The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (6 page)

Notably, Pope Urban II did not invent the term ‘crusade’. The expedition he launched at Clermont was so novel, and in some ways still so embryonic in its conception, that there was no word with which it could be described. Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an
iter
(journey) or
peregrinatio
(pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word
crucesignatus
(one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term
croisade
, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.
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The call of the cross

In the months that followed the Council of Clermont, the crusading message spread throughout western Europe, evoking an unprecedented reaction. While Pope Urban broadcast his message throughout France, bishops from across the Latin world who had attended his original sermon took the call back to their own dioceses.

The cause was also taken up by popular, rabble-rousing preachers, largely unsanctioned and unregulated by the Church. Most famous and remarkable of these was Peter the Hermit. Probably originating from a poor background in Amiens (north-eastern France), he became renowned for his austere, itinerant lifestyle, repellent appearance and unusual eating habits–one contemporary noted that ‘he lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, or never, ate bread’. By modern standards he might be deemed a vagabond, but among the poorer classes of eleventh-century France he was revered as a prophet. Such was his sanctity that his followers even collected the hairs of his mule as relics. A Greek contemporary noted: ‘As if he had sounded a divine voice in the hearts of all, Peter the Hermit inspired the Franks from everywhere to gather together with their weapons, horses and other military equipment.’ He must have been a truly inspirational orator–within six months of Clermont he had gathered an army, largely made up of poor rabble, numbering in excess of 15,000. In history this force, alongside a number of other contingents from Germany, has become known as the ‘People’s Crusade’. Spurred on by crusading fervour, its various elements set off for the Holy Land in spring 1096, months before any other army, making ill-disciplined progress towards Constantinople. Along the way, some of these ‘crusaders’ concluded that they might as well combat the ‘enemies of Christ’ closer to home, and thus carried out terrible massacres of Rhineland Jews. Almost as soon as the People’s Crusade crossed into Muslim territory they were annihilated, although Peter the Hermit survived.
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This first wave of the crusade may have ended in failure, but, back in the West, larger armies were gathering. Public rallies, in which massed audiences were bombarded with emotive rhetoric, prompted fevered recruitment, and crusading enthusiasm also seems to have been propagated more informally through kinship groups, networks of papal supporters and the links between monastic communities and the nobility. Historians continue to dispute the numbers involved, primarily because of the unreliability of wildly inflated contemporary estimates (some of which exceed half a million people). Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children. What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.
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At the heart of these armies were aristocratic knights, the emerging martial elite of the Middle Ages.
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Pope Urban knew only too well the anxiety of these Christian warriors, trapped in a worldly profession imbued with violence, but taught by the Church that sinful warfare would lead to damnation. One contemporary observed:

The pope had constructed the idea of an armed pilgrimage at least in part to address the spiritual dilemma threatening the knightly aristocracy, and he also knew that, with the nobility on board, retinues of knights and infantry would follow, for even though the crusade required a voluntary commitment, the intricate web of familial ties and feudal obligation bound social groups in a common cause. In effect, the pope set off a chain reaction, whereby every noble who took the cross stood at the epicentre of an expanding wave of recruitment.

Although no kings joined the expedition–most being too embroiled in their own political machinations–the crème of western Christendom’s nobility was drawn to the venture. Members of the high aristocracy of France, western Germany, the Low Countries and Italy, from the class directly below that of royalty, these men often bore the titles of count or duke and could challenge or, in some cases, even eclipse the power of kings. Certainly they wielded a significant degree of independent authority and thus, as a group, can most readily be termed ‘princes’. Each of these leading figures commanded their own military contingents, but also attracted much looser, more fluid bands of followers, based on the bonds of lordship and family and perpetuated by common ethnic or linguistic roots.

Count Raymond of Toulouse, the most powerful secular lord in south-eastern France, was the first prince to commit to the crusade. An avowed supporter of the Reform papacy and ally of Adhémar of Le Puy, the count almost certainly had been primed by Urban II even before the sermon at Clermont. In his mid-fifties, Raymond was the expedition’s elder statesman; proud and obdurate, boasting wealth and far-reaching power and influence, he assumed command of the Provençal-southern French armies. Later legend suggested that he had already campaigned against the Moors of Iberia, even that he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, during which one of his eyes had been pulled out of his head as punishment for refusing to pay an exorbitant Muslim tax on Latin pilgrims. Indeed, the count was said to have returned to the West carrying his eyeball in his pocket as a talisman of his hatred for Islam. Fanciful as these tales may have been, Raymond nonetheless had the experience and, more importantly, the resources to vie for overall secular command of the crusade.
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The count’s most obvious rival for that position was a forty-year-old southern Italian Norman, Bohemond of Taranto. As the son of Robert ‘Guiscard’ (Robert ‘the Wily’), one of the Norman adventurers who conquered southern Italy during the eleventh century, Bohemond gained an invaluable military education. Fighting alongside his father during the 1080s in a four-year Balkan campaign against the Greeks, Bohemond learned the realities of battlefield command and siege warfare. By the time of the First Crusade he had an unequalled martial pedigree, prompting one near-contemporary to describe him as ‘second to none in prowess and in knowledge of the art of war’. Even his Byzantine enemies conceded that he had an arresting physical presence:

