God's War: A New History of the Crusades (41 page)

SPREADING THE WORD

Awareness of the First Crusade pervaded elite western culture. When, around 1143 in the midst of the backsliding and compromises of the English civil war, the Anglo-Norman baron Brian FitzCount wished to expose the mendacity of the turncoat bishop of Winchester, he naturally chose a familiar reference, the golden memory of the loyalty of the
boni milites
of the First Crusade.
³
A monk from the Cambrésis on the northern Franco-Flemish frontier, writing
c.
1133, refrained from a detailed account of the Jerusalem expedition, arguing that the events were better described in books, songs and hymns, a regrettable forbearance as he claimed to have attended the Council of Clermont four decades earlier.
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There was no need for either baron or monk to elaborate; the story was well known. The scale and rapid production of histories of the First Crusade by eyewitnesses and others eager to interpret the startling events didactically finds no parallel in medieval historiography. Within a dozen years of Jerusalem’s capture, at least four full eyewitness accounts, three major western histories and part of the great Lorraine version by Albert of Aachen were being circulated along with a bevy of other accounts, more or less derivative, imaginative or polemic. While originating in monasteries and cathedrals, these texts reflected and excited secular interests, for example in local heroes or national pride. Most of the histories sculpted stirring tales of faith, bravery, suffering, danger, tenacity and triumph. The theologians distilled the message of God’s immanence and Christian duty; the no less artful eyewitnesses provided accessible tales of miracles and butchery. One of the very earliest, the
Gesta Francorum
, included elaborate scenes with stereotype exotic Orientals declaiming extravagant, bombastic nonsense much in the style
of the verse
chansons de geste
. Naturalistic representation, especially of the enemy, did not feature.
⁵

Signifying this artificiality, accurate knowledge of Islam and the Prophet remained almost non-existent in western Europe until the translation of the Koran in the 1140s by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable. Despite a quickening of interest after 1099, accounts of Muhammed relied on translated Byzantine polemic or mangled accounts derived from Spain or returning Holy Land pilgrims. Around 1110, Guibert of Nogent’s life of the Prophet in his
Gesta Dei Per Francos
and that by Embrico of Mainz both provided Muhammed with a pet cow, presumably derived from a garbled false memory of the
Sura
of the Koran known as ‘The Cow’. Most discussion of Muslims failed to rise beyond the racist ignorance and abuse of the epics and romances, a tradition in which the
Gesta Francorum
, one of the most popular and copied sources, rested comfortably.

Such texts, while sketching an increasingly fixed canon of adventure stories, fed the language of preaching, as with the invented versions of Urban II’s Clermont address (i.e. all of them). A more or less distinctive, although never prescriptive or uniform, corpus of scriptural references and paraphrases became employed by popes and later propagandists and chroniclers of Jerusalem campaigns. In this narrow vocabulary of holy war a defined set of intellectual and religious attitudes and theories emerged at the precedent-obsessed papal Curia and among the propagandists and apologists of the Second Crusade (1146–8) but, until the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 once more made the story immediately relevant, not elsewhere beyond the cloister or the study. Twelfth-century circulation of even the most prominent histories of the First Crusade may have been limited, including the most ‘popular’, the
Historia
of Robert of Rheims. Surviving in at least thirty-nine twelfth-century manuscripts, only during the Third Crusade (1188–92) did it clearly assume the character of an exemplar. In a famous drawing of Frederick I Barbarossa of Germany, dressed as a
crucesignatus
, a copy of Robert’s
Historia
is being presented by the provost of Schäftlarn. At about the same time the Cistercian monk Gunther of Pairis, near Basel, later one of the few western chroniclers of the Fourth Crusade (1202–4), rendered Robert’s work into verse. Descriptions of the First Crusade and similar later expeditions may have encouraged the application of the language of the Jerusalem holy war, much of it conventional biblical rhetoric, to other
conflicts, forming a specialized literary genre. This hardly constituted a demotic movement.
⁶

