The First Crusade (4 page)

The threat to Latin Christendom?

The first point to acknowledge is that the call to arms made at Clermont was not directly inspired by any recent calamity or atrocity in the East. Urban's sermon may have been stimulated, at least in part, by the Byzantine appeal for military aid received some eight months earlier at the council of Piacenza, but this request was not itself tied to any recent Greek defeat, resulting instead from decades of mounting Muslim aggression in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey). And although the Holy City of Jerusalem, the expedition's ultimate goal, was indeed in Muslim hands, it had been so for more than 400 years - hardly a fresh wound. At the start of the eleventh century, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, thought to enclose the site of Christ's crucifixion and resurrection, had been partially demolished by the volatile Islamic leader known to history as the Mad Caliph Hakim. His subsequent persecution of the local Christian population lasted for more than a decade, ending only when he declared himself a living god and turned on his own Muslim subjects. Tensions also seem to have been running high in 1027, when Muslims reportedly threw stones into the compound of the Holy Sepulchre. More recently, Latin Christians attempting to make devotional pilgrimages to the Levant, of whom there continued to be many, may have reported some difficulties in visiting the Holy Places, but the volume and severity of such complaints was far from overwhelming.
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The reality was that, when Pope Urban proclaimed the First Crusade at Clermont, Islam and Christendom had coexisted for centuries in relative equanimity. There may at times have been little love lost between Christian and Muslim neighbours, but there was, in truth, little to distinguish this enmity from the endemic political and military struggles of the age. When, in the seventh century, Muhammad first revealed the teachings of Allah and Islam exploded out of the Arabian peninsula, the eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium faced a seemingly unstoppable tide of expansion. Arab forces swept through Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor, finally breaking upon the walls of the Greek capital, Constantinople. As the years passed, Islam and Byzantium developed a tense, sometimes quarrelsome respect for one another, but their relationship was no more fraught with conflict than that between the Greeks and their Slavic or Latin neighbours to the west.
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At the other end of the Mediterranean, Islamic forces had overwhelmed the Iberian peninsula in
711CE.
So dynamic was their advance that only the might of Charlemagne's grandfather, Charles the Hammer, could turn them back from the borders of France and the heartlands of Latin Christendom. Partially detached from the rest of Europe by the physical barrier of the Pyrenean mountains, these Muslims settled in Spain and Portugal, leaving the indigenous Christians only a thin sliver of territory in the north. Muslim power held fast for generations, allowing culture, learning and trade to flourish, and Islamic Iberia blossomed into one of the greatest centres of civilisation in the known world. When decay and political fracture finally set in during the eleventh century, the surviving Christian realms of the north were quick to capitalise. In the decades leading up to the First Crusade, the nature of Iberian Latin-Muslim contact did alter: animosities hardened; the Christians went into the ascendant; and the frontier dividing these two faiths gradually began to inch southwards. But even in this period the scavenging Latins were far more interested in draining the Muslim south of its fabled wealth than they were in prosecuting any sort of concerted religious warfare. When blood was shed in battle, it was usually the result of Christian in-fighting, fractious squabbling over the spoils.
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At the end of the eleventh century, Christendom was in one sense encircled by Islam, with Muslim forces ranged against it to the east along Byzantium's Asian frontier and to the south in the Iberian peninsula. But Europe was a long way from being engaged in an urgent, titanic struggle for survival. No coherent, pan-Mediterranean onslaught threatened, because, although the Moors of Iberia and the Turks of Asia Minor shared a religious heritage, they were never united in one purpose. Where Christians and Muslims did face each other across the centuries, their relationship had been unremarkable, characterised, like that between any potential rivals, by periods of conflict and others of coexistence. There is little or no evidence to suggest that either side harboured any innate, empowering religious or racial hatred of the other.
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Most significantl
y, throughout this period indigenous Christians actually living under Islamic law, be it in Iberia or the Holy Land, were generally treated with remarkable clemency. The Muslim faith acknowledged and respected Judaism and Christianity, creeds with which it enjoyed a common devotional tradition and a mutual reliance upon authoritative scripture. Christian subjects may not have been able to share power with their Muslim masters, but they were given freedom to worship. All around the Mediterranean basin, Christian faith and society survived and even thrived under the watchful but tolerant eye of Islam. Eastern Christendom may have been subject to Islamic rule, but it was not on the brink of annihilation, nor prey to any form of systematic abuse.

It is true that, ten years before the council of Clermont, Iberia entered a period of heightened religious intolerance. In 1086, a fanatical Islamic sect invaded Iberia from north Africa, supplanting surviving, indigenous Muslim power in the peninsula. This new regime set about resisting and then repelling the acquisitive Christian north, scoring a number of notable military victories that re
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established the balance of power in Islam's favour. This did cause a reaction in the Latin West. In 1087 the king of France urged his subjects to offer military support to their Iberian brethren, and a number of French potentates duly led companies across the Pyrenees, among them a number of knights who later joined the First Crusade. Then in 1089 Pope Urban II took a limited interest in Iberian affairs. He focused his attention upon the ancient Roman port of Tarragona in north-eastern Spain, a city which had for generations lain in ruins, adrift amid the unclaimed wasteland between Christian and Muslim territory. Urban sponsored the rebuilding of Tarragona as a papal protectorate, but, although he created a new archbishopric there and construction was apparently begun, it is not clear whether the port was actually reoccupied. Iberia did serve as something of a testing ground for crusading ideology, because Urban offered a remission of sin to those engaged in the restoration of Tarragona, but his involvement on the peninsula was still extremely limited and there was no direct link between the needs of this theatre of conflict and his eventual decision to launch a campaign to the Levant.
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Pope Urban’
s motives in
1095

The problems addressed by the First Crusade - Muslim occupation of Jerusalem and the potential threat of Islamic aggression in the East-had loomed for decades, even centuries, provoking little or no reaction in Rome. Urban IPs decision to take up this cause at Clermont was, therefore, primarily proactive rather than reactive, and the crusade was designed, first and foremost, to meet the needs of the papacy. Launched as it was just as Urban began to stabilise his power-base in central Italy, the campaign must be seen as an attempt to consolidate papal empowerment and expand Rome's sphere of influence. It was no accident that Urban chose to unle
ash the concept of crusading in
France, a region in which his roots gave him connections and local knowledge, and over which the papacy had long wished to strengthen its hold. Indeed, the crusade was just one of the weapons used in pursuit of this agenda, Urban's entire grand tour of France in 1095-6 being a transparent attempt to manifest papal authority.

