The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading: Second Edition 9781472599469, 9780826439246

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For R.C. Smail

Lingua sapientium ornat scientiam. Proverbs 15:2

Acknowledgements My first debt of gratitude is to my publisher whose genial compliance with regard to another contract enabled me to finish this even sooner than I had hoped. I owe much to the Librarians and staff of the British Library, the London Library, the libraries of the Universities of Cambridge and London and of Royal Holloway College, the Warburg Institute and, above all, the Institute of Historical Research. I have to thank the editors of Studies in Church History and The End of Strife for permission to incorporate parts of my articles on the persecution of the Jews and martyrdom, which are listed in the Bibliography. My wife Louise, Dr Norman Housley and Mrs Susan Edgington kindly read the typescript and offered good advice, as did Dr Bernard Hamilton, Dr W.G. Waddington and Dr Roy Porter on particular points. Janet Daines typed the final version. Janet Fahy drew the maps. This book is dedicated to the historian to whom I owe most.

Introduction The First Crusade was an extraordinary three-year epic which ended in triumph, in spite of the fact that almost every acknowledged rule of generalship was broken.1 The army which mustered across the Bosphorus in May 1097 and helped take the city of Nicaea consisted of rather more than 20,000 fighting men, of whom c. 5,000 were knights,2 accompanied by perhaps 15,000 male and female pilgrims. Its leaders had expected to join a great Byzantine army under the emperor himself, who had been writing not only to the pope but also to western magnates like themselves, proposing that Jerusalem be restored to Christian control.3 Now, concluding that he had no intention of committing himself to such an adventure, they decided to break out on their own and to march for Jerusalem 1,200 miles away, at the height of summer and across alien territory which for over a third of the distance had been ravaged by nomadic Turks. They could not have known that they were approaching a half-open door. The recent deaths of the Fatimid caliph alMustansir, who had ruled Egypt for 58 years, and his vizier, Badr al-Jamali, and of the ‘Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadi, together with the Selchük Sultan Malikshah and his longserving and powerful vizier, Nizam al-Mulk, had gravely weakened the two chief Muslim powers in the region. The Selchük sultanate, which stretched from Asia Minor to Iran, had disintegrated into principalities over which pretenders and members of the ruling family fought each other for control.4 But the opposition the crusade faced was still potent and the deficiencies in the Christian army shambling to the east were apparent. Drawn from all over western Europe, it had no easy means of communication, because, even though most of the leaders came from what is now France, men from the north

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and from Languedoc could not understand one another. There was no commander-in-chief and the enterprise was run by a committee of the greater lords, who found it hard to agree on anything. Each of them had authority only over his household, and possibly his closer relations, because most arms-bearers, who were free-agents, drifted here and there, attaching themselves to anyone who could assure them and their little bands of followers of food and security. The march would have been difficult in the best of conditions, which these were not.5 There was no system of provisioning and for long periods the crusaders were far from potential supply-points. Most of their time was taken up in foraging. They had to fight most of their battles on foot, because they lost nearly all their horses and, even more seriously, their pack animals, so that they had to carry their baggage themselves. Research on the death rate among them suggests that for the knights it was in the region of 36 per cent.6 Mortality must have been far higher among the poor. The decision in late June 1097 to press on regardless of any assistance from the Byzantine Greeks was not the only gamble the leaders took. Nearly two years later, in May 1099, having progressed slowly with a strategy, such as it was, dominated by a determination to reduce methodically the stronger points down the Syrian coast, they suddenly decided to ignore the cities that stood in their path and make a dash for Jerusalem. Negotiations with Egypt, which they knew was preparing a formidable army, had broken down and they wanted to reach their goal before it could be relieved. They covered the last 170 miles in little more than three weeks, and whereas the city of Antioch in northern Syria had been besieged for eight months and then taken only through treachery, Jerusalem was stormed after only five weeks; indeed, the first evidence we have for westerners knowing how to deploy a wide range of technologically advanced siege weaponry is to be found in the accounts of the assault on it.7 It was conventional wisdom that the investment of strongpoints should be avoided if armies of relief were in the wings,

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because any force settled into a siege was handicapped by its posture. The crusaders paid no attention to this doctrine. They beat off three such armies and they took on two others that arrived on the scene just after cities had been successfully taken. They were not fools. They knew how weak they were and what risks they took. It is not surprising that they attributed their triumph to divine assistance or that their achievement enthralled their contemporaries and was venerated as a model of heroism and endurance for many centuries to some.

