The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (3 page)

A central figure in this process was the pope in Rome. Christian tradition maintained that there were five great fathers–or patriarchs–of the Church spread across the Mediterranean world at Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. But the bishop of Rome–who came to call himself ‘papa’ (father) or pope–sought to claim pre-eminence among all these. Throughout the Middle Ages, the papacy struggled not only to assert its ecumenical (worldwide) ‘rights’, but also to wield meaningful authority over the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Latin West. The decline of the Roman and Carolingian Empires disrupted frameworks of power within the Church, just as it had done within the secular sphere. Across Europe, bishops enjoyed centuries of independence and autonomy from papal control, with most prelates owing their first allegiance to local political rulers and the ‘sacral’ kings of the West. By the early eleventh century, popes were straining simply to make their will felt in central Italy, and in the decades that followed they would sometimes even find themselves exiled from Rome itself.

Nonetheless, it would be a Roman pope who launched the crusades, prompting tens of thousands of Latins to take up arms and fight in the name of Christianity. This remarkable feat, in and of itself, served to extend and strengthen papal power, but the preaching of these holy wars should not be regarded as a purely cynical, self-serving act. The papacy’s role as the progenitor of crusading did help to consolidate Roman ecclesiastical authority in regions like France and, to begin with at least, crusader forces looked as though they might follow the pope’s commands, functioning almost as papal armies. Even so, more altruistic impulses probably also were at work. Many medieval popes seem earnestly to have believed that they had a wider duty to protect Christendom. They also expected, upon death, to answer to God for the fate of every soul once in their care. By constructing an ideal of Christian holy war–in which acts of sanctified violence would actually help to cleanse a warrior’s soul of sin–the papacy was opening up a new path to salvation for its Latin ‘flock’.

In fact, the crusades were just one expression of a much wider drive to rejuvenate western Christendom, championed by Rome from the mid-eleventh century onwards in the so-called ‘Reform movement’. As far as the papacy was concerned, any failings within the Church were just the symptoms of a deeper malaise: the corrupting influence of the secular world, long enshrined by the links between clergymen and lay rulers. And the only way to break the stranglehold enjoyed by emperors and kings over the Church was for the Pope finally to realise his God-given right to supreme authority. The most vocal and extreme proponent of these views was Pope Gregory VII (1073–85). Gregory ardently believed that he had been set on Earth to transform Christendom by seizing absolute control of Latin ecclesiastical affairs. In pursuit of this ambition, he was willing to embrace almost any available means–even the potential use of violence, enacted by papal servants whom he called ‘soldiers of Christ’. Although Gregory went too far, too fast and ended his pontificate in ignominious exile in southern Italy, his bold strides did much to advance the twinned causes of reform and papal empowerment, establishing a platform from which one of his successors (and former adviser), Pope Urban II (1088–99), could instigate the First Crusade.
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Urban’s call for a holy war found a willing audience across Europe, in large part because of the prevailing religious atmosphere in the Latin world. Across the West, Christianity was an almost universally accepted faith and, in contrast to modern secularised European society, the eleventh century was a profoundly spiritual era. This was a setting in which Christian doctrine impinged upon virtually every facet of human life–from birth and death, to sleeping and eating, marriage and health–and the signs of God’s omnipotence were clear for all to see, made manifest through acts of ‘miraculous’ healing, divine revelation and earthly and celestial portents. Concepts such as love, charity, obligation and tradition all helped to shape medieval attitudes to devotion, but perhaps the most powerful conditioning influence was fear; the same fear that made Fulk Nerra believe that his soul was in peril. The Latin Church of the eleventh century taught that every human would face a moment of judgement–the so-called ‘weighing of souls’. Purity would bring the everlasting reward of heavenly salvation, but sin would result in damnation and an eternity of hellish torment. For the faithful of the day, the visceral reality of the dangers involved was driven home by graphic images in religious art and sculpture of the punishments to be suffered by those deemed impure: wretched sinners strangled by demons; the damned herded into the fires of the underworld by hideous devils.

Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that most medieval Latin Christians were obsessed with sinfulness, contamination and the impending afterlife. One extreme expression of the pressing desire to pursue an unsullied and perfected Christian life was monasticism–in which monks or nuns made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and lived in ordered communities, dedicating themselves to God. By the eleventh century, one of the most popular forms of monastic life was that advocated by the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, in eastern France. The Cluniac movement grew to have some 2,000 dependent houses from England to Italy and enjoyed far-reaching influence, not least in helping to develop and advance the ideals of the Reform movement. Its power was reaching an apex in the 1090s, when Urban II, himself a former Cluniac monk, held the papal office.

Of course, the demands of monasticism were beyond the means of most medieval Christians. And for ordinary laymen and women, the path to God was strewn with the dangers of transgression, because many seemingly unavoidable aspects of human existence–like pride, hunger, lust and violence–were deemed sinful. But a number of interconnected salvific ‘remedies’ were available (even though their theoretical and theological foundations had yet fully to be refined). Latins were encouraged to confess their offences to a priest, who would then allot them a suitable penance, the performance of which supposedly cancelled out the taint of sin. The most common of all penitential acts was prayer, but the giving of alms to the poor or donations to religious houses and the performance of a purgative devotional journey (or pilgrimage) were also popular. These meritorious deeds might also be undertaken outside the formal framework of penance, either as a sort of spiritual down payment, or in order to entreat God, or one of his saints, for aid.

Fulk Nerra was operating within this established belief structure when he sought salvation in the early eleventh century. One remedy he pursued was the foundation of a new monastery within his county of Anjou, at Beaulieu. According to Fulk’s own testimony, he did this ‘so that monks would be joined together there and pray day and night for the redemption of [my] soul’. This idea of tapping into the spiritual energy produced in monasteries through lay patronage was still at work in 1091, when the southern French noble Gaston IV of Béarn decided to donate some property to the Cluniac house of St Foi, Morlaàs, in Gascony. Gaston was an avowed supporter of the Reform papacy, had campaigned against the Moors of Iberia in 1087 and would go on to become a crusader. The legal document recording his gift to St Foi stated that he acted for the benefit of his own soul, that of his wife and children, and in the hope that ‘God may help us in this world in all our needs, and in the future grant us eternal life’. In fact, by Gaston’s day most of western Christendom’s lay nobility enjoyed similar well-established connections with monasteries, and this had a marked effect upon the speed at which crusade enthusiasm spread across Europe after 1095. Partly, this was because the vow undertaken by knights committing to the holy war mirrored that taken by monks–a similarity that seemed to confirm the efficacy of fighting for God. More important still was the fact that the papacy, with its links to religious houses like Cluny, relied upon the monasteries of the Latin West to help spread and support the call to crusade.

The second path to salvation embraced by Fulk Nerra was pilgrimage, and, given his multiple journeys to Jerusalem, he evidently found this particular form of penitential devotion especially compelling–later writing that the cleansing force of his experiences left him in ‘high spirits [and] exultant’. Latin pilgrims often travelled to less distant locations–including major centres like Rome and Santiago de Compostela (in north-east Spain), and even local shrines and churches–but the Holy City was fast emerging as the most revered destination. Jerusalem’s unrivalled sanctity was also reflected in the common medieval practice of placing the city at the centre of maps depicting the world. All of this had a direct bearing upon the exultant reaction to crusade preaching because the holy war was presented as a form of armed pilgrimage, one that had Jerusalem as its ultimate objective.
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Warfare and violence in Latin Europe

In launching the crusades the papacy sought to recruit members of one social grouping above all others: the knights of Latin Europe. This military class was still at an early stage of development in the eleventh century. The fundamental characteristic of medieval knighthood was the ability to fight as a mounted warrior.
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Knights were almost always accompanied by at least four or five followers who could act as servants–tending to their master’s mount, weaponry and welfare–but who also were capable of fighting as foot soldiers. When the crusades began, these men were not members of full-time standing armies. Most knights were warriors, but also lords or vassals, landholders and farmers–who would expect to give over no more than a few months in any one year to warfare, and even then did not usually fight in established, well-drilled groups.

