The First Crusade Read online

  To rally the Latin Church to his cause, Urban called the clergy to a grand ecclesiastical council. Held in late November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of south-eastern France, this meeting was attended by some twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots - not a massive assembly by medieval standards, but the largest of Urban's pontificate to date. For more than a week, the council considered an array of ecclesiastical business, as Urban sought to disseminate his plans for the continued reform of the Church. Then, on 27 November, with the council drawing to a close, the pope announced that he would deliver a special sermon to an open-air assembly held in a field outside Clermont. Urban probably arranged for this public spectacle in the hope that his preaching would draw a large crowd, and later tradition maintained that the meeting had to be moved outside because of the sheer weight of numbers that gathered to hear him speak, but in reality perhaps only 300 or 400 people braved the chill November air. These select few were to bear witness to a captivating sermon.27

  Pope Urban s message

  Unless new evidence comes to light, we will never know exactly what Pope Urban II said in his momentous sermon. Even though this speech initiated a campaign that would change the face of European history, no precise record of Urban's words survives. In the years that followed, a number of men, including three eyewitnesses, did record versions of his address, but all of them wrote after the end of the First Crusade. Their accounts must, therefore, be read with a healthy dose of suspicion in mind, given that their versions of the events at Clermont were composed with the benefit of hindsight. They knew only too well what powerful emotions Urban's words would stir in western Christendom, the tide of humanity that would respond to his call and the dreadful progress of the crusade that followed. Only by carefully cross-referencing these versions of Urban's sermon with the pope's own letters, composed around the time of the council of Clermont, can we approach some understanding of his message and intentions.

  We know that Urban urged western Christendom to pursue two interlocking goals: the liberation of the eastern Churches, most notably by bringing military support to the beleaguered Byzantine Empire; and the reconquest of the Holy Land, in particular the city of Jerusalem. From the start, he conceived of the campaign as a war of defence and repossession. The crusade was not launched as an evangelical enterprise to bring about the conversion of Muslims, forced or voluntary, but to protect and recover Christian territory. This was to be a war of religion, but one that focused upon physical power, not ephemeral theology. Rather than emphasise complex questions of dogma and creed, Urban promoted a war that his audience could understand, stressing the theme of Christian brotherhood and highlighting the fact that all Latin knights had a duty to defend Christ's patrimony by participating in an impassioned battle to recover the Holy Land.28

  His appeal seems to have been loosely structured around the three Augustinian principles of Just War - legitimate authority, just cause and right intention - bolstered by remodelled Gregorian ideals. He took 'just cause' as the key theme for his proposed campaign, launching into a polemical oration, peppered with inflammatory images of Muslim atrocities.

  We want you to know what grievous cause leads us to your territory, what need of yours and all the faithful brings us here. A grave report has come from the lands of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople that a people from the kingdom of the Persians, a foreign race, a race absolutely alien to God . . . has invaded the land of those Christians [and] has reduced the people with sword, rapine and fire.29

  A central feature of Urban's doctrine was the denigration and dehumanisation of Islam. He set out from the start to launch a holy war against what he called 'the savagery of the Saracens', a 'barbarian' people capable of incomprehensible levels of cruelty and brutality.

  Their supposed crimes were enacted upon two groups. Eastern Christians, in particular the Byzantines, had been overrun right up to the Mediterranean Sea'. Urban described how the Muslims, occupying more and more of the land on the borders of [Byzantium], were slaughtering and capturing many, destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God. So, if you leave them alone much longer they will further grind under their heels the faithful of God.30 The pope also maintained that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being subjected to horrific abuse and exploitation. While the wealthy were regularly beaten and stripped of their fortunes by illegal taxes, the poor endured even more terrible treatment:

  Non-existent money is extracted from them by intolerable tortures, the hard skin on their heels being cut open and peeled back to investigate whether perhaps they have inserted something under it. 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.31

  These accusations had little or no basis in fact, but they did serve Urban's purpose. By expounding upon the alleged crimes of Islam, he sought to ignite an explosion of vengeful passion among his Latin audience, while his attempts to degrade Muslims as 'sub-human' opened the floodgates of extreme, brutal reciprocity. This, the pope argued, was to be no shameful war of equals, between God's children, but a 'just' and 'holy' struggle in which an 'alien' people could be punished without remorse and with utter ruthlessness. Urban was activating one of the most potent impulses in human society: the definition of the 'other'. Across countless generations of human history, tribes, cities, nations and peoples have sought to delineate their own identities through comparison to their neighbours or enemies. By conditioning Latin Europe to view Islam as a species apart, the pope stood to gain not only by facilitating his proposed campaign, but also by propelling the West towards unification.

  *It was also a popularly held belief that the 'Last Days' prophesied in the Bible -when all mankind would be judged and the 'saved' would enter eternal paradise -could only come to pass once the city of Jerusalem was once again in Christian hands. The First Crusade was thus viewed by some as a crucial step towards the realisation of Christian destiny.

