Holy Warriors (4 page)

Urban and his circle considered how best to broadcast the crusade appeal. In an era before mass communications it was vital to make as big a visual impact as possible. This meant staging numerous public ceremonies: the Council of Clermont was carefully publicized with invitations sent to churchmen across France, Spain, and parts of Germany. Urban chose Clermont for its central location and the meeting attracted thirteen archbishops, eighty bishops and cardinals, and over ninety abbots. For about a fortnight the pope laid down a legislative program for the spiritual recovery of Christendom. On the penultimate day he unveiled the centerpiece of his agenda: the crusade. Urban knew that his own presence was crucial and to this end he then embarked upon a huge tour that took him hundreds of miles northward to Le Mans and Angers, down to Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Montpelier in the south.
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This was no casually arranged ramble, however; no pope had been north of the Alps for fifty years. Even in today’s Internet age the appearance of a celebrity—be it at a supermarket opening or a major political rally—attracts crowds of people eager to see or hear a famous individual for themselves. The arrival of such a powerful figure was bound to excite attention and Urban did his utmost to exploit this. Time and again, for example, at Saint-Gilles, Le Puy, Chaise-Dieu, Limoges, Tours, and Poitiers, the pope would appear on the feast day of the local saint, or else he would consecrate a new building or attend an important festival. In other words, he was careful to choose an opportunity that allowed
him to address the biggest crowd possible. The arrival of the papal entourage was a truly splendid sight; the wealth and splendor of Pope Urban and his court were dominated by this successor of Saint Peter who wore a conical white cap with a circlet of gold and gems around the base.

It was not just through his personal appearances that Urban recruited crusaders. The audience at Clermont carried the call back to their homes and, even though the response to his speech had been rapturous, the pope had little sense of the extraordinary zeal with which his words would be taken up. News of the expedition surged across Europe and saturated the Latin West with crusading fervor. The pope’s appeal to the knights of France soon spread to encompass parts of Spain and Germany as well.

One immediate, if undesired, side effect was a series of attacks against the Jews.
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The rabble-rousing sermons of a preacher named Folkmar incited audiences to turn against the non-Christians in their midst. Jewish communities had peacefully existed in western Europe for many centuries. Folkmar took Urban’s theme of alien peoples and, instead of directing Christian violence toward the Muslims, he chose to emphasize the Jews’ history as the killers of Christ and to suggest that they therefore deserved punishment. One contemporary Hebrew source wrote: “the princes and nobles and common folk in France took counsel and set plans to rise up like eagles and to battle and to clear the way for journeying to Jerusalem, the holy city, and for reaching the sepulchre of the crucified, a trampled corpse who cannot profit and who cannot save for he is worthless. They said to one another: ‘Behold we travel to a distant land to do battle with the kings of that land. We take our souls in our hands in order to kill and to subjugate all those kingdoms which do not believe in the crucified. How much more so should we kill and subjugate the Jews who killed and crucified Him.’”
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Of comparable importance was the Jews’ wealth—many people owed them money (secured by the sin of usury—the charging of interest on loans), and the crusaders needed large sums of cash to set out. In spite of enjoying the nominal protection of local bishops, in the late spring of 1096 the Jewish quarters in Cologne, Speyer-Mainz, and Worms were besieged and stormed. The army of Count Emicho of Leiningen was especially culpable. He was described as a wicked man: “our chief persecutor. He had no mercy on the elderly, on young men and young women, on infants and sucklings, nor on the ill. He made the people of the Lord like dust to be trampled. Their young men he put to the sword and their pregnant women he ripped
open.”
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The Christian chronicler Albert of Aachen suggested that there was an effort to convert the Jews—often forcibly.
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Hebrew sources echo this in reporting the crusaders’ attitude: “Let us take vengeance first upon them. Let us wipe them out as a nation; Israel’s name will be mentioned no more. Or else let them be like us and acknowledge the child born of menstruation.”
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Beyond these terrible episodes in the Rhineland, however, the attacks were limited; this was not a Europe-wide or systematic persecution of the Jews. The ecclesiastical authorities tried to calm matters; the Bible forbade the killing of Jews. The need to prevent major civil unrest was another reason to bring these events to a close; the Jews’ payment of bribes to local bishops also helped and order was duly restored.

