The First Crusade (12 page)

If pure greed did not propel the crusaders, should we then assume that, above all, Christian piety inspired tens of thousands to risk their lives and livelihoods? This vexed question, fraught with difficulty and blighted by unsubstantiated impression, has occupied generations of historians, but some real progress has been made in recent years. Nevertheless, the severe limitations of the available evidence mean that we are still able to attempt only an approximate reconstruction of the motives and intentions of one particular class of crusader: the lay aristocracy. Alone in all medieval society, this upper echelon - the knightly elite - left a discernible imprint on the fabric of history during the process of taking the cross and preparing for the campaign, offering us fleeting, but instructive, insights into their state of mind. Of other social groups, in particular the poor, tens of thousands of whom are known to have joined the crusade, no authentic, first-hand trace survives. They appear in the written record, if at all, as shadowy imaginings, their ideas, aspirations and beliefs recreated by the pens of contemporary aristocratic observers. So on this most taxing question of motivation we must make do with what we can and consider the nobility.

Even here
we should acknowledge that our
evidence has been at least partially filtered. Our primary resources are the legal documents, or charters, drawn up by aristocratic crusaders to settle their affairs prior to departure for the Levant. It is rather ironic that, in this sphere of evidence, administrative efficiency is actually the enemy of historical exactitude. Charters drawn up, for example, under the rigorous standards of twelfth-century English governance tend to be precise, well-ordered documents and thus intensely formulaic and often quite boring. Luckily for us, those originating amid the relative disorder of late-eleventh-century French record keeping, just when the First Crusade was launched, tend to be far more invigorating. Roving, even rambling affairs, they frequently digress from the minutiae of financial exchange and legal rights to record a bewildering array of incidental information, including personal histories and human emotions, current affairs and infamous scandals, the strange and miraculous - all appear in a captivating kaleidoscopic slice of medieval experience. Crucially, they appear to offer a direct window into the minds of aristocratic crusaders. But even with this treasure trove of material, we must exercise some caution, because most nobles were actually illiterate and, since the majority of extant charters relate to transactions with monasteries, almost all surviving documents of this type were, in fact, physically written by monks. We cannot, therefore, discount the possibility that the revelatory lens of charter evidence has been subtly coloured by clerical hands, tainted by monks' intensely Christian outlook and fanatical obsession with spiritual devotion.
²⁹

The mindset
of
the lay aristocracy

Even bearing this caveat in mind, the evidence for the aristocratic response to the crusading message strongly suggests that spiritual concerns dominated the minds of the Latin nobility as they took the cross. To understand why this was so, we must first reconstruct the devotional landscape in which they lived. On this plane of medieval society, laymen were intimately connected to the monastic profession. With the Church and regional clergy still in relative disarray, eleventh-century nobles were reluctant to turn to their parish priests or even local bishops for spiritual guidance. Instead, they looked for succour from monastic institutions like Cluny, champions of devotional purity on the cutting edge of Christian ideology. When Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, all across the Latin West his target audience, the knightly aristocracy, was engaged in a symbiotic union with monasteries. Every knight who joined the expedition to Jerusalem probably enjoyed some form of monastic association, be it through patronage and the donation of wealth or through the presence of a familial member who had entered a religious house. Monastic institutions shaped the nobility's conception of the Christian cosmos: knights were effectively conditioned to view, interpret and interact with the spiritual world around them through terms of reference and rituals defined by monks.
³⁰

The most powerful feature of this programming was an acute awareness of the danger of sin and an associated terror at the prospect of damnation. All medieval society was preoccupied with the pursuit of purity, but the knightly aristocracy, forced by the nature of its profession into daily contact with contaminants such as violence and personal wealth, seems to have been particularly prone to harbour an obsession with spiritual infection and the afterlife. The constant inner struggle it faced was evoked by the early-twelfth-century biographer and confidant of Tancred of Hauteville:

Frequently [Tancred] burned with anxiety because the warfare he engaged in as a knight seemed contrary to the Lord s commands. The Lord, in fact, ordered him to offer the cheek that had been struck together with his other cheek to the striker; but secular knighthood did not spare the blood of relatives. The Lord urged him to give his tunic and his cloak as well to the man who would take them away; the needs of war impelled him to take from a man already despoiled of both whatever remained to him. And so, if ever that wise man could give himself up to repose, these contradictions deprived him of courage.
³¹

Tancred and knights like him across Europe were trapped - their secular obligations made sin inevitable, but monks cautioned them that their transgressions would, in the afterlife, trigger the most gruesome torments. On closer examination, we might, in fact, expect Tancred and his contemporaries to have been rather confused about the exact consequences of their sins because, around
1095,
they were not actually being offered a particularly clear or concise vision of what would happen to their souls after death. Nascent Christian theology bombarded them with a complex jumble of images and ideals, a bewildering mosaic of ritual, custom and belief that, to a modern observer, can appear convoluted and even contradictory, but from which three dominant, interwoven strands emerge.

First, the Church maintained that the Day of the Last Judgement was fast approaching - it had of course been approaching since the earliest Christian era - when good would finally be separated from evil through the weighing of every human soul. Alongside this single apocalyptic event, Latins were also inculcated with a second strand of belief: that they would personally face some form of judgement immediately upon death and that any taint of sin would earn them punishment. Third was an overwhelming belief in the efficacy of alms-giving.

