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The Militant Eschatology of the Liturgy and the Origins of Crusade Ideology
On 27 November 1095, at an ecclesiastical council held at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade, in which it seems he enjoined the armed class of Christendom to take up arms, travel east, rescue Eastern Christians from the tyranny and torture of the Seljuk Turks, and (probably) recapture the Holy City of Jerusalem from the bondage of Muslim dominion. Urban was responding to a plea for help from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus I, whose lands in Anatolia were being overrun by the Seljuks, a Turkic people who, in the process of their migration westward, had converted to Islam. And the pope offered to compensate the arms-men of Christendom with the spiritual benefit of sin forgiveness. Anyone who would take up the journey could, in the language of the privilege that Urban issued, âsubstitute the journey for all penance for sin.â Urban then put AdhĂ©mar of LePuy, the papal legate, in charge of the crusadeâs ecclesiastical leadership. The response was overwhelming, far greater than anything that either the pope or the emperor had envisioned. Not limited to just the warrior class, men, women, and children took up the call, made a vow, and headed eastward. The rapidity with which the call to crusade was answered and mobilized is astonishing. Some of the contingents had left by the early months of 1096.
Very quickly, the crusade came to be seen as an army on pilgrimage to free Jerusalem, whose special emblem was the sign of the cross. In the account of a chronicler writing some three decades later, Pope Urban
instituted and ordered that soldiers and footmen, that is anyone who was able to go to Jerusalem for the purposes of delivering Jerusalem and the other churches of Asia from the power of pagans, for the love of God and in order to obtain the remission of all their sins, should set forth as one bearing their arms, ⊠and likewise he arranged that all going there should wear the sign of the cross marked on their clothing somewhere on the shoulder or on their front, by which they would show themselves to be religious travelers or pilgrims to anyone who would care and by this would not be impeded.
The account, of course, is retrospective, and we have no idea what Urban actually preached, but it is useful in identifying the ideological and mythic elements that came to be associated with the origins story of the First Crusade. For each of the elements credited to UrbanâJerusalem, pilgrimage, war, the crossâthere was an established liturgical and devotional context that had flourished in the century before the First Crusade. These traditions are central for understanding the role that liturgy played in the crusadesâboth as liturgical practices that would be performed on crusade and as traditions that provided a language and an ideological context crucial in the development of the language and ideology of crusades. The chants, texts, prayers, and readings would have been known to the clerics and laymen who went on crusade from their practice of the liturgy. And from their booksâbooks such as the recently discovered eleventh-century sacramentary from the cathedral church of LePuy en Velay, AdhĂ©mar of LePuyâs own cathedral in the heart of the Auvergne, which was itself at the heart of the crusader movement, and which we will return to throughout this chapter.
This chapter is about the salvific ideals and the language provided by the liturgy that would bear on the ideology and practice of crusade. It treats the period before 1095 in order to demonstrate the richness of the tradition that bequeathed a language of service, sacrifice, militancy, victory, and eschatology, and argues that the core elements of crusade ideology were furnished by the liturgy of early medieval Francia. A bellicose language pervades these texts. Devotion to Christ, remission of sin, and victory over the enemy are core themes that, looking backward from a later date through the lens of crusade, will seem recognizable as furnishing the wellspring of ideals that would constitute the building blocks of crusade ideology. The ways in which the liturgy imparted rites and ideals to the crusaders is a central part of how crusading was constituted as the first lay religious movement, a movement indebted to monastic ideals and framed through a monastic vocabulary, and should be set alongside such other phenomena as the Peace of God and the Gregorian Reform movement as part of the culture and context that invented crusading. The discourse articulated by the liturgy in the medieval West constructed the devotional imagination in which the crusades took root. It was the liturgy that provided the eschatological vision of time and history into which the crusaders jumped, and out of which an ideology of crusade was built.
The Image of Jerusalem in the Western Liturgy
We begin with Jerusalem. Jerusalem was always present in the liturgy and in the churches that purported to be images of the new Jerusalem. This was especially but not exclusively true of the Advent-Christmas-Epiphany cycle and during the Easter cycle. But this was the Jerusalem of the future, the Jerusalem of the heavenly kingdom. Paul Bradshaw opened an essay on âthe Influence of Jerusalem on Christian liturgyâ by writing:
A search of Christian liturgical texts from all time periods and in all ecclesiastical traditions reveals the regular occurrence of reference to Jerusalem, but the word is almost invariably employed as a symbol of the eschatological age to come, picking up on the language of the book of Revelation, which speaks of ânew Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from Godâ (21:2; see also 3:12, 21:10); of St. Paul, who refers to âthe Jerusalem aboveâ (Gal. 4:26); and of the Letter to the Hebrews, which talks of âthe heavenly Jerusalemâ (12:22).
Jerusalem and its cognate, Sion, permeated the language and imagery of the liturgical cursus. This was in part because so much of the liturgy was built upon scripture, and in particular the Psalms, which were preoccupied with the holiness of Jerusalem as Godâs city and had been, since Saint Benedict, recited in full in the monastic rite each week. The Psalms, in addition to being the basis for the core liturgical cycle of the office, bequeathed its poetry to a huge number of antiphons, verses, responsories, and chants in the liturgy. Moreover, the use throughout the liturgy of the prophets who had written about the exile from Jerusalem and the desire to returnâespecially Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Danielâopened up the meaning of Jerusalem (and Sion and Israel) to eschatological interpretation. The possibilities of this interpretation were echoed at various points throughout the year. The readings for Advent, for instance, ran through Isaiah, beginning with Isaiah 1:1, âThe prophet complains about the sins of Judah and Jerusalem.â The prophetsâ Jerusalem became the Church, and ultimately the heavenly city. But it was more than this. The prophets furnished almost endless references to a desired, longed-for Jerusalem that was incorporated in its Christianized interpretation throughout the divine office.
The liturgy, building on a deep patristic theology establishing the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, was the mechanism by which material from the Old Testament was given Christian meaning. Responsories (chants that follow or ârespond toâ a liturgical reading) and other verses commented on and thus interpreted scriptural readings and other prayers. Antiphons were chosen in the office to shape and guide the core idea of a psalm. The liturgy thus was constantly engaged in an exegetical discourse with itself and the scripture on which it was based. And in turn, the meaning of Jerusalem in the liturgy could be informed both by the multiple ways of reading scripture (literally, historically, allegorically, tropologically) and on deep traditions of exegesis that informed these readings. John Cassian (d. 435), glossing Galatians, had long before explained that Jerusalem should be understood according to history as the city of the Jews; according to allegory as the ...