More accessible to the partially literate communities of the twelfth century stood oral transmission of ideas, stories and news: sermons, the liturgy, living witness and the Cambrésis monk’s songs,
cantica
and
carmina
,
chansons de geste
, hymns or liturgical chants. Sermons – actual, invented or remembered – sparked ideas and aspirations: the early invented accounts of Urban’s Clermont speech; descriptions of addresses made in 1106 on behalf of Bohemund’s eastern enterprise or in 1103 by the archbishop of Würzburg concerning a plan of Henry IV to visit Jerusalem; or a recruiting circular composed at Magdeburg in 1108 to encourage support for expansion into the lands of the Slavs beyond the Elbe. It was remembered that Bohemund began his sermon in Chartres cathedral to rouse enthusiasm for a holy war against Byzantium in 1106 by relating ‘all his deeds and adventures’, prominently, no doubt, his leadership to Antioch in 1098.
⁷
Such public performances, alive in the collective memory of historians a generation later, helped secure a crusade narrative in the minds of listeners. To reinforce his message, Bohemund may have distributed, in addition to relics, doctored copies of the
Gesta Francorum
which demonized the Greeks while praising him.

Information was conveyed by oral testimony. Chroniclers of the First Crusade relied on the reminiscences of returning veterans. Guibert of Nogent picked the memory of his acquaintance Robert of Flanders; Albert of Aachen’s history depended on the testimony of returning members of Godfrey of Bouillon’s contingent. The most effective medium of popular memory remained verse. Although the great verse epics, such as the
Chanson d’Antioche
, found a form stable enough to be written down only later in the century, verses for singing or recitation, perhaps with musical accompaniment, were compiled much earlier. These contain little if any historical as opposed to literary value, but they provided vivid stories. Thus, in his own lifetime, Duke Robert II of Normandy (d. 1134) was confronted with wholly fictitious tales that he had killed Kerbogha at Antioch and had been offered the crown of Jerusalem, legends that the Anglo-Norman poet Gaimar had incorporated into his vernacular
Estoire des Engleis
by the 1140s.
⁸
Such adventure stories fashioned the image of the First Crusade and conditioned responses to further appeals to holy war. The power of songs and verses
operated on a number of levels, from taproom to court, causing disquiet even in the powerful. In 1124, Henry I of England blinded a rebel, Luke of La Barre, because of his effective slanderous songs.
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In mid-century, Gerhoh of Reichersberg credited the medium with producing a creeping puritanism: ‘The praise of God is also spreading in the mouth of laymen who fight for Christ, because there is nobody in the whole Christian realm who dares to sing dirty songs in public.’
¹⁰

Gerhoh pointed to the close connections of the warlike laity and their families with religious houses, reflecting the interwoven social context for the varied channels of reminiscence, sermon, encyclical, chronicle and song as well as the physical context of visual reinforcement to the ideology of holy war in sculpture, painting and stained glass, of which only the ecclesiastical survives. In parish churches throughout western Europe, holy knights combated evil and qualified for salvation; in a fresco of the Apocalypse on the roof of the crypt of Auxerre cathedral Christ Himself appears as a mounted military hero. The work was commissioned by Bishop Humbaud (1095–1114), a protégé of Urban II who assisted at the Synod of Anse in 1100, which called on
crucesignati
to fulfil their vows, and who died a Jerusalem pilgrim.
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Pilgrimage as much as holy war lay behind representations of the Holy Sepulchre itself, in manuscript illuminations, pictorial decorations, ecclesiastical carving or, as at Eichstätt Bavaria, in the form of a full-scale physical copy.
¹²

Not all media of communication told a story. Liturgical chants, hymns and songs encapsulated moods, ideas and admonition, not narrative, as in the very early twelfth-century
Jerusalem Mirabilis
: ‘There we must go, selling our estates to purchase the temple of God and destroy the Saracens’.
¹³
More subtly, increased contemporary elaboration of the mass focused attention on Christ and the cross, their transferred vocabulary and imagery helping define the mentality on which crusading depended. To work as a focus for action, diffuse verbal and visual references depended on knowledge of the Jerusalem campaign and the motifs of holy war or pilgrimage it encouraged. The elevation of the deeds of the Jerusalemites, as they were often described, to legendary status marched in step with the programme of the post-Gregorian church and the cultural assertiveness of the
ordo pugnatorum
, the warrior class. In the overt and, after 1099, increasingly uncontested alliance between the two lay much of the significance of the events of the First Crusade for later generations.

