Crusades

Volume 3

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

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351985772
• Edition: 1
• 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.

The third issue of the Crusades features articles from Denys Pringle on Crusader inscriptions, Bejamin Z. Kadar on the massacre of 15 July 1099 and Peter Frankopan on co-operation between Constantinople and Rome before the First Crusade.

Co-operation between Constantinople and Rome before the First Crusade: a Study of the Convergence of Interests in Croatia in the late Eleventh Century¹

Peter Frankopan
Oxford University

While Urban II's call for the knights of western Europe to rise up and take part in what later became known as the First Crusade has provoked a great deal of interest from modern historians, the eastern context for this phenomenon has been largely ignored. It was after all Jerusalem which was the goal of the crusaders themselves –something which is made abundantly and categorically clear from the contemporary charter evidence from France – and, moreover, it was the deteriorating situation in the Holy Land and in Asia Minor which had provided the impetus for Urban's call to arms in the first place.²

Certainly Urban himself must have been aware that passage to Jerusalem was becoming increasingly difficult in the 1080s, for several leading figures in early medieval Europe had reached and returned from Palestine in the years immediately before the First Crusade. We know, for example, that Robert of Flanders and Peter the Hermit had visited the holy places in the decade before the crusade.³ What we can establish from a wide collection of primary sources – particularly in the form of church charters – makes it plain that the level of contact between western Europe and the East in general and with Jerusalem in particular had become extensive indeed by the end of the eleventh century.⁴

In spite of the worsening political situation in the East in the 1090s, however, it took the involvement of another individual to prompt the pope to take action. According to the chronicle of Bernold, envoys arrived from Constantinople at the Council of Piacenza in March 1095 with a desperate plea to the pope for aid. After listening to what the Byzantine ambassadors had to say, Urban II resolved to do what he could, promising that he would find knights to help fight against the pagans.⁵ This led inexorably to the moment six months later when the pope stood in a field at Clermont in central France, issuing a call to arms to the knighthood of western Europe.⁶ It is worth stressing that the six months prior to this had seen Urban canvassing widely for support in central and northern Italy, and, above all, in France.⁷

No less important to note, therefore, is that this was not the first time that the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, had approached the pope for military assistance. Confronted by a series of increasingly dangerous raids by Pecheneg steppe nomads in Thrace and on the area to the north of Constantinople in the late 1080s and at the start of the following decade, Alexius had sent to Urban to see if the latter would be prepared and able to send reinforcements to swell the ranks of the imperial forces.⁸ Although we cannot be sure that any such reinforcements arrived, the principal source for this period, the Alexiad of Anna Comnena, makes it plain that the emperor was waiting for the imminent arrival of help from Rome before he began his final, successful, assault on the nomads.⁹

This earlier contact between Alexius and the pope is of course of some significance – even if we know little about what the envoys said on this occasion, or about what Urban's response to them was. However, the fact that the emperor was prepared – and seemingly able – to seek military help from Rome provides an important precedent for his appeal only a few years later at Piacenza. Certainly, we know that there had been other appeals by Byzantine emperors to the papacy, most notably that of Michael VII Doukas to Gregory VII in the early 1070s.¹⁰ But what makes Alexius' appeal different is that fact that it was part of a pattern where western Europe was used and seen as a pool of resources for the Byzantine emperor to draw on, provided, of course, that he could couch his appeals and requests for help in a way which could be both easily understood and well received by the target(s).

It was not only the pope with whom Alexius made contact in his search for support and above all military assistance in the years leading up to the crusade. We know for example that the Byzantine emperor was in direct contact with a number of magnates throughout western Europe, cajoling, requesting and imploring for help. The chronicle of Frutolf tells us that Alexius sent a series of letters to (unspecified) aristocrats in western Europe immediately before the First Crusade, reporting on the increasingly bleak and difficult situation in the East – by which we should understand not only the Holy Land, but also Asia Minor too.¹¹ Ekkehard of Aura says much the same in his chronicle, as does Guibert of Nogent.¹²

