The First Crusade (49 page)

Returning home

Most crusaders returned to western Europe after the capture of Jerusalem and the triumph at Ascalon. News of their success raced ahead of them, spreading like wildfire across Latin Christendom. But one man never learned of the expedition's fate. Pope Urban II, architect of the crusading ideal, died in Rome on 29 July 1099, just two weeks after the fall of the Holy City and before the tidings of victory could arrive.
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The return journey to the West proved arduous and expensive, and any booty collected in the closing stages of the campaign was soon spent. Thousands of crusaders limped back into Europe, many exhausted, sick and penniless. But those who had survived to the end were now revered as heroes in Latin society.

Robert of Flanders, for one, was from this point onwards celebrated as 'the Jerusalemite'. He returned to find his country in considerable disarray, but soon turned his hand to restoring order. He maintained an aura of piety until his death in 1111, donating the now famous relic of the arm of St George, carried in his contingent since the crusade had passed through Byzantium, to the monastery of Anchin. A church was duly built there and dedicated to the saint who had 'protected' Robert and his followers through countiess dangers.
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Robert of Normandy had a less prosperous career after the crusade. He is known to have made a pilgrimage to Mont-St-Michel to give thanks for his survival, but his fortunes waned nonetheless. During his absence in the East, Robert's brother, William Rufus, king of England, died and was succeeded by his ambitious younger sibling, Henry I. After an abortive attempt to seize power in England, Robert was roundly defeated by Henry at the Battie of Tinchebrai in 1106. Captured, he spent twenty-eight miserable years incarcerated in various prisons, among them the Tower of London, until his death in 1134. It was later said that he met with such disaster because he had refused the crown of Jerusalem 'not out of reverence, but out of fear of the work involved'.
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A number of prominent crusaders continued to show clear dedication to the ideals of holy war. The southern French lord Gaston of Beam, who had marshalled the construction of siege engines at Jerusalem, was one of the knights who went on to lend martial expertise to the struggle against the Moors of Spain. Other crusaders sought to express their thanks to God through more peaceful acts of devotion. Rotrou of Perche, who had been one of the first soldiers to brave the walls of Antioch on 3 June 1098, decided to devote himself to the protection and patronage of the Cluniac community at Nogent-le-Rotrou. Some are known to have founded new monasteries, or even to have become monks or priests.
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Of course, not all turned aside from the path of violence and dissolution. Before 1095, the northern French brute Thomas of Marie had a reputation for rapacious cruelty. He joined the crusade alongside the notorious Emicho of Leiningen, persecutor of the Rhineland Jews, but managed to find a place in the second wave of armies and survived all the way to Jerusalem. Having completed his pilgrimage, he returned only to gain new renown for his savage lawlessness. Thomas may have been marked by the cross, but he could not switch off the elemental ferocity that had driven him, and many of his comrades, to the gates of the Holy City.
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The knight Raimbold Creton from Chartres was another crusader who, at first, seemed to turn his back on spiritual devotion. He came back from the Levant crippled, having lost his hand in the first assault on Jerusalem. Within a few years of his return, he was severely censured by the Church for having beaten and castrated a monk whose servants had been stealing his crops. But, after undergoing fourteen years of penance, Raimbold seems to have been a reformed character.
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As far as we know, no one returned from the East laden down with gold and silver, but some did bring back more exotic treasures. Perhaps the most bizarre of these belonged to Gulpher of Lastours, the first Frank on to the walls of Marrat an-Numan in December 1098, who was said to have come home with a pet lion. For most, their 'booty' was in the form of religious relics. The preacher Peter the Hermit returned with a piece of the Holy Sepulchre and a relic of John the Baptist and founded a religious community in France dedicated to their cults. Other crusaders flooded Europe with an array of artefacts, including a single hair from Christ's beard, a whole ball of the Virgin Mary's hair, pieces of the True Cross and the Holy Lance and remnants of numerous saints. Hundreds of crusaders also brought back palm fronds from Jerusalem, symbolic tokens of their completed pilgrimage.
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There were, of course, thousands of men and women who turned aside from the path of the crusade, prompted to desert by fear, starvation, illness and exhaustion. As they crept back into Europe, their failure to fulfil their vows earned them the scorn and disdain of Latin society. Among these were Hugh of Vermandois, who never rejoined the crusade after being sent on an embassy to Constantinople, and Stephen of Blois, who had fled from Antioch in the early summer of 1098 and now faced open condemnation from his wife, Adela. The intense, public shame of their supposed cowardice soon spurred these princes, and numerous other Tailed' crusaders like them, to seek redemption by joining a new, 'third wave' of Latin armies heading out to the Holy Land.