The standard forms of warfare in eleventh-century Europe, familiar to almost all knights, involved a mixture of short-distance raiding, skirmishing–which was usually a ragged affair, characterised by chaotic close-quarter combat–and sieges of the many wood-or stone-based castles littered throughout the West. Few Latin soldiers had experience of large-scale pitched battles, because this form of conflict was incredibly unpredictable and therefore generally avoided. Virtually none would have fought in a protracted, long-range campaign of the sort involved in crusading. As such, the holy wars in the East would require the warriors of Latin Christendom to adapt and improve some of their martial skills.
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Before the preaching of the First Crusade, most Latin knights still regarded acts of bloodshed as inherently sinful, but they already were accustomed to the idea that, in the eyes of God, certain forms of warfare were more justifiable than others. There also was some sense that the papacy even might be capable of sanctioning violence.

At first sight, Christianity does appear to be a pacifistic faith. The New Testament Gospels record many occasions when Jesus seemed to reject or prohibit violence: from his warning that he who lived by violence would die by violence, to the Sermon on the Mount’s exhortation to turn the other cheek in response to a blow. The Old Testament also appears to offer clear guidance on the question of violence, with the Mosaic Commandment: ‘Thou shall not kill.’ In the course of the first millennium
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, however, Christian theologians pondering the union between their faith and the military empire of Rome began to question whether scripture really did offer such a decisive condemnation of warfare. The Old Testament certainly seemed equivocal, because as a history of the Hebrews’ desperate struggle for survival, it described a series of holy wars sanctioned by God. This suggested that, under the right circumstances, even vengeful or aggressive warfare might be permissible; and in the New Testament, Jesus had said that he came to bring not peace but a sword, and had used a whip of cords to beat moneylenders out of the Temple.

The most influential early Christian thinker to wrestle with these issues was the North African bishop St Augustine of Hippo (354–430
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). His work laid the foundation upon which the papacy eventually built the notion of crusading. St Augustine argued that a war could be both lawful and justifiable if fought under strict conditions. His complex theories were later simplified to produce just three prerequisites of a Just War: proclamation by a ‘legitimate authority’, such as a king or bishop; a ‘just cause’, like defence against enemy attack or the recovery of lost territory; and prosecution with ‘right intention’, that is, with the least possible violence. These three Augustinian principles underpinned the crusading ideal, but they fell far short of advocating the sanctification of war.

In the course of the early Middle Ages, Augustine’s work was judged to demonstrate that certain, unavoidable, forms of military conflict might be ‘justified’ and thus acceptable in the eyes of God. But fighting under these terms was still sinful. By contrast, a Christian holy war, such as a crusade, was believed to be one that God actively supported, capable of bringing spiritual benefit to its participants. The chasm separating these two forms of violence was only bridged after centuries of sporadic and incremental theological experimentation. This process was accelerated by the martial enthusiasm of the post-Roman ‘barbarian’ rulers of Europe. Their Christianisation injected a new ‘Germanic’ acceptance of warfare and warrior life into the Latin faith. Under the Carolingians, for example, bishops began sponsoring and even directing brutal campaigns of conquest and conversion against the pagans of eastern Europe. And by the turn of the millennium it had become relatively common for Christian clergy to bless weapons and armour, and the lives of various ‘warrior saints’ were being celebrated.

During the second half of the eleventh century, Latin Christianity began to edge ever closer towards the acceptance of holy war. In the early stages of the Reform movement, the papacy began to perceive the need for a military arm with which to reinforce its agenda and manifest its will. This prompted a succession of popes to experiment with the sponsoring of warfare, calling upon Christian supporters to defend the Church in return for vaguely expressed forms of spiritual reward. It was under the forceful guidance of Pope Gregory VII that the doctrine and application of sacred violence jumped ahead. Intent upon recruiting a papal army that owed its allegiance to Rome, he set about reinterpreting Christian tradition. For centuries theologians had characterised the internal, spiritual battle that devoted Christians waged against sin as the ‘warfare of Christ’, and monks were sometimes described as the ‘soldiers of Christ’. Gregory twisted this idea to suit his purpose, proclaiming that all lay society had one overriding obligation: to defend the Latin Church as ‘soldiers of Christ’ through actual physical warfare.