The First Crusade (11 page)
These five princes - Raymond of Toulouse, Bohemond of Taranto, Godfrey of Bouillon, Tancred of Hauteville and Baldwin of Boulogne - shaped the course of the First Crusade. It was they who stood at the heart of this astonishing expedition, whose skill, ambition and devotion drove the enterprise, and by turns threatened to rip it apart, and they whose lives were utterly transformed by the crusading experience.
The other princes
Other Latin princes answered the pope's call to arms as well. Among these, the pre-eminent figure in terms of lineage was Hugh of Vermandois, brother of King Philip I of France, to whom historians have sometimes appended the rather misleading appellation 'Magnus' (the Great). Hugh was certainly proud of the royal blood flowing through his veins, but the actual physical resources at his command were quite limited. The small county of Vermandois seems to have furnished him with a relatively meagre fortune, and he managed to attract only a small contingent of followers to join him on crusade.
Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, was also well connected, being the eldest son of William the Conque
ror and brother to William Rufu
s, king of England. Although apparently possessed of an easygoing geniality, he later gained a reputation for indolence and a fondness for the finer comforts of life, but this probably owed more to his ineffective governance of Normandy than to any innate flaw of character. As duke, Robert faced almost constant harassment from his acquisitive brother, who pursued the reunification of his father's cross-Channel realm with dogged determination. In the years leading up to
1095,
with the region beset by 'terrible disorder', Robert found it increasingly difficult to maintain control. One twelfth-century observer actually maintained that the duke took the cross only to escape the pressures of rule, but this seems unlikely given that Robert appears all along to have planned to return to Europe upon completion of the journey to Jerusalem.
Robert of Normandy began the crusade in the company of two other princes, Stephen, count of Blois, his brother-in-law, and Robert II, count of Flanders, his cousin. Together, this tight-knit kinship group led a large northern French contingent of First Crusaders. Stephen was reputed to have been one of the richest lords in France, but little is known of his career before
1095,
save that he was married to one of the most formidable women of the age, Adela, daughter of William the Conqueror. Robert of Flanders may have been inspired to take the cross by the example of his sadistic father and namesake who, less than a decade earlier, had completed a pilgrimage to Jerusalem as penance for his brutal and exploitative rule. Along the way, he had established a relationship with the Greek emperor Alexius, to whom he later sent
500
knights to aid in the defence of Byzantium.
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Almost all of these princes had experience of battle, but only Robert of Normandy and Bohemond had commanded large armies, and Bohemond alone had any familiarity with the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean. With Raymond of Toulouse's ambition to be recognised as commander-in-chief of the expedition still unfulfilled by the end of
1096,
the First Crusade began without any obvious or accepted secular leader. Contrary to all the precepts of military convention, its armies would have to function without a single authoritative voice of command.
The challenge of controlling thousands of crusaders was going to be immense, all the more so because they were not drawn from a uniform or united source. Each prince who committed to the expedition brought with him a small party of his closest intimates, including members of his household - perhaps a seneschal, marshal or constable - his servants, a chaplain and even his huntsman. Major princes, like Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemond of Taranto and Robert of Normandy, 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. Stephen of Blois' party, for example, drew in many knights from his homeland region of Chartrain, some of whom were his vassals, but others simply informal supporters who were often powerful lords in their own right. The concept of national identity had little force in the eleventh century, but like-minded crusaders tended to club together. Four relatively distinct contingents evolved: the northern French under the two Roberts and Stephen; an array of Lotharingians and Germans travelling with Godfrey of Bouillon; the southern French and Provencals under the direction of Raymond of Toulouse; and
Bohemond’
s company of southern Italian Normans. Evident tension, even open antipathy, persisted between the northern and southern French; they did, after all, have a history of enmity and spoke different languages, Languedor and Languedoc.
The First Crusade was thus a cellular, organic entity. It would be unrealistic, in
1096
at least, to speak of a single crusading army, because the Latin forces were actually made up of a disparate, even divided, array of contingents, between which there was considerable potential for conflict, and within which there were frequent opportunities for mobility through transferral of allegiance. Not surprisingly, contemporaries found it nearly impossible to estimate the size of such a diffuse force with any accuracy. Many resorted to wildly improbable figures of
500,000
or more. By our best estimate some
7,000
knights took the cross and were accompanied by perhaps
35,000
armed infantry. A horde of anywhere between
20,000
to
60,000
non-combatants attached itself to this militarised core. The not inconsiderable task confronting the crusader princes was to enforce some semblance of unity and direction upon this shifting mass. Their one advantage was that this somewhat haphazard host shared a powerful, unifying goal.
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TAKING
THE
CROSS
Most First Crusaders joined the expedition to Jerusalem at emotionally charged gatherings, where, having been whipped up into a frenzy by a rousing sermon on the virtues of the crusading ideal, they made a public commitment to the cause. This involved two ritual elements: the giving of a solemn vow to see the pilgrimage to the East through to the end by visiting the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; and the adoption of a physical representation of the cross -a symbol which was just then becoming a popular totem of Christian devotion - to be carried on their person until the return journey to the West had been completed. By these two steps, the Church sought to capture and solidify the explosive force of the crusading message, using the binding, legal force of the vow and the instantly recognisable, visual symbol of the cross to ensure that the initial spontaneous enthusiasm actually resulted in participation. One contemporary later described Urban at Clermont declaring that:
Everyone who has decided to make this holy pilgrimage and has made a promise to God and has vowed that he will pour himself out to him as a living, holy and pleasing sacrifice must bear the sign of the Lord s cross on his front or breast. Anyone who after fulfilling his vow wishes to return must put the sign on his back between his shoulder blades.