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My interest in the crusade led me to write two research books on it. The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading was the first of them. I had come to the topic by an indirect route. In the 1970s I had discovered – rather late in the day – the writings of the militants of the South American Liberation movement and they had sparked an interest in the history of theories of Christian violence.8 I had planned to write a full account of the Christian theology of force and I had embarked on a serious reading of the scattered writings of St Augustine of Hippo, the greatest of the early theorists.9 By 1980 I was beginning to quail at the amount of ground I still had to cover and I started to focus on a much less ambitious project, a study of theory with reference to the First Crusade. This was mostly because I had persuaded myself that the crusade was the pivot around which the history of Christian war-theories turned. I became convinced that the ideas preached by Pope Urban II in 1095–96 were inchoate and that crusade theory would not have developed as it did were it not for the experiences on the march of the participants, whom I tried to treat as sympathetically as I could, and for the way these experiences were written up in theological terms by three accomplished monastic authors a decade later.10 Becoming closely involved in the course of the expedition I

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found myself imagining what the crusaders had gone through. I had already begun to look at some of the charter-material, although I had no idea how much of it there would prove to be. I wanted to ask whether light could be thrown on the reasons why men and women had been prepared to engage in something so severe and unpleasant. The second book was therefore complementary. It treated motivation rather than ideas and concentrated on the departure and return of the crusaders rather than on the campaign.11 The books were published 11 years apart and straddled the 900th anniversary of the preaching of the crusade. This was commemorated in 1995 with conferences in England,12 Spain13 and France, where two ran concurrently at Clermont-Ferrand, organized by the Conseil Régional d’Auvergne and the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East.14 There was rumoured to be a third in the town at the same time, dedicated to a critique of bigotry and religious zealotry and convened by the local free-thinkers. At any rate, interest in the crusade was rekindled15 and publishers began to commission new general histories of the crusading movement.16 I do not think, however, that anything has appeared to modify my basic arguments, although I am now certain that Pope Urban’s original message was more radical than I supposed, because I have become convinced that the most important element in it was the call to war as a penance.17

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The books are best known – and controversial – for their empathetic treatment of the crusaders. They represent an approach which, as far as I am concerned, was first introduced 40 years ago by Jean Richard in a preface to a little book of translated texts, in which he discussed briefly the themes of charity and penitence which have so absorbed me since.18 Other recent examples of this way of considering early crusad-

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ing are books written by Marcus Bull and William Purkis;19 and Professor Bull, in an article which is greatly admired by many young historians, has eloquently described what he has been trying to do.20 This historical approach involves taking seriously the ways the crusaders and their contemporaries wrote about themselves and about others, in relation to the world in which they lived, bearing in mind not only obvious factors, but also many other, much more intangible ones, which made up the ‘the mental spaces that people . . . themselves inhabited’, in the words of Marcus Bull.21 These include memory and memorialization, and what Bull has called ‘the underlying assumptions and instincts which up to then may not have found any dedicated outlet but could now assume a central importance’.22 The approach has been described as one that starts with the premise that motivation was ‘primarily spiritual’. This is an over-simplification. The forces moving many people were an amalgam of beliefs, senses, emotions, prejudices and predispositions that were rooted in society as well as in religion. A starting point for those of us trying to get into the heads of the crusaders is the near absence of evidence for the profit motive among them and their families, and the large number of references which confirm the importance of ideas, in the broadest sense, to their recruitment. Of course evidence rarely gives the whole picture, and nearly all the material at our disposal, whether from narrative sources or from hagiographical texts or from charters, relates to the arms-bearing, land-owning classes. We know next to nothing about the motivation of the poor. But we can only work on the basis of the evidence that is available to us, however imperfect it may be. Sometimes one can become too focused on the details. The need to look beyond particular incidents has been graphically illustrated for me by a challenge to my explanation of the pogroms associated with the first wave of crusaders leaving for the East. My arguments that the crusade was a form of vendetta and that notions of vengeance for the crucifixion contributed to the persecution of the European Jews, although

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justified by the evidence, are not sufficient, because Susanna Throop has convincingly questioned my conclusion that such feelings peaked with the First Crusade and declined thereafter. She has shown that, on the contrary, vengeance was a fairly restrained theme in First Crusade sources and that it grew dramatically as the twelfth century progressed.23 It looks now as though notions of vengeance played a relatively minor part and it seems that they should be given not much more prominence than millenarianism;24 it is noticeable that in spite of the interest in eschatology manifested in the years leading up to 2000, nothing new was discovered in relation to the crusade. A difference, of course, between vengeance and millenarianism is that the former had a future in crusade thinking, whereas the latter did not.

