Crusades

Volume 5

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

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351985710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Europäische Geschichte des Mittelalters

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.

Volume 5 is notable for John's France's article, 'Two types of vision on the First Crusade: Stephen of Valence and Peter Bartholomew'.

Two Types of Vision on the First Crusade: Stephen of Valence and Peter Bartholomew

John France
Swansea University

Visions and visionaries always posed problems for the church. They were part of the very fabric of Christianity, but the visionary claimed direct contact with the God and, therefore circumvented and, implicitly, threatened the authority of the official hierarchy of the church. Holy men were always a potential threat. St. Simeon the Stylite (c. 396–459) held court for nearly forty years perched on a high column near Antioch in Syria, producing a rash of emulators whose indiscipline and excess had to be curbed by imperial legislation. They were sometimes linked to the Circumcelliones who terrorized North Africa.¹ The sense of righteousness which monasticism bred might easily lead to disorder and heresy. The monks from the Egyptian desert were all too ready to participate in the sack of the Serapeum, the greatest library of the ancient world, in 391. For this reason the church was deeply concerned to control monastic turbulence by strong discipline embodied in such rules as that of Pachomius and “The Master.”² In the church of the Roman Empire the bishop was the key officer, the guarantor of order amongst the faithful, whose truly Roman political spirit passed into medieval practice. It is no wonder that Pope Gregory I the Great (590–604) so strongly approved of the Rule of St. Benedict, for it firmly subordinated the potential turbulence of ascetic holy men to the power of the abbot and the local bishop; it domesticated monasticism and made it a buttress, not a challenge to the established social and religious order.³ Gregory of Tours was only too happy to record the ignominious death of a self-proclaimed Messiah. St. Boniface and the Frankish church were much troubled by Aldebert, a “charismatic holy man” in the eighth century.⁴

All too obviously, in the view of the official hierarchy, visionaries and wonderworkers offered only traps for the unwary. In the words of a modern authority: “The word of a visionary cannot be taken as certain proof that a vision was supernatural in origin” because such manifestations might be the result of “diabolical intervention” or “the pathological state of the individual.”⁵ But how to distinguish between good and evil manifestations? The Church claimed to be the sole arbiter, and it is a symptom of its growing confidence that from the tenth century the process of canonization was increasingly systematized and controlled through the papacy.⁶ It is hardly surprising that the problem of visions should be manifested on the First Crusade because it arose in an acute, and then recent, form from a great crisis in the affairs of the western church in which radical ideas about the role of monasticism and the church had been bruited.

The great reform of the Church, which culminated in the “Investiture Contest,” sprang from a demand for new and better standards of clerical behaviour within the church. There is a vigorous debate about how far the monastic reformers of the late tenth and early eleventh centuries, especially at Cluny, were concerned to change the Church as a whole. Some have argued that they were revolutionaries who saw themselves as “superior to bishops” and wanted “a society guided towards the good by truly pure men.” Others have taken the view that Cluny was primarily interested in purifying monasticism and its observance.⁷ But whatever view is taken of this controversy, Cluny’s condemnation of clerical corruption, and especially simony, had a very powerful impact on contemporaries. It was an institutionalized reproach to what many regarded as the corruption of the contemporary secular church, made the more powerful by the way in which monks enlisted visions and the supernatural in their support.⁸ In the ferment of ideas in the early eleventh century, heresy emerged. Leutard, the simple peasant who about 1000 dreamt that a swarm of bees entered his body “through nature’s secret orifices” attacked the role of the clergy and a tradition of heresy established itself in his diocese of Châlons-sur-Marne.⁹

But heresy was a relatively rare phenomenon. Far more important was the eremetic movement of the eleventh century which became highly influential. This was an age of spiritual renewal, out of which arose the great Orders of Citeaux and Chartreuse.¹⁰ It was also an age of radical experimentation and dissatisfaction with the established order, and many of those involved were sharply critical of churchmen, the church and its institutions, and spread their ideas by preaching. A notable example was Robert of Arbrissel (c. 1055–1117) who fled to the forest of Craon where there was a virtual colony of hermits including Bernard of Tiron and Vitalis of Savigny.¹¹ Robert is remembered as the founder of the abbey of Fontevraud but he rose to fame as a dynamic wandering popular preacher and was criticized by Bishop Marbode of Rennes for his savage anticlericalism:

In the sermons in which you are in the habit of teaching the vulgar crowds and unlearned men, not only, as is fitting, do you rebuke the vices of those who are present, but you also list, denounce, and attack, as is not fitting, the crimes of absent ecclesiastics … but perhaps it suits you that when, in the opinion of the common people the Church’s order is grown vile, you alone and your like are held in esteem.¹²

