God's War: A New History of the Crusades (14 page)

This was obvious with the employment of the cross as military banner, personal insignia and mystical symbol; part relic, part totem, part uniform. The ceremony instituted at Clermont tapped into another well of traditional devotion conjured up by the Crucifixion and Christ’s command: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24; cf. Luke 15:26: ‘And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple’). Two eyewitnesses later reported Urban use this invocation, as did a veteran of the expedition itself who probably heard of Urban’s appeal some months after Clermont. The theme of following Christ was a standard of eleventh-century eremitic (the ideal of the recluse) and revivalist rhetoric. On a popular as well as elite level, church reform was pursued by evangelists living and preaching a return to the Apostolic life. The idea was not confined to the Jerusalem journey; it inspired eremitical groups such as the new religious communities of Molesme and Cîteaux established in Burgundy before and during the First Crusade as well as the influential Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the Order of Fontevrault, whose preaching tours coincided with Urban’s. Closer to the papacy, Peter Damian (d. 1072), hermit and cardinal, who exerted a strong influence on successive popes for a generation from the 1040s, was an enthusiast for the Jerusalem pilgrimage who propagated the cult of the cross. The two went together as symbols of practical and mystical remission of sin and redemption. From his Jerusalem pilgrimage of 1026–7, the saintly Abbot Richard of St Vanne of Verdun returned with a piece of the True Cross hanging in a bag around his neck.
²⁹
By the 1090s many abbeys had received such relics from pilgrims, not least those, such as Moissac, that were active in support of both pilgrimage and crusade; as Urban’s consecration of Marmoutier indicated, such relics were sought after.

The use of the symbol of the cross at Clermont signalled a pivotal
concern for Jerusalem. Urban himself certainly presided over cross-giving at Tours (March 1096) and probably Le Mans (February), and it is likely that he or his agents distributed crosses wherever he preached. Ceremonies conducted by Urban’s deputies, by local clergy or unofficially proliferated. Apparently at one such occasion at Rouen a riot ensued. Using relics of the cross as a prop to encourage participation, as Urban had done at Marmoutier, became fashionable. It could backfire. An English annalist described how, during the preaching of the Jerusalem expedition, a French abbot constructed his own cross, passing it off as having been made by God: as a punishment, he was afflicted with cancer.
³⁰
It is an indication of the independent role assumed by Peter the Hermit, possibly retrospectively, that he carried as a preaching aid a letter from heaven rather than a relic of the cross which, within a year of Clermont, had swept all other symbols aside. Giving the cross was simple and non-discriminatory. Unlike the granting of the symbols of pilgrimage, which assumed a contractual imposition of a penance by a priest, in the first flush of the new ritual, presenting crosses was not a monopoly of those in holy orders. In June 1096, at Amalfi in Apulia, as a carefully staged demonstration of piety and power, the Italian-Norman lord Bohemund of Taranto provided crosses for his men. Although never becoming the exclusive preserve of holy warriors, wearing the cross was immediately distinctive. At Amalfi, Bohemund had been particularly struck by the crosses worn by passing crusaders. Those in the army to Jerusalem themselves referred to recruits who had not yet fulfilled their vows as being ‘signed with the holy cross’ while in 1098 they wrote to Urban himself that he had ‘ordered us to follow Christ carrying our crosses’.
³¹
For others these badges carried more sinister implications. One of the words employed by Hebrew chroniclers to describe the perpetrators of the Rhineland pogroms of 1096 translates as ‘those bearing insignia’, signs of an obsession with the Crucifixion and vengeance on those allegedly responsible who still denied Christ’s divinity.
³²
For Christian warrior and persecuted Jew, the cross was definitive.