  Urban did, however, have one major problem at Clermont. No recent, overwhelming calamity or crime stood out to act as the igniting spark of his holy conflagration. To ensure that his sermon prompted a fevered response, the pope worked hard to lend his appeal some sense of burning urgency. A heated theological schism had for decades divided Rome and Constantinople, but Urban nonetheless emphasised the shared Christian heritage that united East and West, suggesting that Latin Christendom had a fraternal obligation to act. According to one account, Urban urged his audience 'to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore'; in another he is reported as encouraging them to think of eastern Christians as your blood brothers, your comrades-in-arms, those born of the same womb as you, for you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church'. He also capitalised upon the immediate devotional resonance of Jerusalem, describing the Holy City as 'the navel of the world', the birthplace of all Christian faith and scene of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. Urban hoped that the image of a captive Jerusalem would be so distressing as to prompt an immediate reaction, and he is recorded exhorting his listeners to 'be especially moved by the [fate of the] Holy Sepulchre of Our Lord and Saviour, which is in the hands of unclean races'. The pope may have also played on the theme, previously used by Gregory VII, of the 'kingdom of God', representing the Holy Land as Christ's 'realm' or 'patrimony' and reminding Latin Christians of their obligation to defend their lord's territory.32

  The pope promoted the crusade as a distinct form of warfare, set apart from the grubby contamination of the inter-Christian struggles afflicting the West. According to one account, he proclaimed:

  Let those who in the past have been accustomed to spread private war so vilely among the faithful advance against the inf
idels ... Let those who were formerly brigands now become soldiers of Christ; those who once waged war against their brothers and blood-relatives fight lawfully against barbarians; those who until now have been mercenaries for a few coins achieve eternal rewards.33

  This approach was an offshoot of the Augustinian principle of 'right intention', requiring a Just War to be fought with restraint and control. Urban suggested that 'normal' violence was both illegal and corrupting, that only a war fought under regulated conditions could be considered licit or sanctified. But he proclaimed that in this campaign the regulating factor would be not the degree of brutality, but rather the 'alien' status of its target Earlier in the eleventh century, the papacy had encouraged lay society to adhere to the Peace and Truce of God movements, codes of practice which sought to limit the places and times at which violence might be inflicted. The underlying assumption of these conventions was that not all violence was equal in the eyes of God. For the Peace and Truce, the distinction lay in degrees of sinfulness: violence carried out on a holy day or against a cleric was worse than an attack upon a layman during the week. Pope Urban twisted and extended this idea, declaring that the crusade would be a distinct class of warfare, prosecuted under a particular set of controlled conditions. In this instance, however, the 'controlling' feature that established a 'right intention' had nothing to do with degrees of violence or the tempered prosecution of warfare. Instead, it was entirely dependent upon the 'alien' nature of the enemy to be confronted. The expedition would be 'just' because it was directed against 'inhuman' Muslims, not because it was executed with moderation. This may, to some extent, help to explain why the First Crusaders proved capable of such extreme brutality.34

  A new form of holy war

  Perhaps the most significant feature of Pope Urban's sermon at Clermont was the formula of sanctified violence he associated with the proposed campaign. His predecessors, like Gregory VII, had experimented with the concept of holy war, seeking to promote the idea that military service in the name of God might bring participants a spiritual reward. But, more often than not, their calls to arms had attracted only a limited response. In one sense, Urban followed their lead: he promised that Latins who fought to protect their eastern brethren and recapture Jerusalem would enjoy a remission of sin, that is a cleansing of the soul. But he took a crucial further step, refining the ideological framework of sanctified violence to produce a new model of sacred warfare that, for the first time, truly resonated with the needs and expectations of medieval Europe. It was this new recipe for salvation that produced such an electric reaction among his audience.

  Urban performed a relatively simple feat. He repackaged the concept of sanctified violence in a devotional format that was more comprehensible and palatable to lay society. Earlier popes may have argued that holy war could purify the soul, but Latin arms-bearers seem to have harboured nagging doubts about the efficacy of this notion. Urban sold the idea in terms that were familiar, convincing and attractive.

  Western Christians were programmed to think of themselves as being critically contaminated by sin and conditioned to pursue a desperate struggle for purification through the outlets of confession and penance. Among the most recognised and fashionable of penitential activities in the eleventh century was the practice of pilgrimage. These devotional journeys to sites of religious significance were specifically designed to be gruelling, potentially dangerous affairs, and thus capable of purging the soul. Urban's sermon at Clermont interwove the theme of holy war with that of pilgrimage to produce a distinct, new class of sanctified violence: a crusade. In this sacred expedition, the purificational properties of fighting for Christ were married to the penitential rigours of the pilgrim's journey, creating ideal conditions for the cleansing of sin. In this First Crusade, Urban's target audience, the Frankish knights of western Europe, would be able simultaneously to pursue two of their favourite pastimes -warfare and pilgrimage - in a devotional activity that seemed to them a natural extension of current Christian practice. This crusade promised to engender an unquestionably purgative atmosphere within which the intense burden of transgression and guilt might be relieved. The allure of this armed pilgrimage was all the more intense because its ultimate target was the premier devotional destination in Christian cosmology, the most revered physical space on earth: the Holy City of Jerusalem.