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Norman Housley has drawn attention to the way socioeconomic and economic factors have become less significant to historians than religious ones in the treatment of motivation, which he prefers to call ‘intention’.25 Materialist explanations, which were so influential 50 years ago, are less in evidence. They have played, in fact, an odd role in crusade historiography. It was Liberal economic historians, not Marxists,26 who in the 1920s and 1930s began to interpret the crusades, stripped of their ethic, in social and economic terms. They believed that crusading was an early example of colonialism and assumed that such a powerful movement could only have been generated by economic forces. They do not seem to have understood that they were adopting unquestioningly the point of view of those nineteenth-century imperialists who had looked back on the crusaders as their precursors. Specialists on the subject had played no part in the development of the materialist interpretation and no one had even half-proved it by research. It seems to have gained currency among crusade historians only in the 1950s,

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when in the vanguard were the Israelis, particularly the bestknown of them, Joshua Prawer, for whom the portrayal of the crusaders as forerunners of colonialism accorded with a Zionist reading of the history of the Promised Land since the diaspora.27 In the absence of serious research, the arguments that the prime causes for the First Crusade were economic and that the chief motivating force was a desire for profit, or at least for an escape from dire financial circumstances at home, rested on sand. This may account for the way critics of empathy have expressed their opinions in private and rarely in print, and for the fact that when counter-statements have occasionally surfaced they have tended to be asserted without engagement in debate. It is only now that a serious interpretation of the First Crusade in the context of Historical Materialism has appeared. Conor Kostick divides the crusaders into the two classes of nobiles and pauperes and he analyzes the actions and inter-reactions of these classes in an attempt to show how they determined the course of events. He engages with real passion in a critique of what he calls ‘the “act of love” contention’. I may well be the wrong person to give an objective judgement, but it seems to me that there are obvious limitations in an approach which involves bundling up heterogeneous groups of men and women into two classes, and that Dr Kostick cannot escape the perennial problem, which I have already identified, of lack of evidence.28

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There is consensus that the First Crusade really marked the start of the crusading movement.29 If it had failed, there would never have been another, because senior and influential churchmen in western Europe would have come out of the shadows to condemn the idea of penitential warfare of this sort. Its success transformed it from the foolhardy enterprise it must have seemed to many contemporaries to an example of

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divine intervention. Later crusades were often very unsuccessful, but the memories of that original triumph and the lessons perceived to have been learned from it became embedded in Catholic tradition. On the other hand, it is hard to provide the crusading movement with a terminal date. It now looks old-fashioned and blinkered to concentrate on the central Middle Ages and ignore the centuries of intense activity that followed 1300. It is quite common for historians to end crusading in the late sixteenth century, and some have argued for a terminal date of 1798, when Malta, the last active military-order state, fell to Napoleon. It is becoming clear, however, that crusade ideas were not entirely dormant in the nineteenth century. The air was filled with clouds of pseudo-crusading rhetoric, particularly in relation to imperialist adventures which had nothing at all to do with the original reality. There was some paracrusading activity, containing elements of the old movement, although chosen selectively and distorted. And there was at least one authentic expression of crusading, the foundation by Cardinal Lavigerie in 1890 of a true military order, L’Institut Religieux et Militaire des Frères Armés du Sahara.30 The Institut was anachronistic and did not last long, but its existence demonstrates that the wash generated by the First Crusade could still be felt almost within living memory.

Notes 1 See J. France, Victory in the East. A Military History of the First Crusade (Cambridge, 1994); R. Rogers, Latin Siege Warfare in the Twelfth Century (Oxford, 1992). 2 J. Riley-Smith, ‘Casualties and the Number of Knights on the First Crusade’, Crusades 1 (2002), pp. 19–20. 3 J. Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 61; J. Shepard, ‘Cross-purposes: Alexius Comnenus and the First Crusade’, The First Crusade, ed. J. Phillips (Manchester, 1997), pp. 116–22. R. Hiestand (‘Les canons de Clermont et d’An-

