God's War: A New History of the Crusades (10 page)

While moral and institutional reform of the clergy had been promoted in many areas of early eleventh-century western Christendom, the annexation of the papal office by a cosmopolitan group of radicals and puritans from the mid-1040s provided reformers with the oldest, most dignified institution of church government with which to exercise authority and impose doctrinal, legal and liturgical uniformity. The challenges to the reformed papacy became those of politics and discipline as well as law and doctrine. Skilfully, if controversially, manipulating political circumstances in Italy and Germany, the reforming popes asserted not just the independence of the church,
libertas ecclesiae
, but the autonomous primacy of the see of St Peter. Trumpeting the Petrine texts in the New Testament as demonstrating how Christ gave St Peter – and therefore the pope as his heir or, more telling, vicar (i.e. representative) – rule of the church and authority in heaven and on earth (e.g. Matthew 16:18–19), the reforming popes increasingly claimed authority not just over all churches but over states and laymen as well. Ideologically and politically, this invited opposition, much of it physical. To establish and protect their ‘right order’ of Christendom, successive popes were forced or chose to fight with temporal weapons. The First Crusade was a direct result of this.

In recruiting allies or raising their own troops, later eleventh-century popes were fully aware of the theoretical implications as much as the political necessities. The moral standing of those who fought for the pope became a matter of acute concern. In 1053, Leo IX (1048–54) offered German troops who fought (unsuccessfully) under his personal command against the Norman bandit lords of southern Italy remission of penance and absolution of sins. In 1059, as a result of a major diplomatic revolution, these same Normans became papal vassals, with the obligation to fight for their new lord. Papal banners were granted the Norman invaders of Sicily (in 1060) and England (in 1066) and to Milanese street gangs, the Patarines, engaged in a violent and protracted
struggle for the eradication of clerical abuses and control of the archbishopric of the city in the 1060s and 1070s. Holy war became part of the papal programme. The Patarine conflict was called a
bellum Dei
, a war of God, the fallen Patarine leader Erlembald (d. 1075), a martyr. The key testing ground of papal reform and power was in Germany, where any loosening of the link between church and state or challenge to imperial authority was fiercely opposed by Emperor Henry IV. From the late 1070s disagreements turned to war, the so-called wars of the Investiture Contest, although the issues were far broader than whether or not kings should invest bishops with ring and staff. To fight for papal interests, the most militant of the reforming popes, Gregory VII, even attempted to recruit knights from across Europe to form a papal army, a
militia sancti Petri
, a Militia of St Peter.