It was long thought that Urban II (1088–99) commissioned Robert to be a recruit for the crusade after he gave a sermon before him at the Council of Angers in early February 1096, but it seems more likely that the pope persuaded Robert to join the Augustinian house of La Roë as a means of curbing his excesses, and it was not until 1098 that Robert resumed his wandering life.¹³ There was always something subversive about Robert, who appointed an abbess, Petronilla, to rule his double house of Fontevraud, and this is possibly why he was never canonized despite the great prestige which later accrued to this foundation.¹⁴

Men like Robert saw their role as the purification of this world. Another was Peter the Hermit who was a great popular preacher with a vast following amongst the poor in Northern France and who, though never officially licensed by the pope, recruited and organized what is usually called “The People’s Crusade” which preceded the official crusade and came to grief in Asia Minor in 1096. He used to be regarded as the originator of the crusade, and recently an effort has been made to suggest that as such he played an independent role, but this has not been generally accepted.¹⁵ It is important to recognize that the title “People’s Crusade” is a gross misnomer. The expeditions to which we give that title were, in reality, no different in their social composition from many of the other contingents on the crusade. Numerous small forces lacked a great “Prince”, but subsequently attached themselves to one. The forces which Peter inspired arrived early at Constantinople and became associated with other groups, notably the Italians, to whom they were complete strangers. There is no evidence that Folkmar and his Saxons, whose expedition was broken up by the Hungarians in June 1096, had ever even met Peter. These disparate elements caused trouble at Constantinople and were shipped across to Asia Minor. They provoked the Turks of Nicaea and were heavily defeated. This is hardly surprising in view of their disparate nature and lack of a single leader. As a result, later chroniclers found it convenient to belittle and disparage them as social inferiors. However, they seem to have had knights and substantial men, including counts, in their ranks.¹⁶ Anna Comnena characterizes Peter and his followers as poor men, but her purpose was to create a picture of spiritual simplicity in contrast to the greed and ambition of Bohemond.¹⁷

We know remarkably little about Peter the Hermit. Albert of Aachen wrote shortly after the crusade and records that, while on pilgrimage, he had been scandalized by Islamic control of the Holy Sepulchre and had a vision of Christ telling him to preach its liberation. The Greek princess Anna Comnena later recalled a rather similar story. However, she wrote some forty years after the event and probably drew on recollections of Peter’s early arrival in Constantinople. Moreover, she would have wanted to suppress the fact that Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118) had asked the papacy for help in 1095, thereby helping to provoke the great expedition.¹⁸ Albert suggests that Peter was a preacher before his adventures in the Holy Land, and this is substantiated, at greater length, by Guibert of Nogent. Guibert did not go on the crusade himself, and used the work of an anonymous South Italian eyewitness, the Gesta Francorum, as his main source for the crusade, but drastically rewrote it, using other material to fill in gaps. He provides no account of Peter’s preaching of the crusade, but does describe his life as a wandering preacher whose rhetoric earned him lavish gifts which he gave to the poor, even to prostitutes. Clearly these gifts indicate that Peter’s appeal was much wider than merely to the poor. Guibert shares Marbod of Rennes’s contempt for the poor, and Albert of Aachen speaks of detestable people who went on the crusade led by a pig and a goat. But such aristocratic characterization of these expeditions should not be accepted at face value, and it is notable that Albert paints quite a flattering portrait of Peter.¹⁹

Such charismatic visionaries as Robert of Arbrissel and Peter the Hermit had a very wide appeal which continued over a long period of time. In the early twelfth century a popular preacher, Tanchelm, held Antwerp in thrall. This would not have been possible without support from substantial people. He had many successors elsewhere, some of them heretics, notably Peter Waldo whose Waldensian followers would persist through to the Reformation. Waldo was devoted to the ideal of apostolic simplicity, an idea su...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Crusades
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Two Types of Vision on the First Crusade: Stephen of Valence and Peter Bartholomew
• Vengeance and the Crusades
• The Military Orders as Monastic Orders
• La Vision des Ordres Religieux-Militaires par les Chrétiens Orientaux (Arméniens et Syriaques) au Moyen Age (du début du XIIe siècle au début du XIVe siècle)
• Conrad III and the Second Crusade: Retreat from Dorylaion?1
• New Evidence for the Frankish Study of Arabic Medical Texts in the Crusader Period
• Stephen, the Disciple of Philosophy, and the Exchange of Medical Learning in Antioch1
• The Religious Orders of Knighthood in Medieval Scandinavia: Historical and Archaeological Approaches
• The Thief's Cross: Crusade and Penance in Alan of Lille's Sermo de cruce domini
• There and Back Again: Crusaders in Motion, 1096–1291*
• The Crusader Castle of Toron: First Results of its Investigation
• Thanks to a Neighbour's Bad Reputation: Reconstructing an Area of Thirteenth-Century Acre*
• Reviews
• Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East Bulletin No. 26, 2006
• Guidelines for the Submission of Papers
• Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East Membership Information