RECEPTION AND RESPONSE

The success of the Jerusalem campaign silenced critics of the Gregorian promotion of penitential warfare, encouraging the papacy’s branding of its enemies as fit targets for holy war. In 1103–4, Paschal II, in full Gregorian mode, offered unspecified remission of sins to Robert of Flanders and his knights in return for their deeds of ‘just knighthood’ against papal opponents in Cambrai as well as to southern German supporters against the emperor. Papal adherents in Italy were similarly encouraged: in 1135 the remission of sins granted at the Council of Pisa to those who fought against the anti-pope and the king of Sicily was explicitly equated with that decreed by Urban II at Clermont.
¹⁴
Such an association became regarded as the most potent sign of holiness, justice and honour. Elsewhere, the popularity of penitential war proved useful in essentially secular conflicts. Repeatedly after 1100 the higher clergy of northern France invoked the language of holy war and grants of remission of sins for those engaged in policing the lawlessness of the region, even where the alleged malefactor, such as Thomas of Marle, attacked in 1115, was a crusade veteran destined to epic immortality in the
Chanson d’Antioche
.
¹⁵
The distinction between brutal violence and valiant heroism lay in the eye of the beholder. For the clerics authorizing such campaigns they provided active demonstrations of the church’s direction of the laity for which the First Crusade provided the most striking model.

Acceptance of the values legitimized by the Jerusalem expedition lay in reactions to the returning veterans, fêted on their homecomings laden with relics and other souvenirs from the east. One was reputed to have brought back a lion as a memento.
¹⁶
Most were content with the palm leaves that marked their status as Jerusalemites. The aura of distinction clung to many for the rest of their lives. Some retired to monasteries; others continued their pious careers by endowing religious houses or donating relics. Careers were advanced by exploiting contacts made on campaign. Most, perhaps, picked up the threads of their lives as best they could, returning, in externals at least, to the lives they had left behind. Count Robert of Flanders’s crusade exploits earned admiration in chronicles and charters, his death by trampling in a skirmish in 1111 lamented as a sad fate for a ‘bellicosus Jerosolimitae’.
¹⁷
Reputation could
produce tangible benefits. King Henry I explained to Pope Calixtus II in 1119 that he had afforded his captive brother Duke Robert of Normandy good treatment because of his crusader status: ‘I have not kept him in irons like a captured enemy but have lodged him as a noble pilgrim in a royal castle’.
¹⁸
Whether the hero of Antioch and Jerusalem appreciated such fraternal generosity over the twenty-eight years spent in his brother’s prisons must be debatable.

Other veterans returned to their former lives largely unmarked. Thomas of Marle’s career of rapine, if less lurid than his political opponents and their tame clerical apologists portrayed it, exposed the myth that service in the papal holy war engineered a form of spiritual conversion. As numerous commentators observed, the qualities that produced mayhem in Europe had not been suppressed, merely channelled in a good cause. Thomas of Marle’s aggression had proved very useful in the desperate battles in the east. Not all crusaders attracted unrealistic sentimentality; Everard III of Le Puiset, viscount of Chartres, was accused by Abbot Suger of St Denis a generation later of having undertaken the Jerusalem journey out of pride, his evil reputation for violence in the Ile de France being in no way mitigated by the gesture. The centrality of the martial ethos in popularizing the Jerusalem expedition left some participants happy to pursue former habits. Resort to arms was forced on some: Hugh of Chaumont, lord of Amboise, faced with the loss of his inheritance, acted vigorously and violently; yet he returned east with Count Fulk of Anjou in 1128. Belligerent resolution to disputes still came naturally. Only a few years after his return, Raimbold Croton, a hero at Antioch and Jerusalem, where he lost a hand, had a monk castrated over some stolen hay. Despite a fourteen-year penance forbidding him to bear arms, effectively suspending his social status, Raimbold appealed successfully to Pope Paschal II on account of his bravery at Jerusalem, although he soon died in one of the interminable petty wars in the Ile de France.
¹⁹