Gregory VII significantly developed the theory and practice of holy war and holy warriors. Although not given to citing Augustine of Hippo himself, his loyal henchman Bishop Anselm II of Lucca, in his
Collectio canonum
(i.e. Collection of canon law) of
c.
1083, brought together the Augustinian theories of just war in one contained, intelligible and coherent place for the first time, although its circulation was limited. Gregory, one of whose favourite scriptural quotations was ‘Cursed is he who keeps back his sword from bloodshed’ (Jeremiah 48:10), preferred a moral rather than legal approach. He identified two forms of occupation for arms-bearers, one secular, selfish and sinful, the other penitential, justified by legitimate rights, loyalty to a lord, protection of the vulnerable or defence of the church. Writing in the decade after Gregory’s death, a vigorous papalist propagandist, Bishop Bonizo of Sutri, in his
Liber de Vita Christiana
, identified those who, ‘for their salvation and the common good’, fought schismatics, heretics and excommunicates and protected the poor, orphans and widows, as members of an ‘ordo pugnatorum’, an order of warriors to rank in the social hierarchy, precisely the group implied by the Militia of St Peter and to whom Urban II sought to direct his appeal in 1095.
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By the end of his stormy pontificate, Gregory VII offered all who fought for his cause, in whatever fashion, absolution of their sins and the prospect of eternal salvation. Provided their motivation was grounded on selflessness and faith not gain, such soldiers could combine penance and violence. In castigating his opponents and encouraging his followers Gregory extended his rhetoric, likening service in such a just war as an imitation of Christ’s
sufferings against ‘those who are the enemies of the cross of Christ’.
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Gregory was not merely a rhetorician or theorist. Even before becoming pope, as archdeacon of the Roman church, he had taken a keen interest in wars on behalf of the church, in Sicily, England and Milan. As pope, this continued. In 1076, he offered absolution of all sins to the knights of Count Roger of Sicily on a projected campaign against the Saracens as he did to those joining an attack on Byzantium in 1080 to restore, as Gregory mistakenly thought, the rightful emperor. Throughout the 1070s and 1080s, he tried to enlist
milites
in Italy, Germany and France to coerce clergy contumaciously clinging to unreformed practices of simony and fornication as much as he encouraged the civil conflict in Milan and, after 1080, armed resistance to Henry IV in Germany and Italy. Beyond the specific justifications of war and the function of the arms-bearer, this extension of papal approval and rhetoric lent these conflicts a sustained ideological quality Gregory deliberately fostered and publicized. Those involved were bombarded with rhetoric from all sides insisting on the principles for which they were fighting, conceived in terms of service to God. Many, like the
fidelis beati Sancti Petri
Raymond IV of Toulouse or the duke of Lower Lorraine, Godfrey of Bouillon, who fought for the emperor in Italy against the pope in the 1080s, were to answer the call to Jerusalem in 1096. The level of this propaganda war was such as to indicate that catching the imaginations of the knights themselves was no accident. Not all was conducted on the highest intellectual plane. One imperialist propagandist nicknamed Godfrey of Bouillon’s predecessor but one as duke of Lorraine, another Godfrey, but a staunch papalist, as ‘Prickfrey’ or ‘Shitfrey’.
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The ideological rhetoric of the Investiture Contest wars and the recruitment of knights to establish and protect the Peace and Truce of God depended on the susceptibility of western knights to a religiously framed ideology of war. The Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis left a sharp portrait of one such pious warlord. Hugh, count of Avranches in western Normandy and earl of Chester in north-west England, a nephew of William the Conqueror, had done very well out of the Norman conquest of England, a classic example of that eleventh-century aristocratic mobility and fluid opportunistic careerism that fuelled the First Crusade. In establishing his power on the fringes of the Anglo-Norman realm, Hugh, called by some ‘the wolf’, acquired a foul reputation; vicious, violent, addicted to gambling, a lecher and a glutton, so
fat he could hardly move, he was ‘a great lover of the world’ (not a recommendation in the eyes of the monk who used the phrase). Brave, extravagant and generous to the point of prodigality, he attracted around him a rowdy household in which many were as debauched and sybaritic as he. Yet Hugh was also a patron of monks and an old and close friend of the saintly abbot and archbishop Anselm. He employed a chaplain, Gerold, who furthered the moral instruction of his household with stories of ‘holy knights’ from the Old Testament and of Christian military heroes, including the legendary William of Orange, a saintly warrior in one of the earliest cycles of
chansons de geste
. Some in Gerold’s audience were so moved that they became monks; Hugh himself died (in 1101) in the habit of a Benedictine.
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Such figures were found across western Christendom, from Denmark to Sicily. In such a raucous atmosphere of passion, carnality, militarism and piety was nurtured the mentality of the holy warriors of 1096, among them friends and relatives of Hugh, possessed of the self-righteousness of ideological conviction to add to the heady brew of hedonism, brutality, guilt, obligation, spirituality and remorse. These were precisely the skilled soldiers Gregory VII had hoped to recruit and Urban II did.

The most dramatic and quixotic of Gregory’s military plans was that of 1074, when he announced his intention to lead in person an army to help the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, who were beleaguered by the Seljuk Turks, ‘to take up arms against the enemies of God and push forwards even to the sepulchre of the Lord under His supreme leadership’. The diplomatic context, involving a delicate and unstable triangle of Byzantium, the papacy and the Normans, was specific, in part a consequence of the Greek defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert (1071). However, the objects of the enterprise – apparently Jerusalem, the consolidation of relations with the eastern church, the demonstration of active papal leadership of the whole of Christendom, lay and ecclesiastical, east and west – as well as the rhetoric, pointed directly to the path his protégé Urban II later chose. The language was especially striking, with its persistent emphasis, not only on St Peter, as was usual in his calls to arms, but on Christ Himself:

the example of our Redeemer and the duty of brotherly love demand of us that we should set our hearts upon the deliverance of our brethren. For as He offered his life for us, so ought we to offer our lives for our brothers.