One of the main salvific remedies proffered by the Church to counter the threat of judgement and damnation was the giving of alms, which might be loosely defined as the donation of financial resources to religious communities, often in the form of title to land or rights to its revenue. These transient, material possessions could not, the Church argued, be taken into the afterlife, but might be used to ease the path towards the true Christian 'inheritance', the kingdom of heaven. Like pilgrimage, alms-giving might be undertaken as an appointed penance or be a voluntary propitiary down-payment. In quantifying the purificational impact of such endowments, the

Church was careful to avoid any direct assertion that Christians might crudely buy their way to salvation, preferring instead to suggest that donors might, in God's eyes, become enshrouded in an aura of merit. Nevertheless, most laymen imagined a direct link between donation and salvation. The benefaction of monastic communities like that of Cluny was deemed particularly efficacious, because its monks, engaged day and night in almost constant prayer, transformed every Cluniac monastery into an overflowing super-generator of redemptive energy. Alms-giving to such an institution allowed one to tap into this powerhouse of salvation, because every lay donor name was included in the monastery's prayers. Most religious houses were associated with a particular saint or saints, and lay donation was also believed to earn the favour of these Holy Dead, ensuring an easier passage through the rigours of temporal existence.

An illustrative example is that of the southern French noble Gaston IV of Beam.
A
fidelis beati Petri
who had campaigned against the Moors of Iberia in
1087,
he took the cross in
1096
and joined Raymond of Toulouse's crusading contingent. Earlier, in
1091,
Gaston decided to donate some property to the Cluniac house of St Foi, Morlaas in Gascony. At the same time he confirmed the gifts made by his father years earlier. The charter recording this transaction states that Gaston acted for the benefit of his own soul and those 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 some ways, the rather fragmentary devotional framework which encapsulated the concepts of apocalyptic threat, immediate judgement and propitiary alms-giving might seem to beg more questions than it answered. What, for example, was supposed to happen to a soul between death and the advent of the Last Judgement? Was it possible to attain immediately the delights of heaven or to be eternally condemned to the torments of hell, or were all souls awaiting the Apocalypse in some form of limbo? Could alms-giving or pilgrimage actually cleanse the soul of sin or did it simply cancel out the earthly or heavenly punishment due for transgression?

In later centuries Latin theologians tackled these concerns with varying degrees of success, but for the knights who encountered the crusading message in
1095
the prevailing matrix of belief remained only partially realised or reconciled. For all this, it lost nothing of its power to compel or control. Eleventh-century society seems simply to have filled in the gaps left by this emergent construct, giving rise to devotional customs that actually served to intensify the binding force of the Latin faith. Uncertainty about the afterlife stimulated a popular belief in an embryonic version of purgatory, a shadowy 'middle place' between heaven and hell. It was assumed that, unless one was so utterly dissolute as to earn immediate damnation, this halfway house would be the first destination of all laymen upon death - so powerful and enveloping was the contamination of sin, it was deemed inevitable that every normal human would need to endure at least a period of purification in the hereafter. What is worse, with the souls of the dead mired in an indeterminate purgatorial sentence, Latin nobles not only had their own souls to worry about -they had to answer for the fate of their dead relatives as well. Knights like Tancred, shouldering this heavy burden of responsibility, sought to salve their anxious conscience.

By the end of the eleventh century, social convention and devotional custom dictated that, alongside other penitential acts like pilgrimage, the lay aristocracy should, for the betterment of their own souls and their ancestors' spiritual wellbeing, maintain networks of monastic patronage and donation. The developing theory of purgatory also lent permanent force to any act of endowment. Monasteries frequently appended what amounted to insurance policies to the contracts made with lay donors. Known technically as malediction clauses, these threatened dire spiritual consequences and pronounced elaborate curses upon any noble who chose to renounce his own property transactions or interfere in those of
his ancestors. Had Gaston of Be
arn chosen, in
1091,
to reclaim rather than confirm his father's grants to St Foi, he would have anticipated not only a personal punishment, but the infliction on his ancestor of unspeakable torments in limbo.
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The knightly arist
ocracy targeted by Pope Urban II’
s crusading appeal in
1095
was thus locked into an enduring and overpowering system of monastic patronage. These men were not simply savage brutes, bent on vendetta and violence, they were also, in medieval terms, devout Christians engaged in a constant but seemingly hopeless battle against transgression. Through the intimate devotional interface enjoyed with religious communities they were conditioned to view monastic life as the quintessence of spiritual perfection, but, bound to the duties of knighthood, that cloistered road to salvation was closed to them. The vow required of participants in the crusade seemed to mirror that made by postulant monks, suggesting that the expedition to Jerusalem had now opened up a new path to the kingdom of heaven. Indeed, one contemporary was prompted to observe:

God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake .
..
might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain some measure of God's grace while pursuing their own careers, with liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.
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The thrilling allure of this new opportunity, coupled with the reassuringly traditional penitential context of Urban's proposed armed pilgrimage, rendered the crusade almost irresistible. Tancred's reaction, like that of thousands of his fellow knights, was apparently electric: