Crusades

Volume 14

Benjamin Z. Kedar, Jonathan Phillips, Jonathan Riley-Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781472468413
• eBook ISBN: 9781351985239
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Crusades covers seven hundred years from the First Crusade (1095-1102) to the fall of Malta (1798) and draws together scholars working on theatres of war, their home fronts and settlements from the Baltic to Africa and from Spain to the Near East and on theology, law, literature, art, numismatics and economic, social, political and military history. Routledge publishes this journal for The Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East. Particular attention is given to the publication of historical sources in all relevant languages - narrative, homiletic and documentary - in trustworthy editions, but studies and interpretative essays are welcomed too. Crusades appears in both print and online editions.

Eleventh-Century Pilgrimage from Catalonia to Jerusalem: New Sources on the Foundations of the First Crusade

Nikolas Jaspert
Universität Heildeberg
[email protected]

Abstract

This article analyses an unusually large and generally ignored corpus of private charters: namely, testaments from eleventh-century Catalonia, some of them as yet unedited, that make reference to an upcoming or consummated pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The documents provide rare information about the testators’ social, financial and spiritual circumstances. They not only open a window to the mindset of medieval men and women, but also enable us to discern changes of devotion over time. An analysis of the pilgrims’ declared goals reveals the paramount importance of Christ’s Sepulchre during the largest part of the eleventh century, whereas the town of Jerusalem gained momentum as an “attractor” already prior to the First Crusade. Similarly, a growth of penitential anxieties can be discerned in the second half of the century. The documents analysed in this article therefore substantiate the narrative sources generally used to study pre-crusade pilgrimage. They also demonstrate that Catalonia in the eleventh century was an area much more closely connected to Jerusalem and Palestine both by land and by sea than hitherto thought. Veneration of the holy sites was strengthened by the construction and dedication of churches and chapels, by the transfer of relics and other material and mnemonic devices. As a result, the call to the First Crusade did not go unheard in eastern Iberia.

The conquest of Jerusalem by an army of Christian warriors on 15 July 1099 and the subsequent establishment of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem marked a turning point in the history of pilgrimage: for the first time, Latin Christians ruled the city of David, and soon European settlers and merchants moved to Palestine in great numbers. This in turn facilitated communication between Latin Europe and the Levant and heightened connectivity across the Mediterranean, including Christian pilgrimage. The number of men and women who undertook the arduous journey across the sea or over land rose considerably, as many surveys have shown.¹ In contrast, it is much more difficult to grasp, analyse and quantify pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the period pre-dating the First Crusade.² There are several narrative sources that provide information about individuals and group voyages, the most famous of these concerning the pilgrimages undertaken by abbot Richard of Verdun (Abbot of Saint-Vanne) in 1027 and by Lietbert of Cambrai in 1054 and particularly the so-called “German pilgrimage” of 1064.³ But the narrative sources that relate these journeys are cultural artefacts that present a construct of what might or might not have occurred, providing theological refinement to the traveller’s motivations and giving clearly inflated figures of up to 12,000 participants in the case of the “German pilgrimage.”⁴

These chronicles and hagiographic texts need to be complemented by other, less literary material that might provide new insights into the lives, mind-frames and intentions of high medieval pilgrims. Private charters from the eleventh century often comply with these conditions better than narrative sources, because they provide individuals’ identities as well as their societal and economic background; they therefore offer relatively trustworthy information which can even serve for prosopographical studies. That being said, charters too present problems of their own.⁵ They were more often than not written by scribes and not by the issuer, so it is difficult to say whose voice we are hearing; these texts also follow rules and confinements – those of mediaeval diplomatics. The categories discernible in the charters are not necessarily those of modern scholarship, but those important to medieval men and women. However, private charters open a window to the mindsets of individual pilgrims and crusaders. At the same time these sources provide information about influences that operated on men’s minds and about wider trends of mentalité, because many documents written independently of each other are marked by similar language and ideas, thus providing evidence for the motivations behind pilgrimage in the eleventh century.

When it comes to the connection between pilgrimage and charter evidence, one type of charter stands out: medieval wills. These documents were drawn up under very concrete circumstances which are generally noted in their expositive clauses and narrationes, the most common of which was the testator’s ill health which led him or her to have a testament written. The second most frequent reason was an impending and long journey – a military expedition, a commercial trip or a pilgrimage – which necessarily brought about a certain danger to the traveller. Pilgrims’ wills therefore might provide valuable information about the motivations that lay behind the journey, even more so as they were usually penned before the traveller departed. They are therefore not contaminated by his or her later experience. Although inherently dispositive by nature, some wills would include a short expositive clause summarising the actor’s decision-making process and naming his or her motivations. Charters in general and wills in particular are therefore particularly useful sources for studying mediaeval intentionality, be it that of pilgrims or crusaders. As Marcus Bull fittingly formulated, charters “demonstrate how issues of motivation could be central to the production of the record at source.”⁶ This also holds true for the eleventh-century wills and related documents, such as notices concerning their execution or authentication charters.⁷

There are not many areas in Europe that can boast great numbers of eleventh-century charters, even fewer possess large quantities of testaments and fewer still hold many wills drawn up because of a journey to Jerusalem. On a comparative level, however, there is one region which is unusually fortunate in this respect: Catalonia. This small country in the north-east of the Iberian Peninsula is renowned for its exceptional quantity of original charter material from the ninth to twelfth centuries, including several thousand wills.⁸ Some of these documents were indeed composed on behalf of pilgrims – most of them before their departure for the Holy Land, some of them after the testator had died. This article is based on a survey of 90 private charters collected over a long period of time mainly by systematic inspection of source editions, sometimes also via findings in local archives. In numerical terms, this basis might not seem particularly large but it is, in fact, exceptional when compared with other regions or even realms such as England, France or Germany.⁹ It more than compensates for the very slim number of pertinent chronicles and travel accounts stemming from Catalonia.¹⁰

At first sight, the relationship between these sources and the crusades might seem distant at best, and not only for reasons of chronology. For, the Iberian peninsula in general and Catalonia in particular are areas traditionally believed to have had only minimal ties to crusading and to the Latin States of the Levant. It is assumed that ever since Pope Urban II wrote to the clergy and the barons of Catalonia in 1089 and 1096, forbidding them to travel to Jerusalem and requiring that they fight the Muslims in their own land instead,¹¹ Catalans had refrained from joining the crusades and focussed on the so-called “Reconquista.”¹² The fact that the Church repeatedly promised the combatants in Palestine and Iberia identical indulgences¹³ is said to have contributed to the seeming absence of Castilians, Leonese, Portuguese, Aragonese and Catalans in the Holy Land, and, indeed, until the ill-fated campaign led by James the Conqueror in 1269, large Iberian contingents did not take part in the crusades.¹⁴ Yet, a number of Iberian bishops participated in the Council of Clermont of November 1095,¹⁵ and, tellingly, several popes at the beginning of the twelfth century considered it necessary to repeat the prohibition against Iberians participating in the crusades.¹⁶

In fact, the call of Clermont did not go unheard in the Iberian Peninsula.¹⁷ The news of the Council and the pope’s sermon crossed the Pyrenees together with the bishops who participated in the event. Others met the pope and experienced his calling to the crusade in the weeks following the council during Urban’s trip to southern France. In the beginning of July 1096, the pope spent several days in Nîmes, where he both preached the cross and convened with at least eight high-ranking Iberian prelates: the archbishops of Toledo and Tarragona, the bishops of Girona, Elne and Burgos as well as the abbots of Cuxà, Banyoles and Ripoll.¹⁸ Furthermore, the papal legate and crusade preacher Amatus of Bordeaux can be identified in Aragon during this period.¹⁹ Trans-Pyrenean feudal or family ties such as those between Aquitaine and Aragon or Toulouse and Cerdanya must also be taken into account. Such is the case of William Jordan, count of Cerdanya, who fought in the company of his uncle and feudal overlord, Raymond of T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• ARTICLES
• REVIEWS
• Bulletin no. 35 of the SSCLE
• Guidelines for the Submission of Papers
• Membership Information