A History of the Crusades (11 page)

A movement that diversified and intensified to become such a multi-faceted and complex phenomenon as the crusade could not have failed to have had momentous repercussions at the time. Indeed, the effects of the crusading movement were almost limitless; few aspects of the contemporary western world, leaving aside its immediate neighbours, were not affected and influenced in some way, directly or indirectly. On the stage of world history, crusading played a major role in redrawing the political and cultural map, since it deeply conditioned the process of expansion of Latin Christendom, contributing to the emergence of new Latin states in north-eastern Europe, the Iberian peninsula, and of course the East, although some of these states proved to be only temporary. Within the West, its various applications also helped to shape, even determine decisively, some political developments, most notably the victory of the papacy against the Hohenstaufen emperors who threatened to overthrow it. The fate of the various parts of their empire became one of the major issues of international politics in the later thirteenth century and far beyond. Again, although the Albigensian Crusade did not destroy the Cathar heresy—it was too blunt an instrument—it drastically affected the politics and culture of southern France, the main beneficiary being the French crown. For the first time, as a direct result of the crusade, French royal power was extended meaningfully into Languedoc and to the Mediterranean. And through its very declaration of crusades, the papacy sought to give reality to its claims to direct the affairs of Christendom in this period, the vision coming closest to realization under Innocent III.

On another level, crusading was important in helping to change westerners’ views of themselves, accelerating the process
whereby they came to appreciate that they possessed a common identity rooted in a shared cultural tradition, despite their local difficulties. And since the distinctive and unifying characteristic was the shared Latin Christian culture, the vast chasm which opened up between westerners and non-westerners was fundamentally religious in conception. In this sense, as total ideological war, the crusades dramatically increased the xenophobic streak within western culture, hitherto relatively dormant, and heightened the exclusive world view in which Latin Christian cultural superiority was taken for granted. One related consequence was a drastic change in Christian–Jew relations within the West, the pogroms of 1096 testifying to a new, persecuting attitude that soon established itself at the heart of western culture. Another perceptual change lay in the way in which crusading, as an ideal and in practice, came to penetrate chivalric values, and thus contributed sharply to the knightly class’s perception of itself and to the cultural distance that separated those of the degree of knighthood from other social classes.

The impact of the crusade in more mundane ways can be seen everywhere, but space precludes more than a very partial listing here. From the above survey, it will be apparent that as the movement developed, so more and more westerners became touched directly by it. By the mid-thirteenth century, for example, there can have been few laymen and laywomen who did not hear at least one crusade sermon, probably more, in the course of their lives; and as the vow redemption policy was implemented and extended, so more and more of their contemporaries took the cross. Again, with the extension of crusade taxation and other fund raising expedients, fewer and fewer pockets can have remained untouched, whether those of the peasant, townsman, cleric, or whomever. And crusaders’ thirst for cash obviously presented opportunities for those wishing to extend their interests in a particular locality, for example, since the supply side of the land market was significantly eased at times of crusade. Similarly, the wealth of the Italian maritime republics was clearly enhanced by the demands of crusaders for shipping and supply, and the establishment of the Latin settlements in the East allowed them to extend their trading ventures. The need
for weapons, foodstuffs, and other necessaries also provided temporary growth in demand in crusaders’ homelands for a whole range of items, although it is impossible to know whether the economic stimulus stemming from expenditure for the crusades was outweighed by the disruption that crusading also caused to economic life.

These are but some of the more notable and obvious effects of the crusading movement in this period, but nothing directly has been said here about the impact upon the crusader himself, his family, his friends, his tenants. Yet it was at this very personal and human level that the crusading movement wrought perhaps its most powerful and poignant influence for those caught up within it at the time. As in all wars, many participants returned physically or mentally scarred, if they returned at all; their lives could never be the same again. Nor could the lives of crusaders’ wives and children, and those otherwise entwined in the crusader’s fate for one reason or another. Modern historical research is only now beginning to unearth the profundities of the crusading movement’s impact at this fundamental level.

JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

CRUSADING
attracted men and women of all classes. The involvement of the masses in the First Crusade was attributed by a contemporary to disorder, to an epidemic of ergotism which was sweeping western Europe, and to economic distress. He described what appeared to be a passage of migration, with many of the poor travelling ‘weighed down by wives, children and all their domestic goods’. Pope Urban had not wanted unsuitable men and women of this sort to join a military expedition—he had, he wrote in 1097, ‘been stimulating the minds of knights’—but precisely because he had preached the crusade as a pilgrimage, a devotional activity open to all, he and his successors found it hard to prevent the unsuitable going, even after Innocent III had found a solution in crusade redemptions. In the end, the cost of taking part proved to be more effective than official discouragement. There seem to have been substantial numbers of the poor in the armies which marched overland to the East, but once expeditions started going by sea the poor were less able to meet the expenses of the passage. Although there were always some, creating problems for the leaders as we have seen, their numbers declined, while their self-generated crusades, in which, perhaps, they responded to their exclusion from expeditions which were anyway becoming more professional—the
Children’s Crusade of 1212, the Popular Crusade of 1309, and the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320—never succeeded in breaking out of western Europe.

The masses were an important, if irregular, element and it is disappointing that hardly any evidence about the way they thought or felt survives. When we come to the more substantial crusaders, the merchants, craftsmen, and farmers, shafts of light break through at times. For instance, in December 1219 Barzella Merxadrus, a citizen of Bologna, drew up a will when he was very ill in the camp at Damietta in Egypt. He made his wife Guiletta his heir to any property or spoil that might have been apportioned to him and he tried to make sure that she could keep her place in the tent they had shared with other crusaders. But such insights are rare, and good evidence is to be found only for the feelings and perceptions of the landowning nobles and knights. The more prosperous among them were prominent enough to be mentioned frequently in the narrative accounts. They had social positions to maintain and therefore the costs of households on crusade to meet, and, since they had property to dispose of for cash, they generated charters which often contain priceless information on their states of mind.

Crusaders ‘took the cross’, which involved making a vow of a particular kind, often at emotional public gatherings under the influence of preachers whose business it was to whip their audiences up into a frenzy. It has been suggested that by the third quarter of the twelfth century the taking of the cross and the rite granting the pilgrimage symbols of purse and staff were being merged into a single ceremony. This may be so, but originally the rituals were distinct. King Louis VII of France went through two of them, separated in time and space, when he was preparing for the Second Crusade. He made his vow to crusade on 31 March 1146 at Vézelay, where a large gathering had assembled. Louis and the greater nobles took the cross at a semi-private ceremony, at which the king was given a cross sent by the pope. He joined the preacher, St Bernard of Clairvaux, for the public meeting and stood on a platform with him wearing his cross, obviously to encourage the audience. Such was the enthusiasm
with which Bernard’s sermon was greeted that the packet of cloth crosses which had been prepared for distribution was used up and Bernard had to tear his monastic habit into strips to provide more. Then, over a year later on 11 June 1147 at St Denis, Louis received from the hands of the pope the symbols of pilgrimage, the purse and the oriflamme, the battle-standard of the French crown, given presumably in place of the staff.

These procedures were paralleled everywhere in the early decades of crusading. After nobles and knights had taken the cross, they would make private arrangements to receive the purse and staff, and perhaps also the blessing which appears in the later rites, from a local bishop, abbot, or prior. This second ceremony was sometimes associated with a financial arrangement with, or a donation for, the religious community concerned. For instance, on 22 May 1096 in the chapter house of Lérins, Fulk Doon of Châteaurenard donated quite a lot of property to the abbey. He was handed a napkin (in place of the pilgrim’s purse) and a staff by the abbot, who enjoined the crusade on him as a penance and also gave him a mule. Ceremonies of this type may have continued long after the two rites had been joined together: in 1248 John of Joinville received the symbols of pilgrimage, and apparently them alone, from the abbot of Cheminon.