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tioche sur l’organisation ecclésiastique des Etats croisés. Authentiques ou Faux?’, Autour de la Première Croisade, ed. M. Balard (Paris, 1996), pp. 29–37) has shown that a Clermont decree, discussed in Antioch in 1098, which appeared to suggest that Pope Urban envisaged Latin rule over churches in the Levant, was actually issued with reference to the Iberian Peninsula. M. Brett, ‘The Near East on the Eve of the Crusades’, La Primera Cruzada, Novecientos Años después: el Concilio de Clermont y los Orígines del Movimiento Cruzado, ed. L. García-Guijarro Ramos (Madrid, 1997), pp. 119–36. For the Muslim response to the crusaders’ invasion and the evolution of jihadi ideas in reaction to Christian occupation of the Levantine littoral, see C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades. Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh, 1999); R. Irwin, ‘Islam and the Crusades 1096–1699’, The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades, ed. J. Riley-Smith (Oxford, 1995), pp. 217–28; N. Christie, ‘Motivating Listeners in the kitab al-Jihad of ‘Ali ibn Tahir al-Sulami’, Crusades 6 (2007), pp. 1–14; M.A. Köhler, Allianzen und Verträge zwischen fränkischen und islamischen Herrschern im Vorderen Orient (Berlin, 1991). For ground-breaking work on logistics, see J.H. Pryor, ‘Introduction: Modelling Bohemond’s March to Thessalonike¯’, Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. J.H. Pryor (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 1–24; A.V. Murray, ‘Money and Logistics in the Forces of the First Crusade: Coinage, Bullion, Service, and Supply, 1096– 99’, Logistics of Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, ed. J.H. Pryor (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 229–49. Riley-Smith, ‘Casualties’, pp. 13–28. This is not too different from James Powell’s estimate of a c. 34 per cent mortality rate on the Fifth Crusade in the early thirteenth century. J.M. Powell, Anatomy of a Crusade, 1213–1221 (Philadelphia, 1986), pp. 166– 72. Attention has recently been drawn to a contemporary reference to the siege by Ibn al-‘Arabi, which could be read as implying that the figure for the Muslim dead in the sack of Jerusalem was lower than is suggested by the evidence provided by Christian eyewitnesses and later Muslim writers. J. Drory, ‘Some Observations During a Visit to Palestine by Ibn al-‘Arabi of Seville in 1092–95’, Crusades 3 (2004), pp. 115, 119–20. At about the same time I was coming to the conclusion, expressed in What Were the Crusades? (London, 1977), that authentic crusades were fought in many different theatres of war.

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9 My article ‘Crusading as an Act of Love’, History 65 (1980), pp. 177–92 was a product of this reading. 10 An authoritative edition of Guibert of Nogent’s account has been published by R.B.C. Huygens, Dei gesta per Francos (CCCM 127A, Turnholt, 1996). Marcus Bull is leading a project which will result in new editions of the works of Robert of Rheims and Baldric of Bourgueil. Another important recent edition is that of Albert of Aachen, Historia Ierosolimitana, ed. Susan Edgington (Oxford, 2007). 11 The First Crusaders, 1095–1131 (Cambridge, 1997). 12 The First Crusade. Origins and Impact, ed. J. Phillips (Manchester, 1997). 13 La primera cruzada, novocientos anos después: el concilio de Clermont y los origines del movimiento cruzado, ed. L. GarciaGuijarro Ramos (Madrid, 1997). 14 Le Concile de Clermont de 1095 et l’Appel à la Croisade. Actes du Colloque Universitaire International de Clermont-Ferrand (23–25 Juin 1995) organisé et publié avec le concours du Conseil Régional d’Auvergne (Rome, 1997); Autour de la Première Croisade, ed. M. Balard (Paris, 1996). 15 T. Asbridge, The First Crusade. A New History (London, 2004); J. Flori, 1095–1099. La mémoire des siècles. La Première Croisade. L’occident chrétien contre l’Islam (Brussels, 1992); J. Flori, Pierre l’Ermite et la première croisade (Paris, 1999); J. Flori, La guerre sainte. La formation de l’idée de croisade dans l’occident chrétien (Paris, 2001); A. V. Murray, The Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem. A Dynastic History 1099–1125 (Oxford, 2000); also A. Becker, Papst Urban II (1088–1099), 2 vols (Stuttgart, 1964– 88). 16 Those in English include H.E. Mayer, The Crusades, tr. J.B. Gillingham, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1988); J. Richard, The Crusades, c.1071–c.1091, tr. J. Birrell (Cambridge, 1999); J. Phillips; The Crusades, 1095–1197 (Harlow, 2002); A. Jotischky, Crusading and the Crusader States (Harlow, 2004); J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades. A History, 2nd edn (London, 2005); C.J. Tyerman, God’s War. A New History of the Crusades (London, 2006); N. Jaspert, The Crusades, tr. P.G. Jestice (Abingdon, 2006). See also N. Housley, Fighting for the Cross. Crusading to the Holy Land (New Haven and London, 2008). 17 See Riley-Smith, The First Crusaders, pp. 53–78. 18 J. Richard, L’Esprit de la croisade (Paris, 1969), pp. 26–38.

