God's War: A New History of the Crusades (4 page)

This was much more than a theological spat. The power of the German kings relied heavily on control of the church, especially in Saxony. A revolt there in 1076 gave the most belligerent of the reforming popes, Gregory VII, an opportunity to put pressure on Henry IV to make concessions by publicly challenging his right to rule, claiming the pope possessed a plenitude of power that included the right to depose unsuitable monarchs, including emperors. The intransigent Henry IV was excommunicated in 1076 and again in 1080. Rival kings were put up by the papalist and anti-imperialist party in Germany. The ensuing war spilt over into Italy. In 1084 Henry IV invaded, captured Rome, installed his own anti-pope and forced Gregory VII to find refuge with the Norman conquerors of southern Italy. Over the subsequent decade, Henry’s anti-pope held sway in Rome, supported by repeated imperial forays south of the Alps. The background to the First Crusade lay in this conflict, as Urban II sought to use the mobilization of the expedition as a cover to reclaim the pope’s position in Italy and demonstrate his practical leadership of Christendom, independent of secular monarchs. The slogan of the papal reformers was ‘libertas ecclesiae’, ‘church freedom/liberty/rights’. This provided the central appeal of Urban II’s summons of 1095, when he called on the faithful to go to ‘liberate’ the churches of the east and Jerusalem. The crusade is impossible to understand outside of this context of more general church and papal reform. It was ironic that, at the very time they were asserting universalist claims, the reforming popes could never be entirely secure in Rome itself. Local nobles, deprived of control of the lucrative office of the papacy, German and pro-imperialist invaders and other Italian political rivals
forced successive popes into temporary or near-permanent exile over the century following Gregory VII’s exile. It was only after he had launched the First Crusade in 1095–6 that Urban II was himself able to establish his residence in the Eternal City.

The Investiture Contest, only resolved by compromise in 1122, exposed some of the weaknesses in the material and ideological positions of both papacy and empire, as well as highlighting the limitations of centralized political authority more generally. The papacy was, with the English government of the time, one of the leaders in western Europe pioneering the development of written techniques of government – communicating with local agents, subordinates and representatives abroad by standardized letters; systematic, retrievable record keeping; the creation of a bureaucratic tradition. Yet, as was later famously remarked, the pope lacked legions, having to rely on secular protectors to secure papal independence and integrity. By contrast, the German emperor was politically the most powerful ruler in western Europe, wielding vast theoretical and potential power over territories that stretched from southern Denmark to central Italy. Yet these lands, based on the eastern portion of the old Carolingian empire (known from the ninth century as East Francia), were held together by networks of dynastic alliance, personal relations, tradition, ideology, convenience and brute force, not institutional routine. This made the building of political consensus, the basis to all effective authority, a full-time and precarious exercise for German rulers in the eleventh century. Since 962, the king of Germany could hope to be crowned by the pope as Roman emperor. Despite the Investiture Contest and continued tension thereafter, most kings succeeded in persuading popes to perform this highly symbolic and important ceremony. However, some did not. King Conrad III of Germany, commander of the Second Crusade (1145–9), was one of the few medieval German kings after Otto I not to be crowned emperor, although he nonetheless exercised many of the imperial prerogatives and gave himself some of the formal titles of an emperor. The lack of imperial title reduced a German king’s claims to jurisdiction in North Italy, one of the wealthiest regions of western Europe, which formed a significant and lasting element in imperial pretensions. However, Conrad’s power, like that of his predecessors, depended on his position in Germany.

Politically, Germany in the eleventh and twelfth centuries comprised a number of disparate regions each dominated by its own duke and
closely integrated nobilities: Bavaria, Swabia, Franconia, Saxony, Lorraine. Eastward expansion, although temporarily halted in the north by a great Slav rebellion in 983 against German rule east of the Elbe, had created marcher lordships such as in Austria, Styria and Meissen, giving local entrepreneurial margraves considerable autonomy. The power of the king depended on his own personal dynastic lands – Otto I had been duke of Saxony – coupled with a range of imperial lands, cities and rights, and alliance with the church, the only truly imperial institution (hence the threat presented by the Investiture dispute). Although tending to descend within one family – the Saxons 911–1024; Salians 1024–1125; Hohenstaufen 1138–1254 – the German kingship was elective, a right the electors, composed of the leading dukes and ecclesiastical magnates such as the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz, stubbornly maintained. While the elective element in other kingdoms, such as England, France or the Christian states of northern Iberia, withered, repeated dynastic interruptions, through either lack of direct heirs (1002, 1024, 1125, 1138, 1152) or the succession of minors (1056, 1197), entrenched an active elective principle in Germany. Nonetheless, the German kings were – and were recognized by their neighbours as being – not just sentimentally the secular heads of western Christendom by virtue of the imperial title, but practically the leading secular rulers in western Christendom.

