The Crusades

Thomas Asbridge

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780061981364
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire antique

The Crusades is an authoritative, accessible single-volume history of the brutal struggle for the Holy Land in the Middle Ages. Thomas Asbridge—a renowned historian who writes with "maximum vividness" (Joan Acocella, The New Yorker )—covers the years 1095 to 1291 in this big, ambitious, readable account of one of the most fascinating periods in history. From Richard the Lionheart to the mighty Saladin, from the emperors of Byzantium to the Knights Templar, Asbridge's book is a magnificent epic of Holy War between the Christian and Islamic worlds, full of adventure, intrigue, and sweeping grandeur.

I

THE COMING OF THE CRUSADES

1

HOLY WAR, HOLY LAND

On a late November morning in the year 1095, Pope Urban II delivered a sermon that would transform the history of Europe. His rousing words transfixed the crowd that had gathered in a small field outside the southern French town of Clermont, and in the months that followed his message reverberated across the West, igniting an embittered holy war that would endure for centuries to come.

Urban declared that Christianity was in dire peril, threatened by invasion and appalling oppression. The Holy City of Jerusalem was now in the hands of Muslims–‘a people…alien to God’, bent upon ritual torture and unspeakable desecration. He called upon Latin Europe to rise up against this supposedly savage foe as ‘soldiers of Christ’, reclaiming the Holy Land and releasing eastern Christians from ‘servitude’. Enticed by the promise that this righteous struggle would purge their souls of sin, tens of thousands of men, women and children marched out of the West to wage war against the Muslim world in the First Crusade.¹

POPE URBAN AND THE IDEA OF CRUSADING

Urban II was perhaps sixty years old when he launched the First Crusade in 1095. The son of northern French nobility, and a former cleric and Cluniac monk, he became pope in 1088, at a time when the papacy, reeling from a rancorous and protracted power struggle with the emperor of Germany, stood on the brink of overthrow. So parlous was Urban’s position that it took him six years to reassert control over Rome’s Lateran Palace, the traditional seat of papal authority. Yet, through cautious diplomacy and the adoption of measured, rather than confrontational, policies of reform, the new pope oversaw a gradual renaissance in the prestige and influence of his office. By 1095 this slow rejuvenation had begun, but the papacy’s notional right to act as head of the Latin Church and spiritual overlord to every Christian in western Europe was still far from realised.

It was against this background of partial recovery that the idea of the First Crusade was born. In March 1095 Urban was presiding over an ecclesiastical council in the northern Italian city of Piacenza when ambassadors from Byzantium arrived. They bore an appeal from the Greek Christian Emperor Alexius I Comnenus, a ruler whose astute and assertive governance had arrested decades of internal decline within the great eastern empire. Exorbitant programmes of taxation had refilled the imperial treasury in Constantinople, restoring Byzantium’s aura of authority and munificence, but Alexius still faced an array of foreign enemies, including the Muslim Turks of Asia Minor. He thus dispatched a petition for military aid to the council in Piacenza, urging Urban to send a detachment of Latin troops to help repel the threat posed by Islam. Alexius probably hoped for little more than a token force of Frankish mercenaries, a small army that could be readily shaped and directed. In fact, over the next two years, his empire would be practically overrun by a tide of humankind.

The Greek emperor’s request appears to have chimed with notions already fermenting in Urban II’s mind, and through the spring and summer that followed the pope refined and developed these ideas, envisaging an endeavour that might fulfil a broader array of ambitions: a form of armed pilgrimage to the East, what is now called a ‘crusade’. Historians have sometimes characterised Urban as the unwitting instigator of this momentous venture, suggesting that he expected only a few hundred knights to answer his call to arms. But in reality he seems to have had a fairly shrewd sense of the potential scale and scope of this enterprise and to have laid the foundations of widespread recruitment with some assiduity.