Crusaders from the Rhineland—often known as the Peasants’ Crusade—set out for the East as early as the spring of 1096, led by the charismatic preacher Peter the Hermit. Historians have shown that this group included a number of nobles and it is no longer, as previously thought, regarded as an army made up of rustics; it has now been renamed the People’s Crusade. These adventurers reached Constantinople in August 1096 where their dismal levels of discipline horrified Alexius. The emperor took harsh measures to preserve the safety of his city while the fear and animosity generated by this group contributed much toward subsequent tensions between the crusaders and the Greeks. Alexius persuaded the Rhinelanders to cross the Bosporus into Asia Minor and then he abandoned them, providing little support in terms of guides or supplies. Within a few weeks the crusaders encountered the armies of Kilij Arslan, the Seljuk Turkish sultan of Asia Minor. In October 1096 his forces slaughtered the vast majority of the Christians, although Peter the Hermit managed to escape. As Albert of Aachen observed, it was just punishment for the crusaders’ ill-treatment of the Jews. This was scarcely an auspicious start to the First Crusade.
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While these events unfolded in the East, the main armies began to finalize their preparations. The first good harvest in years seemed to signify divine approval and across Europe people raised money for their great adventure. Many individuals have left traces of their preparations in charters—documents that detail the sale or mortgage of their lands and the acquisition of money and provisions. In subsequent centuries material of this sort becomes bland and formulaic, an efficient record of the practical details of a transaction. Back in the late eleventh century, however, such bureaucratic conformity was blissfully ill-developed and charters often contained
long and elaborate stories that explained why an individual had taken a particular course of action. This material can give a vivid insight into the mind-set of the contemporary nobility, not least because the charters were made prior to the expedition’s departure and are not clouded by the knowledge of its subsequent success.
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A document of the castellan Nivelo of Fréteval related: “Whenever the impulse of warlike fierceness roused me, I would gather about myself a band of mounted men and a crowd of followers. I would descend upon the village and freely give the goods of the men of St Père of Chartres to my knights for food. Now, therefore, I am going as a pilgrim to Jerusalem, which is still in bondage with her sons, to secure the divine pardon that I seek for my misdeeds.”
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We can see in this the violence and chaos so troublesome to Pope Urban; in this instance a church had been targeted for the knightly depredations. Yet with the call for the crusade, Nivelo saw a chance to redeem himself and to make good his sins as a pilgrim warrior fighting to liberate Jerusalem. The fusion of pilgrimage and holy war is neatly displayed in a Provençal charter for Guy and Geoffrey of Signes, who took the cross “on the one hand for the grace of pilgrimage and on the other, under the protection of God, to wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive and killed with barbaric fury.”
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In the autumn of 1096 the main crusading armies set out on the three-thousand-mile journey from northern Europe to Jerusalem. It has been estimated that about sixty thousand people took part in the expedition. The population of western Europe may have been around twenty million; self-evidently the vast majority of people stayed at home; if, however, one considers ties of family, friendship, and trade, then the crusade touched the lives of millions. Fulcher of Chartres wrote: “whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Allobroges [Savoyards], Lotharingians, Allemani [southern German and Swiss], Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitainians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians and Bretons.”
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While recent episodes such as the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 gave some indication of the resources
required for a large military campaign, the crusade was on a far greater scale. It has been estimated that the expedition cost four times a knight’s annual income and so loans, gifts, and mortgages were essential.
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Families gave what they could; often they had to support more than one individual because brothers or fathers and sons went together. Gifts of horses and mules were particularly welcome, as were precious stones, gold, and silverware. The currency of the time was of such a small denomination that it was utterly impractical to try to carry the necessary cash, otherwise the crusader army would have consisted of countless treasure-carrying carts. While we know that at least seven different currencies (coins from Lucca, Chartres, Le Mans, Melgueil, Le Puy, Valence, and Poitou) were in circulation among the Provençal contingent alone, the better option was to take precious objects to trade with local money-changers en route.
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Yet Urban’s offer of salvation struck a deep chord with the wider populace—who would not want to have all their sins wiped clean? Thus, men and women, young and old, the poor and the infirm joined the expedition as pilgrims. Many were utterly unsuited to the rigors of the campaign and in the course of the crusade the majority of this anonymous mass perished through disease or starvation, or deserted.