But for all his lion-like stature, Bohemond lacked wealth, having been disinherited by his acquisitive half-brother in 1085. Driven by rapacious ambition, he thus took the cross in the summer of 1096 with at least one eye upon personal advancement, nursing dreams of a new Levantine lordship to call his own. Bohemond was accompanied on crusade by his nephew, Tancred of Hauteville. Barely twenty, with little real experience of war, this young princeling nonetheless had an unquenchable dynamism (and could apparently speak Arabic), and he quickly assumed the position of second in command of the relatively small but redoubtable army of southern Italian Normans that followed Bohemond into the East. In time Tancred would become one of the foremost champions of the crusading cause.
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The leading southern French and Italian Norman crusaders were all allies of the Reform papacy, but after 1095 even some of the pope’s most embittered enemies joined the expedition to Jerusalem. One such was Godfrey of Bouillon, from the region of Lorraine. Born around 1060, the second son to the count of Boulogne, he could trace his lineage back to Charlemagne (later legend even had it that he was born of a swan) and was said to have been ‘taller than the average man…strong beyond compare, with solidly built limbs and stalwart chest, [with] pleasing features [and] beard and hair of medium blond’. Godfrey held the title of duke of Lower Lorraine, but proved unable to assert real authority over this notoriously volatile region and probably took the cross with some thought of starting a new life in the Holy Land. Despite his reputation for despoiling Church property and his limited military background, in the years to come Godfrey would demonstrate an unswerving dedication to the crusading ideal and a gift for clear-headed command.

Godfrey stood at the forefront of a loose conglomerate of troops from Lorraine, Lotharingia and Germany and was joined by his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. Reportedly darker-haired but paler-skinned than Godfrey, Baldwin was said to have a piercing gaze. Like Tancred, he would emerge from relative obscurity during the course of the crusade, demonstrating a bullish tenacity in battle and an almost insatiable appetite for advancement.

These five princes–Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Boulogne–played pivotal roles in the expedition to reclaim Jerusalem, leading three of the main Frankish armies and shaping the early history of the crusades. A fourth and final contingent, made up of the northern French, also joined the campaign. This army was dominated by a tight-knit kinship group of three leading nobles: the well-connected Robert, duke of Normandy, eldest son of William the Conqueror and brother to William Rufus, king of England; Robert’s brother-in-law Stephen, count of Blois; and his namesake and cousin, Robert II, count of Flanders.

For these potentates, their followers and perhaps even the poorer classes, the process of joining the crusade involved a dramatic and often emotional ceremony. Each individual made a crusading vow to journey to Jerusalem, similar to that for a pilgrimage, and then marked their status by sewing a representation of the cross on to their clothing. When Bohemond of Taranto heard the call to arms, his reaction was apparently immediate: ‘Inspired by the Holy Ghost, [he] ordered the most valuable cloak which he had to be cut up forthwith and made into crosses, and most of the knights who were [there] began to join him at once, for they were full of enthusiasm.’ Elsewhere, some took this ritual to extremes, branding their flesh with the sign of the cross, or inscribing their bodies or clothing with blood.

The process of identification through a visible symbol must have served to separate and define the crusaders as a group, and the pilgrim vow involved certainly brought crusaders an array of legal protections for their property and persons. The contemporary descriptions of these moments of dedication tend to stress spiritual motivation. We might doubt this evidence, given that it is almost always provided by churchmen, except for the fact that it is supported by a wealth of legal documents, produced either by, or at the behest of, men placing their affairs in order before departing for Jerusalem. This material seems to confirm that many crusaders did indeed see their actions in a devotional context. One crusader, Bertrand of Moncontour, was so inspired that he decided to give up lands which he was withholding illegally from a monastery in Vendôme because ‘he believed that the Way of God [the crusade] could in no way benefit him while he held these proceeds of theft’.

The documentary evidence also reflects an atmosphere of fear and self-sacrifice. Prospective crusaders seem to have been deeply apprehensive about the long and dangerous journey they were undertaking, but were at the same time willing to sell virtually all their possessions to fund their participation. Even Robert of Normandy was forced to mortgage his duchy to his brother. The once fashionable myth that crusaders were self-serving, disinherited, land-hungry younger sons must be discarded. Crusading was instead an activity that could bring spiritual and material rewards, but was in the first instance both an intimidating and extremely costly activity. Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and in the long years to come the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and indestructible spiritual resolution.
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BYZANTIUM