Urban recognised that developing the idea of an expedition to aid Byzantium offered a chance not only to defend eastern Christendom and improve relations with the Greek Church, but also to reaffirm and expand Rome’s authority and to harness and redirect the destructive bellicosity of Christians living in the Latin West. This grand scheme would be launched as part of a broader campaign to extend the reach of papal influence beyond the confines of central Italy, into Urban’s birthplace and homeland, France. From July 1095 onwards he began a lengthy preaching tour north of the Alps–the first such visit by a pope for close to half a century–and announced that a major Church council would be held in November at Clermont, in the Auvergne region of central France. Through the summer and early autumn Urban visited a succession of prominent monasteries, including his own former house of Cluny, cultivating support for Rome and preparing the ground for the unveiling of his ‘crusading’ idea. He also primed two men who would play central roles in the coming expedition: Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, a leading Provençal churchman and an ardent supporter of the papacy; and Count Raymond of Toulouse, southern France’s richest and most powerful secular lord.

By November the pope was ready to reveal his plans. Twelve archbishops, eighty bishops and ninety abbots congregated in Clermont for the largest clerical assembly of Urban’s pontificate. Then, after nine days of general ecclesiastical debate, the pope announced his intention to deliver a special sermon. On 27 November, hundreds of spectators crowded into a field outside the city to hear him speak.²

The sermon at Clermont

At Clermont Urban called upon the Latin West to take up arms in pursuit of two linked goals. First, he proclaimed the need to protect Christendom’s eastern borders in Byzantium, emphasising the bond of Christian fraternity shared with the Greeks and the supposedly imminent threat of Muslim invasion. According to one account, he urged his audience ‘to run as quickly as you can to the aid of your brothers living on the eastern shore’ because ‘the Turks…have overrun them right up to the Mediterranean Sea’. But the epic endeavour of which Urban spoke did not end with the provision of military aid to Constantinople. Instead, in a visionary masterstroke, he broadened his appeal to include an additional target, one guaranteed to stir Frankish hearts. Fusing the ideals of warfare and pilgrimage, he unveiled an expedition that would forge a path to the Holy Land itself, there to win back possession of Jerusalem, the most hallowed site in the Christian cosmos. Urban evoked the unparalleled sanctity of this city, this ‘navel of the world’, stating that it was ‘the [fountain] of all Christian teaching’, the place ‘in which Christ lived and suffered’.³

In spite of the undoubted resonance of these twinned objectives, like any ruler recruiting for war the pope still needed to lend his cause an aura of legitimate justification and burning urgency, and here he faced a problem. Recent history offered no obvious event that might serve to focus and inspire a vengeful tide of enthusiasm. Yes, Jerusalem was ruled by Muslims, but this had been the case since the seventh century. And, while Byzantium may have been facing a deepening threat of Turkish aggression, western Christendom was not on the brink of invasion or annihilation at the hands of Near Eastern Islam. With no appalling atrocity or immediate threat to draw upon, Urban chose to cultivate a sense of immediacy and incite a wrathful hunger for retribution by demonising the enemy of his proposed ‘crusade’.

Muslims therefore were portrayed as subhuman savages, bent upon the barbaric abuse of Christendom. Urban described how Turks ‘were slaughtering and capturing many [Greeks], destroying churches and laying waste to the kingdom of God’. He also asserted that Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being abused and exploited by Muslims, with the rich being stripped of their wealth by illegal taxes, and the poor subjected to torture:

The cruelty of these impious men goes even to the length that, thinking the wretches have eaten gold or silver, they either put scammony in their drink and force them to vomit or void their vitals, or–and this is unspeakable–they stretch asunder the coverings of all the intestines after ripping open their stomachs with a blade and reveal with horrible mutilation whatever nature keeps secret.