Two particular groups were not represented on the crusade. One body of people who wished to take part were banned, namely monks. Their vows required them to remain in the cloister; they were to fight the Devil through prayer, rather than with the sword. As Urban wrote: “we do not want those who have abandoned the world and vowed themselves to spiritual warfare either to bear arms or to go on this journey; we forbid them to go.”
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The fact that Urban had to issue letters making such points explicit shows that many monks were attracted to the concept. Probably the most noticeable absentees from among the First Crusaders were kings. Monarchs could have provided an obvious focus of command and resource, yet none became involved. In large part, this was a matter of circumstance, although their absence undoubtedly suited Urban because it meant the papacy retained a dominant position in the campaign. King William Rufus of England was in perpetual conflict with his churchmen; Emperor Henry IV of Germany was never likely to participate on account of the long-running conflict between his empire and the papacy, while King Philip of France was also cast out of the Church, albeit for more carnal reasons. He had pursued a relationship with Bertrada of Anjou, who was already married to Count Fulk IV of
Anjou (“le Réchin”—Fulk “the Repulsive,” a name acquired because of his hideously deformed feet). Clearly this was a situation the Church could not sanction. Philip refused to end the affair (he too was already married) and he was duly excommunicated; it would be unacceptable for the “Knights of Christ” to be headed by an adulterer.

Without the presence of kings it was left to members of the senior nobility to provide leadership, and five individuals stand out particularly. Godfrey of Bouillon ruled the duchy of Lorraine, a region on the border between France and Germany, although it was to the ruler of the latter that he owed obedience.
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Godfrey was a deeply religious man who, contrary to Urban’s strictures, brought a group of monks with him to provide spiritual support. He was also a fearless soldier, famed for his ability in single combat. Generous, gracious, and affable, this tall, bearded man was a model holy warrior. His younger brother Baldwin of Boulogne began his career as a cleric but he set aside his habit and became a soldier. Also tall, with brown hair and a beard, he was serious in dress and speech; those who did not know him well took him to be a bishop. Baldwin was married to an En glishwoman, Gothehilde, who accompanied him on the campaign. He was a fine horseman and fighter, although as events reveal, he had a harsh, pragmatic streak too. Count Stephen of Blois was a charming, well-educated man who wrote poetry and sent back letters to his wife, Adela, a daughter of William the Conqueror.
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He was an individual of high standing and at one point seems to have been made commander of the army, although as we will see, this was not a task he carried out with any distinction or dignity. Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles was an Occitan-speaking noble whose territory was based around Toulouse in southern France.
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He was an older man, in his sixties at the time of the crusade, who had committed himself to support Pope Urban’s appeal prior to the Council of Clermont. Raymond actually sold his lands in Europe as a sign that he was wholehearted in his wish to forge a new life in the Holy Land or die in the attempt. He was a strong-willed, pious individual, although rather arrogant and overbearing in his manner; in fact, his lack of diplomatic skills ultimately cost him the throne of Jerusalem. Finally, there was Bohemond of Taranto, arguably the most controversial figure on the crusade.
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He was a Norman-Sicilian whose father had already passed over him in his choice of successor; he was in consequence not especially wealthy, but possessed a fierce determination to advance his standing. Bohemond was a formidable warrior, tall, fair-haired,
and blue-eyed; clean-shaven unlike most of his colleagues, he had the bravery required of a champion of Christ. As a Norman-Sicilian he was a traditional enemy of the Byzantines and had taken part in an unsuccessful invasion of the empire in the 1080s.