Gregory hoped he could ‘with Christ’s help carry succour to the Christians who are being slaughtered by the pagans’; preferable even to dying for one’s country, ‘it is most beautiful and glorious indeed to give our mortal bodies for Christ, who is life eternal’. He called on the faithful ‘to defend the Christian faith and serve (
militare
) the heavenly king’ thus ‘by a transitory labour you can win an eternal reward’.
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Similar Christocentric rhetoric suffused Urban II’s preaching of the First Crusade twenty years later. Before he became pope, Odo of Largery, as cardinal-bishop of Ostia from 1080, had been very close to Gregory VII, once described as his
pedisequus
, lackey or valet. Within the papal Curia in the early twelfth century, therefore among those who may have known those involved first or at most second hand, Urban II’s crusade was seen explicitly as completing Gregory’s abortive project of 1074.

Gregory’s scheme of 1074 displayed a broad sense of history. The pope placed his desire to help and be reconciled with the eastern church in the context of papal visits to Constantinople that had ceased in the early eighth century when the Carolingian Franks were adopted as the new protectors of the church in the west. The church’s legitimizing of war in the eleventh century was similarly influenced by a historical perspective. Just as Carolingian warriors gained in reputation by being seen as the champions of Christianity against pagan and infidel foes, so the perception of a turn in what had seemed an inexorable tide running against Christendom not only inspired gestures such as Gregory VII’s in 1074 and Urban II’s in 1095 but enhanced the status of those called upon to fight for the Faith. However important the just and holy war against enemies of the church in general, the highest justification for knighthood was the battle against the infidel, against Islam. The earliest vernacular French
chansons de geste
of the late eleventh and early twelfth century, which provide some insight into the mentality and idealism of the arms-bearing classes, while displaying little of the trappings of the crusade – war as penance, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, papal authorization – demonstrated the special status of war against the infidel, who stood both in practice and in literary type as the absolute antithesis to the Christian world, a dangerous alien aping of the familiar and the good. As the
Song of Roland
, the earliest surviving version of which seems to have been consolidated
c.
1100, put it in a notorious line: ‘Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit’ (Pagans are wrong and Christians are right).
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The memory of the long struggle with Islam from the seventh
century was not lost 400 years later. If anything, it had grown in symbolic as well as political significance, an exaggerated exercise in collective religious and cultural nostalgia. The context of western reactions to Islam in the eleventh century was of a period of active military confrontation on all frontiers which had been preceded by one of relative stability. The First Crusade occurred at a time of shifting fortunes along the borders of Christendom, which provided the opportunity to think of aggressive campaigns even before the request for aid from the eastern emperor in 1095.

ISLAM AND HOLY WAR

The ten years after the death of Muhammed at Mecca in 632 redrew the political and religious map of the Mediterranean and Near East. The ancient rivals of Christian Byzantium and Sassanian Persia who had fought each other almost to a standstill in a war that had lasted a generation (602–28) proved easy pickings for the Arab-led armies that swept from the Arabian peninsular to conquer the Fertile Crescent: Syria and Palestine 635–41; Persia 637–42; Egypt 640–42. In classical Muslim historiography, deliberately symbolic was the entrance into Jerusalem of the caliph (i.e. successor to the Prophet as Commander of the Faithful), Umar, in February 638. The caliph was not the field commander of operations in Palestine but, with the fall of Jerusalem imminent, he arrived to supervise proceedings. Having negotiated a peaceful surrender of the Holy City whence, Islamic tradition insisted, the Prophet had made his night journey to heaven, Umar entered the city, on a donkey or camel – the sources disagree – ostentatiously dressed in coarse, dirty robes, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the lavish parades favoured by the defeated Byzantines. The religious element in the triumph was clear to both Muslim and Christian commentators. Going to the terrace on which the Jewish Temple had stood, the supposed site of Muhammed’s celestial ascent but now reduced to a rubbish tip, Umar ordered the clearance of the site and the construction of a small mosque. Equally, in accordance with the surrender terms, the shrines, churches and synagogues of the Christians and the Jews were left untouched. This iconic moment resonated for centuries; it was entirely appropriate that the fullest contemporary history of crusading and the subsequent
western settlements in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century, by Archbishop William of Tyre, began with the Arab conquests and the failure of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to resist them.
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