Not the least symptom and cause of this predominance lay in the role of German rulers in the expansion of Christianity to the Slavic kingdoms of eastern Europe. It says much for the damage inflicted on German monarchic power that, whereas in the tenth and eleventh centuries the initiative in reeling the new kingdoms and principalities of Poland, Bohemia and Hungary into the orbit of western Christendom had come from the German kings, from the mid-twelfth century it was left to local east German dukes and lords, aided by the ideology of holy war and their recruiting of crusaders and immigrants, who pushed the frontiers of Latin Christendom into Prussia and the north-eastern Baltic. Although many of the earliest Christian missionaries to the western Slavs, especially in Bohemia and Moravia, and to the Magyars in Hungary in the decades around 900 were Greek Orthodox, the creation of the new western empire by Otto I, not least through his defeats of Magyar invaders, opened the region to western Latin evangelists as local rulers sought to associate themselves with the new German
power. The adoption of Christianity provided a cohesive force in the establishment of settled political identities and institutions, the church providing education, literacy, civil servants, a potentially pliant and dependent new landowning ecclesiastical aristocracy of bishops and abbots, a supportive ideology of transcendent kingship and convenient national saints, such as King Wenceslas in Bohemia (d.
c.
929) and Stephen in Hungary (king 1000–1038). Poland had adopted Latin Christianity in 966 as part of the attempts of Miesco I to expand into Pomerania as a client of Otto I, a strategy giving him, he reckoned, a better chance of making good his conquests and his desire to dominate the western Slavs. A sign of Polish determination to enter the Latin world came when, in 991, Miesco placed the kingdom under formal papal protection. Hungary’s position was far more liminal, sharing a long frontier with Byzantium as well as Germany. However, here too rulers consistently sought to place themselves within a German/Latin Christian orbit politically and hence culturally rather than become a client of the Greek empire. The Hungarian desire to maintain this western bias informed their consistently sympathetic and later active engagement with the crusades that passed through their lands in 1096, 1146 and 1189. In some senses the crusades confirmed the drift of Hungarian policy since the tenth century.

The only competitor for influence in the vast tracts of Slavic/Magyar lands between the Elbe, Baltic, Danube and the Black Sea remained the Greek empire of east Rome, Byzantium, with its capital of Constantinople on the Bosporus, between Europe and Asia. Both Moravia and Hungary had initially seemed likely to fall into the Greek orbit in the early tenth century before the rise of Ottonian Germany proved more attractive. Even in the eleventh century, Constantine IX (1042–55) sent the Hungarian ruler a crown, although Hungary steadfastly attempted to protect its autonomy though close ties with the German empire (St Stephen had married the sister of Emperor Henry II (1002–24)). More securely, Greek influence and the desire of the local ruler to consolidate his status by a Byzantine alliance led to the conversion of Prince Vladimir of Kiev (988/9) whose confederation of the Rus incorporated the main trading centres on the Dneiper with the original northern capital of the Rus at Novgorod. However, even the Russians gradually emancipated themselves from Greek dominance. Alliances were sought in the west; Henry I of France (1031–60) married a Russian princess, with their son,
Philip I, introducing a Greek first name that became popular in the French royal family down to the nineteenth century. In the 1040s the Russians even attacked Byzantium, and there were generally unavailing attempts to loosen the grip of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate over the Russian church. The ability to manipulate peoples around its frontiers played a crucial role in Byzantine foreign policy and survival. East of the Russians, the nomadic and Turkish tribes such as the Khazars, Pechenegs and Cumans of the southern Eurasian steppes north of the Black Sea presented a greater and more intractable threat, as did the Turkish tribes that penetrated the Near East in the mid-eleventh century.