Since 1095, Pope Urban had called for more and more recruits to reinforce the First Crusade. Once news of Jerusalem's recapture reached the West, a fresh surge of enthusiasm swept across Europe, as tens of thousands sought to emulate the main expedition's 'heroic' achievements. This campaign, known to history as the '1101 Crusade', aggressively promoted by Urban's successor Pope Paschal, saw recruitment that almost eclipsed that of the first two waves combined. By September 1100, armies of new and old crusaders alike began setting off to defend the Holy Land.

This 'third wave' was joined at Constantinople by none other than Raymond of Toulouse. With his ambitions for Jerusalem thwarted, Raymond had renewed his alliance with the Greek emperor Alexius and travelled to Byzantium still carrying his prized relic of the Holy Lance. He agreed to give the campaign the benefit of his experience and knowledge, but even this was not enough to save the 1101 Crusade from total disaster. The expedition enjoyed neither the luck nor the hard-bitten unity of purpose that had characterised the First Crusade. It was ripped apart by the Seljuqs of Asia Minor, suffering horrific casualties, and those few who did reach the Holy Land achieved nodiing of value. Having sought to cleanse their reputations, both Hugh of Vermandois and Stephen of Blois lost their lives in this fruitless endeavour. Raymond of Toulouse survived by the skin of his teeth, but seems to have mislaid the Holy Lance somewhere in Asia Minor.
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Settling in the east