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19 M.G. Bull, Knightly Piety and the Lay Response to the First Crusade (Oxford, 1993); W. Purkis, Crusading Sprituality in the Holy Land and Iberia c.1095–c.1187 (Woodbridge, 2008). Other works on ideas include H.E.J. Cowdrey, ‘Christianity and the Morality of Warfare During the First Century of Crusading’, The Experience of Crusading. Volume One. Western Approaches, ed. M.G. Bull and N. Housley (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 175–92; P.J. Cole, The Preaching of the Crusades to the Holy Land, 1095– 1270 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 20 M.G. Bull, ‘Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem in Miracle Stories, c.1000–c.1200: Reflections on the Study of First Crusaders’ Motivations’, The Experience of Crusading. Volume One. Western Approaches, ed. M.G. Bull and N. Housley (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 13–38. 21 Bull, ‘Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem’, p. 38. 22 Bull, ‘Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem’, p. 25. 23 S. Throop, ‘Vengeance and the Crusades’, Crusades 5 (2006), pp. 21–38. For the pogroms, see now especially R. Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley and London, 1987); R. Chazan, God, Humanity and History. The Hebrew First Crusade Narratives (Berkeley and London, 2000); A.S. Abulafia (ed.), Religious Violence between Christians and Jews (Basingstoke, 2002); J. Cohen, Sanctifying the Name of God. Jewish Martyrs and Jewish Memories of the First Crusade (Philadelphia, 2004). 24 See J. Riley-Smith, ‘Christian Violence and the Crusades’, Religious Violence between Christians and Jews. Medieval Roots, Modern Perspectives, ed. A.S. Abulafia (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 11. 25 N. Housley, Contesting the Crusades (Oxford, 2006), pp. 24–47; and see p. 77, where he prefers to call motivation ‘intention’. See Housley, Fighting for the Cross, pp. 22–80. 26 See Bull, ‘Views of Muslims and of Jerusalem’, p. 18; Housley, Contesting the Crusades, pp. 77–8. 27 J. Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam (New York, 2008), pp. 3–4, 60–1. Prawer summarized his views in The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. European Colonialism in the Middle Ages (London, 1972). 28 C. Kostick, The Social Structure of the First Crusade (Leiden, 2008). 29 Although there has recently been an unsuccessful attempt to deny its radical nature. P. Chevedden, ‘Canon 2 of the Council of

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Clermont (1095) and the Crusade Indulgence’, Annuarium Historiae Conciliorum 37 (2005), pp. 253–322. 30 Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam, pp. 45–61; E. Siberry, The New Crusaders. Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Aldershot, 2000).

Chapter 1

Pope Urban's message Urban spent the year from August 1095 to September 1096 in France. He had returned to his homeland primarily to oversee the reform of its Church, but he had also come with the intention of preaching the crusade and soon after his arrival he seems to have conferred about this with Adhemar of Monteil, the bishop of Le Puy who was to be his personal representative in the army, and with Raymond of St Gilles, the count of Toulouse. On 27 November 1095 he proclaimed the crusade to a large but mainly clerical gathering at Clermont. He then journeyed through central, western and southern France, skirting the areas under the direct control of the king, whom it would be difficult to meet while his appeal against a sentence of excommunication imposed on him for adultery was under consideration. There is evidence that he preached the crusade at Limoges at Christmas, at Angers and Le Mans in February 1096 and at a council held at Nimes in July, but he must have preached elsewhere as well. Possibly at Le Mans in February, certainly at Tours in March, he presided over ceremonies during which knights took the cross. By the time he left France the enterprise was already under way.1 The crusade was his personal response to an appeal which had reached him from the Greeks eight months before. In March 1095 he had been presiding over a council at Piacenza, when there had arrived an embassy from Constantinople to ask for aid against the Turks. Urban replied by encouraging 'many to promise, by taking an oath, to aid the emperor most faithfully as far as they were able against the pagans. 2 The close connection between the events at Piacenza and Clermont was noticed by a contemporary,3 but it would be wrong to suppose that a spontaneous reaction at Piacenza started a chain of thought in Urban's mind that ended with Clermont. In fact his response was probably premeditated. Since the beginning of his pontificate he had been involved in negotiations with the Greek emperor Alexius over relations between the churches of Rome and Constantinople and over military aid from the West to