Christians living under Muslim rule in the Levant were said to have been reduced to a state of ‘slavery’ by ‘sword, rapine and flame’. Prey to constant persecution, these unfortunates might suffer forced circumcision, protracted disembowelment or ritualised immolation. ‘Of the appalling violation of women’, the pope reportedly reflected, it would be ‘more evil to speak than to keep silent’. Urban appears to have made extensive use of this form of graphic and incendiary imagery, akin to that which, in a modern-day setting, might be associated with war crimes or genocide. His accusations bore little or no relation to the reality of Muslim rule in the Near East, but it is impossible to gauge whether the pope believed his own propaganda or entered into a conscious campaign of manipulation and distortion. Either way, his explicit dehumanisation of the Muslim world served as a vital catalyst to the ‘crusading’ cause, and further enabled him to argue that fighting against an ‘alien’ other was preferable to war between Christians and within Europe.⁴

Pope Urban’s decision to condemn Islam would have dark and enduring consequences in the years to come. But it is important to recognise that, in reality, the notion of conflict with the Muslim world was not written into the DNA of crusading. Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.*

The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist.

Urban’s genius was to construct the idea of ‘crusading’ within the framework of existing religious practice, thus ensuring that, in eleventh-century terms at least, the connection he established between warfare and salvation made clear, rational sense. In 1095, Latin Christians were accustomed to the idea that punishment owed through sinfulness might be cancelled out by confession and the performance of penitential activities, like prayer, fasting or pilgrimage. At Clermont, Urban fused the familiar notion of a salvific expedition with the more audacious concept of fighting for God, urging ‘everyone of no matter what class…knight or foot-soldier, rich or poor’ to join what was to be, in essence, an armed pilgrimage. This monumental endeavour, laden with danger and the threat of intense suffering, would take its participants to the very gates of Jerusalem, Christendom’s premier pilgrimage destination. As such, it promised to be an experience imbued with overwhelming redemptive potency; functioning as a ‘super’ penance, capable of scouring the spirit of any transgression.

From the rape of the Holy City by an alien enemy to the promise of a new path to redemption, the pope conjured a persuasive and emotive blend of images and ideas in support of his call to arms. The effect on his audience appears to have been electric, leaving ‘the eyes of some bathed with tears, [while others] trembled’. In what must have been a pre-planned move, Adhémar, bishop of Le Puy, was the first to step forward to commit to the cause. On the following day the bishop was proclaimed papal legate (Urban’s official representative) for the coming expedition. As its spiritual leader, he was expected to promote the pope’s agenda, not least the policy of détente with the Greek Church of Byzantium. At the same time, messengers arrived from Raymond of Toulouse proclaiming the count’s own support for the cause. Urban’s sermon had been a resounding success, and over the next seven months he followed it up with an extended preaching tour, which saw his message crisscross France.⁵

And yet, in spite of the fact that Clermont must be regarded as the First Crusade’s moment of genesis, it would be wrong to regard Urban II as the sole architect of the ‘crusading ideal’. Previous historians have rightly emphasised his debt to the past, not least in relation to Pope Gregory VII’s pioneering exploration of holy war theory. But it is equally important to recognise that the idea of the First Crusade–its nature, intentions and rewards–underwent ongoing, largely organic development throughout the expedition. Indeed, this process even continued after the event, as the world sought to interpret and understand such an epochal episode. It is all too easy to imagine the First Crusade as a single, well-ordered host, driven on to Jerusalem by Urban’s impassioned preaching. In reality, the months and years that followed November 1095 saw disjointed waves of departure. Even what we commonly term the ‘main armies’ of the crusade began the first phase of their journey not as a single force, but rather as a rough conglomeration of smaller contingents, gradually feeling their way towards shared goals and systems of governance.

Within a month of the pope’s first sermon, popular (and often unsanctioned) preachers had begun to proclaim the call to crusade across Europe. In their demagogic hands some of the subtleties surrounding the spiritual rewards associated with the expedition–what would come to be known as the crusading ‘indulgence’–seem to have been eroded. Urban had likely intended that the remission offered would only apply to the temporal punishment for confessed sins; a rather complex formula, but one that adhered to the niceties of Church law. Later events suggest that many crusaders thought they had been given assured guarantees of heavenly salvation and thus believed that those who died during the campaign became sacred martyrs. Such notions continued to inform thinking about the crusading experience for centuries to come, establishing a gnawing rift between official and popular conceptions of these holy wars.

Notably, Pope Urban II did not invent the term ‘crusade’. The expedition he launched at Clermont was so novel, and in some ways still so embryonic in its conception, that there was no word with which it could be described. Contemporaries generally termed this ‘crusade’ simply an iter (journey) or peregrinatio (pilgrimage). It was not until the close of the twelfth century that more specific terminology developed, in the form of the word crucesignatus (one signed with the cross) for a ‘crusader’, and the eventual adoption of the French term croisade, which roughly translates as ‘the way of the cross’. For the sake of convention and clarity, historians have adopted the term ‘crusade’ for the Christian holy wars launched from 1095 onwards, but we should be aware that this lends a somewhat misleading aura of coherence and conformity to the early ‘crusades’.⁶

The call of the cross

In the months that followed the Council of Clermont, the crusading message spread throughout western Europe, evoking an unprecedented reaction. While Pope Urban broadcast his message throughout France, bishops from across the Latin world who had attended his original sermon took the call back to their own dioceses.

The cause was also taken up by popular, rabble-rousing preachers, largely unsanctioned and unregulated by the Church. Most famous and remarkable of these was Peter the Hermit. Probably originating from a poor background in Amiens (north-eastern France), he became renowned for his austere, itinerant lifestyle, repellent appearance and unusual eating habits–one contemporary noted that ‘he lived on wine and fish; he hardly ever, or never, ate bread’. By modern standards he might be deemed a vagabond, but among the poorer classes of eleventh-century France he was revered as a prophet. Such was his sanctity that his followers even collected the hairs of his mule as relics. A Greek contemporary noted: ‘As if he had sounded a divine voice in the hearts of all, Peter the Hermit inspired the Franks from everywhere to gather together with their weapons, horses and other military equipment.’ He must have been a truly inspirational orator–within six months of Clermont he had gathered an army, largely made up of poor rabble, numbering in excess of 15,000. In history this force, alongside a number of other contingents from Germany, has become known as the ‘People’s Crusade’. Spurred on by crusading fervour, its various elements set off for the Holy Land in spring 1096, months before any other army, making ill-disciplined progress towards Constantinople. Along the way, some of these ‘crusaders’ concluded that they might as well combat the ‘enemies of Christ’ closer to home, and thus carried out terrible massacres of Rhineland Jews. Almost as soon as the People’s Crusade crossed into Muslim territory they were annihilated, although Peter the Hermit survived.⁷

This first wave of the crusade may have ended in failure, but, back in the West, larger armies were gathering. Public rallies, in which massed audiences were bombarded with emotive rhetoric, prompted fevered recruitment, and crusading enthusiasm also seems to have been propagated more informally through kinship groups, networks of papal supporters and the links between monastic communities and the nobility. Historians continue to dispute the numbers involved, primarily because of the unreliability of wildly inflated contemporary estimates (some of which exceed half a million people). Our best guess is that somewhere between 60,000 and 100,000 Latin Christians set off on the First Crusade, of which 7,000 to 10,000 were knights, perhaps 35,000 to 50,000 infantry troops and the remaining tens of thousands non-combatants, women and children. What is certain is that the call to crusade elicited an extraordinary response, the scale of which stunned the medieval world. Not since the distant glories of Rome had military forces of this size been assembled.⁸

At the heart of these armies were aristocratic knights, the emerging martial elite of the Middle Ages.* Pope Urban knew only too well the anxiety of these Christian warriors, trapped in a worldly profession imbued with violence, but taught by the Church that sinful warfare would lead to damnation. One contemporary observed:

God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of kni...