Introducing the cross as a visible symbol of the vow of commitment, Urban associated the taking and wearing of it in a highly-charged way with Christ’s precepts, ‘Every one that hath left house or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting’ (Matthew 19: 29) and ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16: 24 or Luke 14: 27). From Syria the crusade leaders wrote to him as ‘You who by your sermons made us all leave our lands and whatever was in them and ordered us to follow Christ by taking up our crosses’.

Some men responded hysterically, branding crosses on their bodies, but the sight of the ordinary cloth crosses must have been striking enough. An early twelfth-century sculpture from the priory of Belval in Lorraine shows a crusader wearing on his
chest a cross made from 5 cm wide strips of cloth; the cross looks as though it measured 15 by 15 cm. Contingents soon came to distinguish themselves by the style or colour of the crosses they wore—this practice seems to have been introduced in the late 1140s for the Wendish crusaders, who wore a badge of a cross superimposed on a ball—and, as we have already seen, at a planning meeting for the Third Crusade it was decided that the French participants would wear red crosses, the English white ones, and the Flemish green.

Crusaders were expected to wear their crosses on their clothing at all times until they came home with their vows fulfilled: in 1123 the bishops at the First Lateran Council referred to those ‘who had taken their crosses off’ without departing. It should, therefore, have been possible to tell who was a crusader and it was important to do so. The leaders of the First Crusade were convinced that there was a reservoir of additional manpower in the West which could be deployed if only the Church would force laggards to fulfil their vows. Demands of this sort were made throughout the history of the crusading movement and attempts were periodically made to establish just how large the reservoir of ‘false crusaders’ was. But it was a lot easier to rail against those who had had second thoughts than to make them do what they had promised.

Another reason why it was important to know who had taken the cross was that crusaders enjoyed special rights. At first there was confusion, even among the higher clergy, about at least one of the privileges granted them by the Council of Clermont, the commitment by the Church to protect their families and properties while they were away. Hugh II of Le Puiset, who had taken the cross for the crusade of 1107, felt threatened by a castle thrown up on a farm in his viscounty by Count Rotrou of Mortagne, who had, incidentally, been on the First Crusade. Hugh’s bishop, Ivo of Chartres, although one of the greatest canonists of the age, passed the matter over to a secular court. Violence ensued and Hugh appealed to the pope who reallocated the case. Ivo pointed out that churchmen could not agree what to do, because ‘this law of the Church protecting the goods of knights going to Jerusalem was new. They did not
know whether the protection applied only to the crusaders’ possessions, or also to their fortifications.’

By the thirteenth century, however, the privileges had become clearly defined, giving crusaders an advantage in law, because so many of them had legal implications. Besides the indulgence, about which more below, and protection, they included a delay in the performance of feudal service or in judicial proceedings until return, or alternatively a speedy settlement of a court case before departure; a moratorium on the repayment of debt or the payment of interest; exemption from tolls and taxes; freedom for a cleric to enjoy a benefice
in absentia
and for a knight to sell or pledge fiefs or inalienable property to raise money; release from excommunication; licence to have dealings with excommunicates and freedom from the consequences of interdict; the ability to use the crusade vow as a substitute for another not yet fulfilled; and the right to have a personal confessor with wide powers of absolution.

Crusaders obviously had a high profile. No one has yet made a study of the effects on their social standing of engaging in such a prestigious activity, but there can be little doubt that the title
Jerosolimitanus
adopted by them gained them honour in their neighbourhoods and even internationally. When Bohemond of Taranto toured France in 1106, in a triumph which culminated in his marriage to the king of France’s daughter in Chartres cathedral, many French nobles wanted him to be godfather to their children. He lectured about his adventures to large audiences and his experiences as a prisoner of the Muslims became incorporated in the
Miracula
of St Leonard, whose shrine he ostentatiously visited. Two or three generations after the First Crusade families were still proud of ancestors who had fought in it.