But for Urban the real beauty of the crusade was that it also had the potential to fulfil a range of other papal ambitions. Since the start of his pontificate, Urban had sought to re-establish friendly contact with the Greek Church of Byzantium, whose relationship with Rome had soured after the two Churches were, in 1054, forced into schism by a heated disagreement over liturgical practice. Orchestrating a positive response to the Byzantine appeal for military aid promised to cement a new period of detente with Constantinople. At the same time, it offered the prospect of expanding Latin influence over the Levantine Church in Asia Minor, Syria and Palestine, a significant step along the road towards papal pre-eminence in all Christendom.

The First Crusade also held more altruistic benefits. It is likely that Urban earnestly desired to help his Byzantine brethren and those eastern Christians living under Islamic rule. Although probably aware that the latter were not suffering desperate abuse, he still sought to liberate all Christendom, thus ending any threat of oppression. And while the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land might have been willing to grant pilgrims access to the sacred sites of Jerusalem, in Urban's mind it was still infinitely preferable for that revered city to be under Christian control. At the same time, he came to realise that the very means by which these goals might be achieved could also serve to purify the Latin West. Having grown up among the Frankish aristocracy, the pope was only too aware of the spiritual dilemma facing this knightly class. Bombarded by a stream of warnings about the dreadful danger of sin, but forced to resort to soul-contaminating violence in order to fulfil their duty and defend their rights in this lawless age, most nobles were trapped in a circle of guilt, obligation and necessity. As Roman pontiff, the father of the Latin Church, Urban was personally responsible for the soul of every single Christian living in the West. It was incumbent upon him to lift as many of his flock as possible towards salvation. The campaign launched at Clermont was therefore, in one sense, designed to answer the prayers of a polluted class in Urban s care, because it offered the nobility a new path to redemption. The message in 1095 was that knights would now be able to prosecute violence in the name of God, participating in a holy war.
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The long road to holy war

Turning bloodshed into a sacred act required the pope to reconcile Christian teaching with the ruthlessness of medieval warfare. With the preaching of the First Crusade the Latin Church went far beyond simply condoning violence; it energetically encouraged military conflict and promoted carnage as an expression of pious devotion. This sanctification of warfare, in which two seemingly immiscible elements - violence and Christianity - were fused, now stands as the defining characteristic of the First Crusade, the feature which has catapulted this expedition into the popular imagination and aroused generations of scholarly attention. The very concept of Christian holy war, of which the crusade was the dominant species, can elicit a sense of dismay and censure in modern observers, who view it as a distortion of Christ's teaching, an abomination that directly contradicts his promotion of pacifism. Many are driven to ask how the medieval papacy could have developed such an extraordinary concept.
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In fact, the First Crusade was not utterly abnormal, but an extreme product of concerns common to all ages of human society: the need to contain mankind's innate appetite for violence; and the desire to distinguish between 'good' and 'evil' warfare. Across millennia of recorded history and in every corner of the planet, civilisations have struggled to control and harness human aggression, most often by categorising certain types of bloodshed as acceptable and outlawing or vilifying the remainder. Even modern societies posit a moral distinction between 'private' murder and killing performed in the midst of sanctioned 'public' warfare. Ruling elites also tend to promote their own wars as justifiable and those of their enemies as morally corrupt. The medieval theory of crusading similarly sought to redirect the energies of Europe's feuding warlords, channelling their bloodlust out beyond the borders of the Latin West for the good' of all Christendom. In the long term, however, this approach to the management of violence had a bleak and lasting impact upon the relationship with Islam.

This still begs the question of how Christianity, seemingly a pacifistic religion, was so readily militarised. Pope Urban II did not conjure the idea of a crusade from thin air, nor did he consider the concept of holy war to be revolutionary or even novel. In his mind, centuries of Christian, and even pre-Christian, tradition legitimised the principles espoused at Clermont. It was inevitable that his ideas would be influenced by precedent because eleventh-century Latin society was profoundly retrospective. Being Christian to the core, it accepted two immutable truths: scripture, the cornerstone of the faith, was utterly unassailable, the unquestionable word of God; and at the moment of its foundation by St Peter, the Roman Church had been a precise expression of divine will, the Lord's design for mankind made manifest on earth. These two ancient rocks of perfection left a heavy imprint upon the medieval mind. Fixated by this vision of a golden age in which the apostles supposedly created an ideal Christian order, and governed by an immoveable, authoritative text, the medieval world was obsessed with the past.

But Urban and his contemporaries viewed their Christian history through a cracked and clouded lens. The glorious 'perfection' of a bygone era to which they aspired too often owed more to fiction than to fact. The sheer malleability of history - stretched and distorted by the imprecisions of memory and twisted through wilful manipulation and forgery - meant that the past' that informed and enabled Urban's sanctification of violence was actually a shifting, tangled web of reality and imagination. Although the pope earnestly believed that the campaign he preached in 1095 conformed to Christ's teaching, a deep chasm separated the ideals promoted by scripture and those that sustained the concept of crusading.