The most famous piece of evidence here, of course, is the letter sent by Alexius to Count Robert I of Flanders some time at the start of the 1090s, and certainly well before the crusade.¹³ The authenticity of this letter has been much debated, and it has been regularly claimed that the missive is a (later) forgery.¹⁴ There seems little reason, however, to dismiss the letter out of hand, and as has been shown convincingly in recent years, much of the content of the letter strikes a chord with what we know about Byzantium's contact with the West in this period. Crucially too, the fact that it provides an accurate and reliable summary of Byzantium's predicament in the early 1090s suggests clearly that it might very well have originated from Constantinople around this time. As such, the letter provides an important insight into the thinking and the workings of the emperor immediately before the First Crusade.¹⁵

There is some significance therefore to the fact that we know that Alexius had previously enjoyed personal contact with Robert of Flanders. Robert had met the Byzantine emperor on his way back from Jerusalem at the end of the 1080s, and had promised to send Alexius support in the form of armed knights on his return home.¹⁶ Although we cannot be sure what form the emperor's request for help took, this clearly occurred against a backdrop of sustained pressure on Byzantium, apparently in Asia Minor, and certainly in Thrace and to the area north of Constantinople.

It is worth stressing, too, that knights duly did arrive from Flanders at the start of the 1090s, and played an important part in the emperor's dealings with the Pechenegs and, for that matter, in the defence of Nicomedia against the Seljuk Turks.¹⁷ Although it is not clear whether Alexius had followed up his meeting with Robert with any correspondence, the level of contact between the two certainly points to a possibility, if not a likelihood, that the Byzantine emperor would look again to Flanders and to Robert – who had helped him in the past – for armed men to bolster the imperial forces at a time of need.

This alone is an important indicator of the fact that Alexius was not slow to see the value, as well as the possibilities, of tapping into the resources of western Europe at a time when concepts like knightly piety and military service as devotion were fast establishing the vibrant momentum which would in turn fuel and feed the crusade movement. It goes without saying that his desire to attract knights from the West came at a time when life was becoming increasingly difficult in Byzantium, where economic, social and military resources were spread thin indeed by the late eleventh century. What makes his contact with Robert of Flanders particularly interesting, therefore, are the methods to which the emperor resorted in order to attract knights to make the journey to Constantinople and beyond.

The letter to Robert makes great play, for example, of the damage being done by pagans – evidently not only Muslim Turks and Turkomen, but also Pecheneg steppe nomads too. The letter also stresses that knights would be performing a specifically Christian duty by offering their service to the Byzantine emperor, by driving out the infidels from churches and from other holy places.¹⁸ In this way, the letter offers an invaluable precursor of the insight into the level of understanding which Alexius had of the prevailing knightly mentality of the West and, as such, provides an important example of the emperor seeking to elicit support directly from magnates in Europe without going through the papacy.

Alexius' attempt to deal directly with individuals with whom he had previously had personal contact is also useful here, for it puts the emperor's appeal to the pope into the more appropriate light of being a measure of some desperation. That is to say, that the dispatch of envoys to Urban II resulted from the fact that Alexius' other measures and other efforts to rally support had either not been effective, or, simply, that he needed considerably more men and more support than could be gathered from individuals such as Robert of Flanders.

In this respect, it is worth underlining the fact that for all the comments of the author of the Alexiad that the emperor had been caught by surprise by the arrival of the first wave of crusaders in Byzantium, he does not seem to have been under-prepared for the even larger numbers who were to follow in the second half of 1096 and the first half of 1097. Indeed, there are few, if any, indications that the various expeditions which converged on the imperial capital, led by Godfrey of Bouillon, Robert of Normandy, Raymond of Toulouse, Robert II of Flanders, Hugh of Vermandois or Bohemond, experienced any problems of supply during their journey across the western part of Byzantium – nor, for that matter, on their way from Nicaea to Antioch. This provides a telling indication of the fact that Alexius had been expecting large numbers of men, and that he had made the logistical arrangements accordingly.¹⁹

The letter to Robert of Flanders is therefore of crucial importance in establishing how Alexius went about trying to muster support before the crusade, in showing the ways in which he sought to do so, and, no less importantly, in placing the crusade itself in a fuller context – at least from a Byzantine perspective. It is worth noting, then, that there is another analogous piece of evidence which has often been overlooke...

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