Urban’s message delivered at Clermont and repeated in sermons and letters over the next three years, emerged clearly: penitential warfare to rescue Jerusalem and the eastern churches from Islam; the liberation of the eastern church after centuries of bondage with the implication of the restoration of fraternal unity with, as one eyewitness at Clermont later had it, ‘blood-brothers’;
³³
the prospect of the remission of all sins, as
Urban clearly stated in December 1095, for those warriors who had taken the cross in sign of their acceptance of their duty to follow Christ; the obligation to revenge the loss of Christ’s Holy Land as a debt of honour; the realization of papal leadership of Christendom; the transformation of a sinful military aristocracy into a godly order. It is not entirely clear how far this was from what Alexius I had envisaged when he despatched yet another embassy to the pope early in 1095, but it is certain that Urban’s scheme owed more to his own rather than the Greek’s designs. Not the least remarkable feature of the inception of the Jerusalem expedition was that the
casus belli
was the sole invention of the aggressors, almost entirely unimagined by their target. In the west, Urban’s penitential war marked a significant step on the path towards incorporating all Christendom into a
militia Dei
against unbelievers and sinners.

Urban called for a penitential holy war rather than, as many have maintained, specifically an armed pilgrimage. While no authentic account of the Clermont speech exists, the council’s Jerusalem decree and Urban’s surviving letters from the period emphasized the spiritually meritorious temporal goal of the expedition, the liberation of the eastern churches and that of Jerusalem. The method to be employed was unequivocally military. In a letter to his supporters in Flanders written days after the end of the Clermont assembly, Urban talked of the expedition in terms of a
procinctus
, a military undertaking.
³⁴
To the monks of Vallembrosa a year later he referred to his hope that the knights who set out ‘might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom’, warning the monks not to join up ‘either to bear arms or go on this journey’. Urban was remembered as calling for an armed struggle in his preaching at Limoges in December 1095. Count Fulk of Anjou, who entertained Urban in March 1096, shortly afterwards noted how the pope had exhorted recruits ‘to go to Jerusalem to hunt the pagan people who had occupied the city’. Many of those who received the pope’s message of liberating Jersualem by force understood his meaning clearly enough, as a Gascon charter put it, ‘to fight and to kill’ those who had defiled the scene of the Resurrection. The countess of Flanders recalled in 1097 how the Holy Spirit had inflamed the heart of her husband, Count Robert II, to curb the perfidy of the Turks with armed force. In the surviving letters of the crusaders, the sense of the army as a militia rather
than a pilgrimage is strong. When Pope Paschal II announced the capture of Jerusalem to the French clergy in December 1099, he described the expedition as a
Christiana militia
, only the following April adding the word
peregrinatio
and the language of pilgrimage.
³⁵

For Urban, holy war and its associated remission of confessed sin needed no additional justification; he claimed the authority of God. The Clermont decree avoided any direct reference to pilgrimage. The Clermont ceremony of taking the cross appeared deliberately novel, independent of the rite performed by departing pilgrims.
Libertas ecclesiae
by force needed no further sanction, as the Investiture Wars of Gregory VII had shown – at least to the radicals at the Papal Curia, of whom Urban was one. It has been argued that the oblique language of Urban’s letters, using words such as
labor
,
via
and
iter
, implied pilgrimage. Rather, they implied an equally meritorious penitential military alternative to pilgrimage. Overt language of pilgrimage was avoided or ignored by Urban in his own correspondence, the closest evidence for what he may have been thinking. Urban’s own words explicitly and unequivocally described holy war, in the style of Gregory VII; they did not refer explicitly to an armed pilgrimage even if he were conscious of the tempting parallel. However, the sacralizing of war in all its aspects, shedding blood, killing, securing booty and plunder, appeared extreme and for some, especially among the clergy, no doubt disconcerting. The point was made by the famous battle cry of the hard-pressed crusaders at the battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097 as recorded by a widely circulated anonymous author who gave the impression of being an eyewitness: ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in God and the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’.
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This was not, as many have assumed, a surrender to material greed. Instead, the chronicler was attempting to convince his audience of the spiritual legitimacy of the form of warfare in all its practical ramifications, in recognition, perhaps, of its contentious nature.