By the early eleventh century, the Byzantine empire stretched from the Danube and Adriatic, with some outposts still retained on the mainland of Italy (at Bari, for instance), to the Taurus and Anti-Taurus mountains of eastern Anatolia and a few strongholds in northern Syria, such as Antioch. Seemingly dominant, culturally, commercially and politically, in fact the empire had only recently reasserted its position in northern Syria and the northern Balkans, where the previously independent Bulgarian state had been painfully annexed by Emperor Basil II, ‘the Bulgar Slayer’ (976–1025), and Serbian separatist tendencies neutralized. This hegemony did not last long. In the mid-1050s, Turkish tribes led by the Seljuk family had invaded the Near East, becoming the effective rulers in Baghdad. In 1071, the Seljuks invaded Anatolia, defeating and capturing the Byzantine emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, at the battle of Manzikert. With their frontier defences breached, the Byzantines soon lost the interior of Anatolia, the Seljuks even establishing their Anatolian capital at Nicaea, within striking distance of Constantinople itself. Behind the Seljuk conquest of Anatolia other Turkish tribes took advantage of the political chaos to exploit the towns and settled agrarian economy of the region. The chief of these groups were the Danishmends, who established a so-called
ghazi
(i.e. holy warrior) state to the north-east of the peninsula. At much the same time, other nomadic and semi-nomadic tribes penetrated Byzantium’s Balkan frontiers. Twenty years earlier, the Greeks had to accept the settlement of the Pechenegs south of the Danube in north-eastern Bulgaria, while another steppe people, the Cumans, established themselves just to the north of the Balkan frontier. Across the Adriatic, the final Byzantine holdings were snuffed out by the new power in the region, Norman adventurers led by Robert Guiscard. Bari, the last stronghold, fell in
1071. Guiscard followed up his victory by invading the Balkans. Only with the accession of the military usurper Alexius I Comnenus was the Norman threat repulsed at Durazzo (now Durres on the Adriatic coast of Albania) in 1085 and the Pechenegs finally defeated, at Mount Levounion (at the mouth of the Maritsa in southern Thrace near the modern Turco–Greek border) in 1091. Apart from the Italian possessions, only the losses to the Seljuks in Anatolia and northern Syria remained to be restored. That is where, in the eyes and strategy of Alexius I, the appeal to the west he made in 1095 and the First Crusade came in.

The shifting fortunes of Byzantium in the eleventh century were mirrored by the disorder in the Islamic Near East following the Seljuk invasions of the 1050s. After seizing control of the Baghdad caliphate in 1055, their leader receiving the apt title of ‘sultan’ (
sultan
is Arabic for power), the Seljuk Turks pressed westwards. After defeating the Greeks in 1071, they annexed most of Syria and Palestine by 1079. However, despite the appearance of unity, the Seljuks presided over a loose, often fractious confederation of regional powers, such as the more or less independent sultanate of Rum, i.e. Anatolia, and city states, such as Mosul, Aleppo, Antioch (taken in 1084/5), Damascus and Jerusalem. These old Arab cities, while often owing allegiance to one or other of a series of competing Seljuk lords, were often controlled by Turkish military commanders (atabegs) whose authority rested as much in their personal mercenary bands, often of slave troops (mamluks), as on higher Seljuk approval. Everywhere, ethnic and religious diversity complemented the alienation of ruled – whether town-dwellers, rural cultivators or Bedouin or steppe nomads – from ruler. In parts of Syria, immigrant Turkish Sunnis ruled indigenous Shia populations or exerted control over local Arab nobles. In Cilicia and northern Syria, significant religiously and ethnically distinct Armenian communities were squeezed between the competing powers of Byzantium, Arabs and Turks. Across this area and in the Jazira (modern northern Iraq) the political uncertainties offered opportunities for Kurdish as well as other Turkish incomers. Similar dislocation characterized the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, which contested with the Seljuks ascendancy over southern Palestine. In Egypt, the Shia rulers dominated the majority Sunni inhabitants through powerful chief ministers, called viziers, who were often neither Egyptian nor Arab, but Turks or Armenians. The Near East
presented no harmonious spectacle of civilized peace. The Turkish invasions from the 1050s destabilized the region, introducing an alien ruling elite backed by military coercion, causing as much if not more mayhem and disruption than the crusaders were able to achieve.