Chapter 2

The response of lay people Urban made quite strenuous efforts to publicize his proclamation of war. A letter of his to the people of Flanders is dated very soon after the Council of Clermont.! He followed up his tour of France, as we have seen, with embassies or letters to Genoa, Bologna, Pis a and Milan, and the crusade was on the agenda of councils he held at Bari in October 1098 2 and Rome in April 1099. 3 At Clermont and possibly again at Nimes he encouraged all the bishops present to preach the cross in their dioceses. 4 Hugh of Die, the archbishop of Lyons and an enthusiastic reformer, certainly promoted the crusade and so did several other bishops,s but not all appear to have carried out the pope's instructions energetically. Very few copies of the Clermont decree on the crusade indulgence survive, which suggests that few of the bishops took the trouble to have it copied. One of those who did, Lambert of Arras, has left us his own account of the council, in which no reference is made to the crusade at all: for Lambert the most important result was naturally the pope's confirmation of the standing of his own bishopric. 6 And there is no record of the crusade being discussed at the Council of Rouen of February 1096, which republished many of the Clermont decrees.? Enthusiasm was generated by the sermons of freelancers like Peter the Hermit and by monks, who were often active recruiting officers: the abbot of Maillezais seems to have been prominent as a preacherj 8 Duke Robert of Normandy was persuaded to crusade by 'certain religious? and there were religious houses which were agencies of recruitment, perhaps because they were enthusiastic or rich or business-like enough to be centres for the disposal of property and the raising of funds: Cluny and St Vincent of Le Mans stand out. In whatever way the news was spread - one contemporary exclaimed that it travelled so fast that there was no need for preaching 10 - there is little doubt that it passed quickly from Clermont into areas which were not visited personally by the pope. As early as 11 February 1096 King Philip of France and his brother Hugh of

Chapter 3

Conditions on the march The second wave of crusaders began to leave western Europe in the middle of August 1096, on or after the date fixed by the pope. They travelled in groups under the leadership of great magnates, around whom the lesser lords and knights gathered for the time being: Hugh of Vermandois, the king of France's brother; Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine; Bohemond of Taranto, the eldest son of Robert Guiscard, who had involuntarily disinherited him by granting him future conquests on the eastern shore of the Adriatic which the south Italian Normans were never strong enough to make; Raymond of St Gilles, count of Toulouse, who shared the leadership of the largest of the armies with the chief papal legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy; Count Robert of Flanders; and Duke Robert of Normandy and Count Stephen of Blois. Between November 1096 and May 1097 these great men were arriving in Constantinople, where they were persuaded to become vassals of the Byzantine Emperor Alexius - full vassals in all cases save that of Raymond of St Gilles, who would only agree to a modified form of commendationand to promise to restore to the emperor all lands they conquered which had once belonged to the empire. 1 From April 1097 they were being shipped across the Bosphorus and in early June they came together in one host before the city of Nicaea, which on the 19th surrendered to the Greek troops accompanying them. On the 26th they began to march out across Asia Minor and on 1 July they won a major victory over the Seljuq Turks at Dorylaeum. After two days' rest they took the road to Akshehir, Konya and Ereghli, where on c.10 September they routed a Turkish army blocking their way. Tancred, Bohemond's nephew, and Baldwin of Boulogne, Godfrey of Bouillon's brother, now broke away from the main army to raid Cilicia, taking Tarsus, Adana, Misis and Iskenderun. Baldwin went eastward to Gaziantep, Tilbeshar and Edessa, which he reached on 20 February 1098. After being formally adopted by its Armenian prince, he took over its government entirely on 10 March, establish-