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The crusaders certainly seem to have felt that these rites set them apart from the rest of society, their insignia proclaiming to all that they bore the status and obligations of armed pilgrims, and the burden of duty conferred by them later proved to have the power both to compel and inspire. But, for all their binding force, these rituals seem, at least in
1095-6,
to have been relatively informal. There was probably no exact or established formula of words for the vow taken, nor does there seem to have been a universally recognised method for acquiring or wearing the cross. Most crosses seem to have been provided by the clergy, but Bohemond furnished his followers with theirs by cutting up his own cloak, while Godfrey of Bouillon's chaplain, Abbot Baldwin, dispensed with a cloth badge entirely, having his cross branded into the flesh of his forehead, a practice which was apparently quite widespread. Like so many features of crusade recruitment and practice, the rituals associated with taking the cross developed organically.
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Initial motives
It was once fashionable to suggest that the First Crusaders were primarily inspired to take the cross by greed, that the crusade was a grand adventure, offering the aspirant knights of Eurdpe an opportunity to amass untold fortunes of treasure and territory. It is true that, even at Clermont, Pope Urban II appears to have been aware that his audience might be attracted to the crusading cause by avaricious impulses. The decree describing the expedition that was recorded in the canons of the council stated: Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitu
te this journey for all penance.
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It has also been suggested that the appetite for materialistic gain was amplified by the wretched standard of living enjoyed by most Latins at the end of the eleventh century. A severe drought had afflicted much of France in the years before
1096,
leading to a series of poor harvests and the resultant spread of famine. Then, while the crusade was actually being preached, the region was hit by outbreaks of ergotism, a rather grim disease caused by eating bread made from mouldy rye. The theory is that, faced by these horrors, the Latin West responded with rapturous enthusiasm to the image of the Levant as 'a land flowing with milk and honey'. The evidence provided by one contemporary observer certainly supports this idea, because he wrote that 'it was easy to persuade the western Franks to leave their farms. For Gaul had been afflicted for some years, sometimes by civil war, sometimes by famine, sometimes by an excessive death rate. Finally a plague
..
. had terrified the people to the point at which they despaired of life.' Another contemporary conceded that it was difficult to be sure that all crusaders were driven by pure motives:
Different people give different reasons for this journey. Some say that in all pilgrims the desire has been aroused by God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Others maintain that the French lords and most of the people have begun this journey for frivolous reasons and that it was because of this that setbacks befell so many pilgrims
...
and for that reason they cannot succeed.
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Of all the theories assigning acquisitive motives to the First Crusaders, the most enduring and influential has been the idea that the expedition was almost exclusively populated by land-hungry younger sons, deprived of inheritable territory at home in the West by the law of primogeniture, and thus desperately eager to establish new lordships in the East. This image is, however, profoundly misleading.
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Some crusaders might fit this paradigm, at least to a degree -Bohemond of Taranto, for example, was certainly alive to the possibility that the journey to Jerusalem might furnish opportunities for the conquest of territory - but they were very much in a minority. For every crusader like Bohemond, there were countless more who, like Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders, already enjoyed secure possession of adequate, even expansive lordships. Some crusaders did, of course, at least entertain the possibility that they might end up settling in the Holy Land. In spite of his own immense Provengal power-base, Raymond of Toulouse seems to have had his eye on Levantine relocation and travelled east in the company of his third wife, Elvira.
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The reality was that most crusaders were inspired by a complex combination of motives; many must have harboured hopes that in the course of this devotional pilgrimage they might reap some personal gain. But perhaps the most significant insight into the medieval mentality offered by the First Crusade is the unequivocal demonstration that authentic Christian devotion and a heartfelt desire for material wealth were not mutually exclusive impulses in the eleventh century. We now know that greed cannot have been the dominant motive among the First Crusaders, not least because, as recent research has shown, for most participants the expedition promised to be utterly terrifying and cripplingly expensive.
The prospect of such a massive journey into the unknown -Jerusalem was more than
3,000
kilometres away and most crusaders would never before have travelled more than
100
kilometres from home - left many almost paralysed with fear. The acute anxiety expressed by Stephen of Blois when making a donation to a local abbey just prior to his departure for the East was reflective of the emotions felt by many crusaders: '[May God] pardon me for whatever I have done wrong and lead me on the journey out of my homeland and bring me back healthy and safe, and watch over
my wife Adela and our children.
Many who answered Urban's call to arms fully expected to die in the venture, and they tried to brace themselves to enter the scouring fire of holy war. Most also had to face virtual penury just to afford the exorbitant cost of crusading. Recent estimates suggest that, in order for the average knight to meet the costs of the coming campaign in terms of equipment, supplies, horse and servants, he would have had to raise five times his annual income. Many families endured major financial sacrifices to enable their kin to afford to crusade. Most tellingly of all, we know with the benefit of hindsight that only a handful of crusaders actually stayed in the Levant after the expedition, and among the returning majority none came home laden down with riches.
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