Other witnesses, such as Bishop Gaston of Cahors or Abbot Geoffrey of Vendôme, took Urban’s holy war and, whether or not the pope intended it, by analogy interpreted it as a form of pilgrimage, a familiar and more clerically palatable model.
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This was facilitated by the goal of the enterprise being the supreme pilgrimage destination, Jerusalem. The association with pilgrimage diluted the radicalism of Urban’s message, even if it set up an inherent conceptual contradiction by linking
extreme violence with a previously pacific activity. Earlier stories of pilgrims carrying arms for defence and fighting attackers, as on the German pilgrimage of 1064–5, simply did not embrace the idea of pilgrims whose whole purpose was to fight. The appeal of thinking of the Jerusalem expedition as a pilgrimage was obvious; the typology of journeying, penance and remission of sins was recognizable, demonstrated by the hordes of non-combatant pilgrims who tagged along with the armed forces. From the evidence of some charters, a few crusaders’ letters, such as those of Count Stephen of Blois, and early chronicle accounts, it is clear that this conservative approach, probably peddled by local clergy in search of a means of comprehending this novel phenomenon, possessed force and acquired ready adherents.
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Thereafter, pilgrimage and the holy wars of the cross became almost inseparable. This may not have been Urban’s doing. His vision was more radical, more disturbing and more penetrating.

It is sometimes argued that Urban’s original plan had been for a limited expedition to assist Alexius I and press on to the Holy Sepulchre rather in the fashion of Gregory VII’s embryonic scheme of 1074, and that it was only the astonishing response to his call that forced him to change his rhetoric and policy. This underestimates the grandeur of his scheme. His tour of France was extensive and exhausting. At Clermont in late November and again at Tours in March, the sixty-year-old pope preached in the open air. His schedule was punishing, with the travelling followed by regular public appearances at long-winded liturgical ceremonies even without preaching. He presided over three major church councils, at Tours (March 1096) and Nîmes (July 1096) as well as Clermont. The vigour and geographic embrace of Urban’s preaching argues against modest recruitment plans; his role in local consecrations of altars and the like, the ease of passage through different provinces and lordships and the orderly crowds of notables assembled reflected careful premeditation. Despite the attempts of apologists to imply otherwise, enthusiastic crowds were not gathered by chance in the early weeks of Urban’s tour. On Christmas Day 1095 at Limoges he attended three separate services, progressing between them in full regalia. Within the week he had rededicated the cathedral and the chief local shrine of St Martial. Only then did he preach about Jerusalem.
³⁹
His visit to Poitiers coincided with the feast of that city’s patron saint, St Hilary (13 January). At Angers (January 1096) and at Tours and Marmoutier
(March), his preaching was linked to local ceremonies or assemblies that were far from haphazard and probably long planned (dedications of churches, translations of bodies of local dignitaries, church councils, etc.). The liturgical theatricality, emphasized by regular processions in full ceremonial finery, was not staged at random. His successor Paschal II noted Urban’s attention to towns (
civitates
). While he tried to impose a southern French bishop, Adhemar of Le Puy, as leader of the expedition in his place, he still wrote to the Flemish in the north urging participation and dispatched a legate to the Anglo-Norman realms. Although the expedition lacked the cohesion Urban may have wished for, Adhemar’s authority was widely accepted on the march once the armies had combined at Nicaea in June 1097. Urban’s later injunctions to the Bolognese (September 1096), prohibiting clergy from joining and encouraging laymen to consult their parish priests or bishops, do not speak of alarm at numbers but canonical rectitude, very much part of the package from Clermont or even Piacenza onwards. The timing of the preaching, seen by some as oddly late in the year, suited elaborate recruitment. Urban’s journey to France covered two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, appropriate to his message of repentance, as well as the major Christocentric festivals of Christmas and Easter, when images and dramatic representations of Jerusalem accompanied church and civic celebrations. Urban’s announcement that the expedition would set out on 15 August 1096 provided time for armies to be raised: in the event all the main contingents north of the Alps left by October. It also recognized the importance of waiting for the harvest, traditionally begun in northern Europe on 1 August. Thus the timetable of the church year, including the departure date, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a major cult in Le Puy itself, was suited to military requirements; logistics matched liturgy.