Chapter 4

The ideas of the crusaders Anyone who reads the letters written during the crusade and the eyewitness accounts will be struck by the crusaders' sense of wonder. Feelings of amazement at the magnitude of their achievement came over them as they left Asia Minor and neared Antioch. In a despatch of 18 October 1097 Adhemar of Le Puy and the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem summarized the successes so far and went on: 'We are few in comparison with the pagans. Truly God fights for US.'l This was taken up in the following January in a letter from the bishops in the army. How one against a thousand? Where we have a count the enemy has forty kings; where we have a regiment the enemy has a legion; where we have a knight they have a duke; where we have a footsoldier they have a count; where we have a castle they have a kingdom. We do not trust in any multitude nor in power nor in any presumption, but in the shield of Christ and justice, under the protection of George and Theodore and Demetrius and St Blaise, soldiers of Christ truly accompanying us. 2 The success of an army so badly supplied and led could only be ascribed by them to God, and with the capture of Antioch and Jerusalem and the defeats of threatening Muslim relief forces the chorus swelled: 'We had the most victorious hand of the Father with us'; 'the earth fought for US'.3 Astonishment persisted after the crusade, when the participants came to look back on it. 'Who could not marvel at the way we, a small people among such kingdoms of our enemies, were able not just to resist them but to survive.'4 It was natural for them to recall the exploits of the Israelites in the Old Testament and to compare them with their own. In their sufferings they were inspired by the patience of Job; in their march, their

Chapter 5

The crusade of 1101 From the winter of 1096-7 onwards crusaders were drifting back to western Europe. Obloquy was heaped on the heads of the early homecomers, like Emich of Leiningen, who had been turned back in the Balkans, Stephen of Blois, who had deserted the crusade at Antioch, and Hugh of Vermandois, who had never returned to the army after having been sent on an embassy to Constantinople at the beginning of July 1098. 1 Stephen of Blois was not only publicly humiliated; he also had to endure the private nagging of his formidable wife Adela of England. 2 Guy Trousseau, who had escaped over the walls of Antioch during the night of panic in June 1098, returned to France a broken man, exhausted by his journey and still unable to understand why he had given way to fear.3 In the winter of 10991100 these disgraced figures were followed by the triumphant conquerors of Jerusalem. The return of the great magnates must have been welcome when one considers the disorder that often followed the prolonged absence of a lord: Flanders was in an unsettled state while Count Robert was away.4 In fact there must always have been the risk that a crusader would return to find his family or financial affairs in crisis. A good example is the experience of Hugh of Chaumont, who made the crusade soon after coming of age and in the aftermath of a violent dispute over his inheritance. During his minority his uncle Lisois had had guard of his castle of Amboise. Lisois apparently wanted the castle for his heiress, Corba of Thorigne, his grand-daughter through the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Foucois of Thorigne, and he tried to ensure this by arranging with Count Fulk of Anjou that she be wed to a man called Aimery of Courron. Hugh of Chaumont had naturally reacted bitterly to the prospect of being deprived of Amboise and his vassals had resorted to violence. Fulk of Anjou had managed to arrange a composition of the differences between Hugh and Aimery and it says much for the speed with which these storms passed once the issues that caused them were resolved that Hugh and Aimery had both

Chapter 6

Theological refinement The odyssey of the first crusaders was retold for later generations in paintings and sculpture, in popular songs and poems, the greatest of which, the Chanson d' Antioche, was composed by a participant even though it has survived only in a version reworked in c.1180 by the poet Graindor of Douai, and above all in histories. No other event in the central Middle Ages inspired anything like the quantity of historical writing to be encountered here: apart from the authors of eyewitness narratives, who wrote soon after the crusade and have already been discussed, there are at least twelve western Christian historians of significance. Their message is a remarkably consistent one, the only major difference being the emphasis given to the role and importance of the French, which is natural in a corpus containing contributions from all over western Europe. But in terms of the expression of ideas three historians stand out. They were all Benedictine monks from northern France. They wrote at about the same time, within a decade of the liberation of Jerusalem; indeed their works may have pre-dated that of the eyewitness Peter Tudebode, although with them we are in another world. They had not, however, taken part in the crusade or even visited the East, l although two of them had been at the Council of Clermont. They all used as a basic source the same anonymous eyewitness account in the Gesta Francorum, although each had something to add to it from information he had gathered personally. The first was Robert the Monk (or of St Remy or Rheims). The date of his birth is unknown. He may have been a pupil of Baldric of Bourgueil, the third of these historians. At any rate he had a reputation for scholarship and, after being a monk of St Remy and Marmoutier, he was made abbot of St Remy. In this capacity he was present at the Council of Clermont. But he seems to have been an extremely incompetent administrator, which was perhaps why, accused of various misdemeanours and excommunicated, he was deposed in 1097. His appeal against this sentence to Pope Urban II was successful to the extent that it was quashed, but he was not able