  Jerusalem has a singular devotional resonance for three of the world's great religions, being the third city of Islam and the centre of the Christian and Judaic faiths. By the end of the eleventh century, it was popular in the Latin West to conceive of the city and its surroundings as a physical relic of Christ's life. Pope Urban was fully conscious of the almost irresistible appeal of the Holy City, and he took pains to underline its significance during his sermon. According to one account, he proclaimed that since 'we derive the whole of our Christian teaching from the fountain of Jerusalem' and because 'the [Holy] Land itself and the city in which Christ lived and suffered are known to be holy on the evidence of scripture', all Christian knights should feel impelled to answer his call to arms:

  You, dearest brothers, must take the greatest pains to try to ensure that the holiness of that city and the glory of his Sepulchre will be cleansed... You, Christian soldiers, may justly defend the freedom of the fatherland by the exercise of arms. [And] if you believe that you ought to take great pains to make a pilgrimage to the graves of the apostles [in Rome] or to the shrines of any other saints, what expense of spirit can you refuse in order to rescue, and make a pilgrimage to, the Cross, the Blood, the Sepulchre?35

  The spiritual rewards offered by Urban for making this armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem were immensely attractive, but not theologically audacious. Later, unsanctioned preachers did extend and simplify Urban's message, but the pope himself never suggested that joining the crusade would 'magically' guarantee all participants a place in heaven. To a modern observer, the very idea of fighting to purify one's soul might seem absurd and irrational, but Urban's vision of the crusade indulgence was firmly grounded in medieval reality. He conceived of the purificational properties of the crusade in terms that mirrored current devotional practice, incorporating existing language and ritual to produce a system that, in eleventh-century terms, offered a clear and rational pathway towards salvation.

  Having modelled the crusade as an armed pilgrimage, Urban expressed the spiritual benefits of the campaign in penitential terms. Before 1095, under typical circumstances, a Latin knight concerned for the purity of his soul and fearful of the fires of hell would confess his sins to a cleric, receive an appropriate penance (such as fasting or a pilgrimage) and, upon completion of this punishment', be absolved. The expedition preached at Clermont represented a new form of'super' penance: a venture so arduous, so utterly terrifying, as to be capable of cancelling out any sin. Participants would still have to confess their transgressions to a member of the clergy, but the crusade would replace any necessary penance. Answering Urban's call to arms, therefore, offered the arms-bearers of Europe a powerful new penitential option, but one that was cloaked in the apparatus of accepted custom. For the first time, fighting in the name of God and the pope brought with it a spiritual reward that was at once readily conceivable and deeply compelling: a real chance to walk through the fires of battle and emerge unsullied by sin.36

  2

  AFIRE WITH CRUSADING FEVER

  At first glance, it might appear that Pope Urban s sermon at Clermont had an almost miraculous impact, that his words fell like fiery sparks upon bone-dry tinder, instantaneously igniting the imagination and enthusiasm of Latin Christendom to produce an extraordinary, unprecedented, perhaps even inexplicable, response.

  In the twelve months following the council of Clermont, somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 men, women and children, drawn from across the face of western Europe, answered the pope s rallying cry. This was, of course, not a full mobilisation of all Latin manpower. To be sure, more people stayed at home than took the cross. But it was, nonet
heless, a gathering of human force and resources on a scale unparalleled in this age. Contemporary observers from within Europe and without gazed in wonder, sure in the knowledge that they were witnessing an event unique in living memory. Struggling to find an explanation for this phenomenon, they looked to the hand of God, or even the Devil. In the last century, historians have been driven to devote more analytical energy to rationalising this explosion of crusading fever than to almost any other feature of the expedition. They have grappled with a series of complex but crucial questions. What emotions and impulses inspired such a mass of Latin humanity to set out on crusade? How and why did the call to aid the eastern Churches and free Jerusalem spread across Europe with such power and rapidity? Did Pope Urban II actually appreciate the sheer elemental dynamism of the message he unleashed at Clermont?1

  The answers to all these queries are, at best, circumspect and approximate. Just as we can do nothing more than estimate the number of thousands who responded to the crusading ideal, so too, with the surviving evidence, we can gain only a limited insight into their motivation and intent In any case, it would be a gross oversimplification to suggest that such a host of individuals might be driven by a single set of beliefs and desires. Likewise, the precise details of the mechanisms of crusade dissemination and recruitment, and the full range of Urban's expectations, must remain in the shadowy half-light between theory and demonstrable reality. This is not to suggest that these lines of enquiry are without value — just the opposite. Even the partial traces of evidence and explanation are profoundly revelatory. Observing the impact of the crusading ideal is akin to tracing the spread of a virulent disease within a living organism. The dispersal and effect of an illness may disclose a great deal about the nature of the afflicted host Similarly, even limited success in charting the response to Urban s preaching can furnish significant insights into the nature of eleventh-century society. It can, perhaps, even offer a brief glimpse into the essence of the medieval mentality. Exploring the motives and intentions of the First Crusaders as they took the cross may also help to explain their reactions to the appalling trials and remarkable triumphs of the next four years.