were bombarded with emotive rhetoric, prompted fevered recruitment, and crusading enthusiasm also seems to have been propagated more informally through kinship groups, networks of papal supporters and the links between monastic communities and the nobility. Historians continue to dispute the numbers involved, primarily because of the unreliability of wildly inflated contemporary estimates (some of which exceed half a million people). Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children. What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.⁸

At the heart of these armies were aristocratic knights, the emerging martial elite of the Middle Ages.* Pope Urban knew only too well the anxiety of these Christian warriors, trapped in a worldly profession imbued with violence, but taught by the Church that sinful warfare would lead to damnation. One contemporary observed:

God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake…might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain some measure of God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.

The pope had constructed the idea of an armed pilgrimage at least in part to address the spiritual dilemma threatening the knightly aristocracy, and he also knew that, with the nobility on board, retinues of knights and infantry would follow, for even though the crusade required a voluntary commitment, the intricate web of familial ties and feudal obligation bound social groups in a common cause. In effect, the pope set off a chain reaction, whereby every noble who took the cross stood at the epicentre of an expanding wave of recruitment.

Although no kings joined the expedition–most being too embroiled in their own political machinations–the crème of western Christendom’s nobility was drawn to the venture. Members of the high aristocracy of France, western Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, from the class directly below that of royalty, these men often bore the titles of count or duke and could challenge or, in some cases, even eclipse the power of kings. Certainly they wielded a significant degree of independent authority and thus, as a group, can most readily be termed ‘princes’. Each of these leading figures commanded their own military contingents, but also attracted much looser, more fluid bands of followers, based on the bonds of lordship and family and perpetuated by common ethnic or linguistic roots.

Count Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful secular lord in south-eastern France, was the first prince to commit to the crusade. An avowed supporter of the Reform papacy and ally of Adhémar of Le Puy, the count almost certainly had been primed by Urban II even before the sermon at Clermont. In his mid-fifties, Raymond was the expedition’s elder statesman; proud and obdurate, boasting wealth and far-reaching power and influence, he assumed command of the Provençal-southern French armies. Later legend suggested that he had already campaigned against the Moors of Iberia, even that he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which one of his eyes had been pulled out of his head as punishment for refusing to pay an exorbitant Muslim tax on Latin pilgrims. Indeed, the count was said to have returned to the West carrying his eyeball in his pocket as a talisman of his hatred for Islam. Fanciful as these tales may have been, Raymond nonetheless had the experience and, more importantly, the resources to vie for overall secular command of the crusade.⁹

The count’s most obvious rival for that position was a forty-year-old southern Italian Norman, Bohemond of Taranto. As the son of Robert ‘Guiscard’ (Robert ‘the Wily’), one of the Norman adventurers who conquered southern Italy during the eleventh century, Bohemond gained an invaluable military education. Fighting alongside his father during the 1080s in a four-year Balkan campaign against the Greeks, Bohemond learned the realities of battlefield command and siege warfare. By the time of the First Crusade he had an unequalled martial pedigree, prompting one near-contemporary to describe him as ‘second to none in prowess and in knowledge of the art of war’. Even his Byzantine enemies conceded that he had an arresting physical presence:

Bohemond’s appearance was, to put it briefly, unlike that of any other man seen in those days in the Roman world, whether Greek or barbarian. The sight of him inspired admiration, the mention of his name terror…His stature was such that he towered almost a full cubit over the tallest men. He was slender of waist and flanks, with broad shoulders and chest, strong in the arms…The skin all over his body was very white, except for his face which was both white and red. His hair was lightish-brown and not as long as that of other barbarians (that is it did not hang on his shoulders)…His eyes were light-blue and gave some hint of the man’s spirit and dignity…There was a certain charm about him [but also] a hard, savage quality in his whole aspect, due, I suppose, to his great height and his eyes; even his laugh sounded like a threat to others.