Conclusion Pope Urban II's appeal to lay knights in 1095-6 was the culmination of the movement of the Church towards lay people which had begun earlier in the eleventh century. As a scion of the petty nobility of Champagne and a Cluniac monk, he revived an alliance between the Holy See and the French which had not flourished for 200 years by calling on French knights to take part in an enterprise that was to be a pilgrimage, unusual in that it was explicitly for the young and healthy, and at the same time a war with the twin aims of freeing their Christian brothers, whose needs were associated with those of all Christendom, and liberating the holy city of Jerusalem. He followed a conventional practice among the reformers by referring to this war as Christ's own, to be fought in accordance with God's will and intentions. He equated service in it with love of God and neighbour and he applied to the actions of the participants Christ's injunctions to take up their crosses and follow him and to abandon for his sake their families and properties. Potential crusaders were to confirm their commitment by taking vows similar to those already made by pilgrims. Realizing that the campaign would be long and arduous, Urban recognized it as a penitential exercise so severe that it would be 'satisfactory', outweighing any punishment that would have been imposed by God on the crusaders for their previous sins. Nothing he said was particularly novel, at least in terms of the ideas current in reforming circles in Italy, and had it not been for its striking success we might now consider his summons merely to have been another example of the hyperbolic utterances favoured by reforming churchmen of his time. But his preaching had two remarkable consequences. The first was that the faithful responded enthusiastically to it. There can be little doubt that those who took the cross, and the families who helped to finance them, were moved on the whole by idealism. The only explanation for their enthusiasm seems to be that Urban's message encountered the laity's growing aspirations and the hand stretched out by the Church to lay people was suddenly grasped. That is not to

Chronological table 1-7 March 1095 July 15 August 18-28 November 27 November December 23 December - 6 January 1096 6-12 January 11 February

c.1 March 8 March 16-22 March early April 12-19 April 3May 18-20 May 21 May 23 May 25-29 May 29 May 30 May June end June c.1 July c.3-4July 6-14 July c.20July 1 August

Council of Piacenza Arrival of Pope Urban II in France Pope Urban at Le Puy Council of Clermont Crusade proclaimed by Pope Urban Peter the Hermit began to preach the cross First outbreaks of persecution of Jews in France Pope Urban preached cross at Limoges Pope Urban preached cross at Angers King Philip of France conferred on crusade with Hugh ofVermandois and the French magnates in Paris Walter Sansavoir left for East Peter the Hermit began journey Synod at Tours at which Pope Urban presided over a ceremony of taking the cross Peter the Hermit at Trier Peter the Hermit at Cologne Emich of Leiningen's forces began massacre of Jews at Speyer Emich's followers massacred Jews at Worms Walter Sansavoir entered Hungary Jews at Regensburg forcibly baptized, probably by Peter the Hermit's followers The destruction of the Jewish community at Mainz by Emich's forces Pogrom at Cologne began Persecution of Jews at Prague, probably by followers of Folkmar Massacre ofJews around Cologne continued and was extended to Trier and Metz Folkmar's army destroyed at Nitra Gottschalk's army surrendered to the Hungarians at Pannonhalma Peter the Hermit's army mauled at Nish Cross preached by Pope Urban at the Council of Nimes Walter Sansavoir reached Constantinople Peter the Hermit reached Constantinople

List of abbreviations Archives de ['Orient latin Monumenta Germaniae historica inde ab anna Christi quingentesimo usque ad annum millesimum et quingentesimum auspiciis societatis aperiendis fontibus rerum Germanicarum medii aevi, ed. G.H. Pertz et al. (1826 ff.) MGH Scriptores in Folio et Quarto, 32 vols (1826-1934) MGHS Patrologiae cursus completus. Series Latina, compo J.P. Migne, PL 217 vols and 4 vols of indexes (184~4) Recueil des historiens des croisades, ed. Academie des InscripRHC tions et Belles-Lettres (1841-1906) RHCarm. RHC Documents armeniens, 2 vols (1869- 1906) RHC Oc. RHC Historiens occidentaux, 5 vols (1844-95) RHCOr. RHC Historiens orientaux, 5 vols (1872-1906) Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de la France, ed. M. RHGF Bouquet et al., 24 vols (1737-1904) AOL MGH

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