After the debacle of the 1101 Crusade, Raymond of Toulouse elected to remain in the east, joining the ranks o
f those First Crusaders who settl
ed in the Levant. He soon demonstrated his keen desire to forge a new lordship in the Near East. In his absence, the Provencal enclave, so carefully established in the Jabal as-Summaq in 1098-9, fell under the sway of Antioch. Raymond thus turned his attention to the Lebanese city of Tripoli and its environs. In the years that followed, he batded to subdue the surrounding region and died in 1105 while laying siege to Tripoli itself. The city held out until 1109, but once it fell Raymond's legacy was complete. The county he founded would endure well into the thirteenth century.
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To
the north, Raymond's old adversary Bohemond of Taranto retained control of his long-cherished prize, the city of Antioch. Bohemond did see fit to complete his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in December 1099 alongside the nascent count of Edessa, Baldwin of Boulogne. But upon his return to Syria the southern Italian Norman had precious little time to relish his achievements. Facing Byzantine aggression to the north in Cilicia and through the southern port of Latakia, as well as renewed Muslim resistance to the east, Bohemond's initial efforts to create an independent Latin principality centred on Antioch were beset on all sides. Then, in the summer of 1100, the fortune that had blessed so many of his enterprises deserted him entirely. Overrun in a petty skirmish, he was taken prisoner by a Muslim warlord in eastern Asia Minor and spent three long years in captivity. Soon after his eventual ransom, he led the combined forces of Antioch and Edessa to a humiliating defeat in the Batde of Harran at the hands of Aleppo and its allies.
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By 1105, Bohemond had suffered enough. Having fought so hard for possession of Antioch, he now set sail for the West, effectively turning his back on the Levant. Once in Europe, he convinced a gullible Pope Paschal II to proclaim a new crusade, this time expressly directed towards conquering the Balkans from Byzantium. Having nursed his hatred and resentment of Alexius Comnenus for decades, Bohemond finally had the chance to exact his revenge, but once again fate cheated him. His army was crushed by Alexius outside Durazzo in 1108 and, forced to sign a degrading declaration of surrender, he retired to southern Italy, dying a broken man in 1111.
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It fell to Bohemond's nephew, Tancred of Hauteville, to defend Latin Antioch. Having risen to prominence in the course of the crusade, he now showed his true quality. Tancred's relentless ambition and immense martial energy transformed the nascent principality. By the time of his death in 1112, its borders had been expanded and consolidated, the threat posed by Aleppo had been all but neutralised, and Antioch's power and influence could even challenge that of Jerusalem. As it was, the fruits of Tancred's labour were squandered by his successor Roger of Salerno, who, twenty-one years to the day after the astounding victory against Kerbogha, led the Antiochene army to destruction in the evocatively named Battle of the Field of Blood. The principality survived, but never again attained such prominence.
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The true jewel of Latin dominion in the Levant was, of course, the city of Jerusalem. Its first protector, Godfrey of Bouillon, had only just begun to consolidate his position when he fell ill and died in the summer of 1100. This champion of the crusading ideal was buried on the very site of Christ's crucifixion. With Godfrey's demise, power passed to his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. To seize this prize, Baldwin ceded control of the county of Edessa to his cousin and namesake, the crusader Baldwin of Le Bourcq, and raced south to Palestine. He had already demonstrated a capacity for cold-blooded ruthlessness and an ardent hunger for power during the annexation of Edessa. Now there was little question that he would demand full and absolute control of Jerusalem. On 25 December 1100 he was crowned as the first Latin king of Jerusalem.
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Arnulf of Choques had by this stage been ousted from power, but the reputation of the True Cross that he helped to 'discover' survived intact and its cult grew apace. Armed with t
he power of his office and
wielding this potent relic, Baldwin carved out the foundations of a mighty realm. The interior of Palestine was subdued through sheer, brutal force. A string of coastal ports was overcome, vital strategic and economic lifelines.
Baldwin even initiated the settl
ement of the inhospitable Jordanian desert. Living until 1118, it was his stable hand that protected the legacy of the First Crusade, shepherding al
l the crusader states through th
eir first two decades of existence. Baldwin and his fellow Latins had forged an outpost of western Christendom in the heart of Islam that would endure for almost two centuries. The bloody and incessant batde to defend these isolated satellite setdements against a rising tide of Muslim aggression would change the course of history.
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CONCLUSION

If we consider the First Crusade as a whole, taking an overarching view of its nature and impact, we are immediately confronted by one simple but utterly overwhelming fact: the expedition succeeded. Against all the odds, its primary goal - the recovery of Jerusalem - was achieved. This sounds like an obvious statement, but the full force and impact of this victory are actually quite difficult to appreciate.

The reasons for the crusade's success are readily apparent. Historians have long appreciated the central significance of the profound religious and political fractures that afflicted Islam at the end of the eleventh century. Had the Muslims of the Near East united in the face of the First Crusade it could not possibly have prevailed. The combined forces of Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul would surely have crushed the Franks outside the walls of Antioch; facing the collective might of the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, the Latins could never have mounted the sacred walls of Jerusalem. In the years to come, hundreds of thousands of Franks sought to equal the achievements of these First Crusaders, but in the face of burgeoning Islamic solidarity, none prospered.
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However, other contributing factors have, to date, been underplayed. The expedition was not quite
the ramshackle venture we once
imagined. The Latins may not have maintained complex lines of supply on the road to the East, but their campaign does show clear evidence of strategic and logistical forethought. Bohemond took care to provision the gathering armies at Nicaea in 1097, and the crusaders pursued a productive policy of close co-operation with the Greeks. They also made careful preparations before attempting to push into Syria and overcome Antioch, building a network of alliances with indigenous Christians and creating a system of foraging centres. The expedition also benefited immensely from naval support while still at Antioch and then on the road south to Palestine - the arrival of a Genoese fleet at Jaffa in the summer of 1099 transformed the siege of Jerusalem. The precise degree of planning and co-ordination behind these fortuitous encounters is unclear, but Pope Urban II is known to have encouraged the maritime powers of northern Italy to collaborate with the crusaders.