But for all his lion-like stature, Bohemond lacked wealth, having been disinherited by his acquisitive half-brother in 1085. Driven by rapacious ambition, he thus took the cross in the summer of 1096 with at least one eye upon personal advancement, nursing dreams of a new Levantine lordship to call his own. Bohemond was accompanied on crusade by his nephew, Tancred of Hauteville. Barely twenty, with little real experience of war, this young princeling nonetheless had an unquenchable dynamism (and could apparently speak Arabic), and he quickly assumed the position of second in command of the relatively small but redoubtable army of southern Italian Normans that followed Bohemond into the East. In time Tancred would become one of the foremost champions of the crusading cause.¹⁰

The leading southern French and Italian Norman crusaders were all allies of the Reform papacy, but after 1095 even some of the pope’s most embittered enemies joined the expedition to Jerusalem. One such was Godfrey of Bouillon, from the region of Lorraine. Born around 1060, the second son to the count of Boulogne, he could trace his lineage back to Charlemagne (later legend even had it that he was born of a swan) and was said to have been ‘taller than the average man…strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and stalwart chest, [with] pleasing features [and] beard and hair of medium blond’. Godfrey held the title of duke of Lower Lorraine, but proved unable to assert real authority over this notoriously volatile region and probably took the cross with some thought of starting a new life in the Holy Land. Despite his reputation for despoiling Church property and his limited military background, in the years to come Godfrey would demonstrate an unswerving dedication to the crusading ideal and a gift for clear-headed command.

Godfrey stood at the forefront of a loose conglomerate of troops from Lorraine, Lotharingia and Germany and was joined by his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. Reportedly darker-haired but paler-skinned than Godfrey, Baldwin was said to have a piercing gaze. Like Tancred, he would emerge from relative obscurity during the course of the crusade, demonstrating a bullish tenacity in battle and an almost insatiable appetite for advancement.

These five princes–Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Boulogne–played pivotal roles in the expedition to reclaim Jerusalem, leading three of the main Frankish armies and shaping the early history of the crusades. A fourth and final contingent, made up of the northern French, also joined the campaign. This army was dominated by a tight-knit kinship group of three leading nobles: the well-connected Robert, duke of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror and brother to William Rufus, king of England; Robert’s brother-in-law Stephen, count of Blois; and his namesake and cousin, Robert II, count of Flanders.

For these potentates, their followers and perhaps even the poorer classes, the process of joining the crusade involved a dramatic and often emotional ceremony. Each individual made a crusading vow to journey to Jerusalem, similar to that for a pilgrimage, and then marked their status by sewing a representation of the cross on to their clothing. When Bohemond of Taranto heard the call to arms, his reaction was apparently immediate: ‘Inspired by the Holy Ghost, [he] ordered the most valuable cloak which he had to be cut up forthwith and made into crosses, and most of the knights who were [there] began to join him at once, for they were full of enthusiasm.’ Elsewhere, some took this ritual to extremes, branding their flesh with the sign of the cross, or inscribing their bodies or clothing with blood.

The process of identification through a visible symbol must have served to separate and define the crusaders as a group, and the pilgrim vow involved certainly brought crusaders an array of legal protections for their property and persons. The contemporary descriptions of these moments of dedication tend to stress spiritual motivation. We might doubt this evidence, given that it is almost always provided by churchmen, except for the fact that it is supported by a wealth of legal documents, produced either by, or at the behest of, men placing their affairs in order before departing for Jerusalem. This material seems to confirm that many crusaders did indeed see their actions in a devotional context. One crusader, Bertrand of Moncontour, was so inspired that he decided to give up lands which he was withholding illegally from a monastery in Vendôme because ‘he believed that the Way of God [the crusade] could in no way benefit him while he held these proceeds of theft’.

The documentary evidence also reflects an atmosphere of fear and self-sacrifice. Prospective crusaders seem to have been deeply apprehensive about the long and dangerous journey they were undertaking, but were at the same time willing to sell virtually all their possessions to fund their participation. Even Robert of Normandy was forced to mortgage his duchy to his brother. The once fashionable myth that crusaders were self-serving, disinherited, land-hungry younger sons must be discarded. Crusading was instead an activity that could bring spiritual and material rewards, but was in the first instance both an intimidating and extremely costly activity. Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and in the long years to come the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and indestructible spiritual resolution.¹¹

BYZANTIUM

From November 1096 onwards the main armies of the First Crusade began to arrive at the great city of Constantinople (Istanbul), ancient gateway to the Orient and capital of the Byzantine Empire. For the next six months the various contingents of the expedition passed through Byzantium on their way to Asia Minor and the frontier with Islam. Constantinople was a natural location for the diverse forces of the crusade to gather, given that it stood on the traditional pilgrim route to the Holy Land and that the Franks had travelled east with the express intention of aiding their Greek brethren.