God's War: A New History of the Crusades (15 page)

Urban’s own preaching seems to have been highly effective. From the admittedly partial and limited evidence of charters between recruits and monasteries, it has been observed that a ‘high proportion’ of noble recruits came from areas Urban visited or within a couple of days’ ride from his itinerary. His preaching impressed eyewitnesses, and he had an advantage that Gregory VII lacked, in that he himself came from precisely the arms-bearing aristocratic milieu of the French nobility that he sought to exploit, as did his chosen legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a nobleman reputed as an excellent horseman.
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Like many contemporary
bishops, Adhemar was evidently almost as at home on a battlefield as in a cathedral, some of his colleagues even donning armour (like Odo, bishop of Bayeux at the battle of Hastings as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry) and wielding maces in deference to the canon law prohibition on clergy spilling blood, a ban that apparently did not include crushing and bruising.

Urban performed only as the hub of the recruiting wheel. The mechanics of spreading the word capitalized on the networks of ecclesiastical affinity and administrative efficiency developed by the reformist papacy over the previous half-century. Urban authorized local diocesans to preach the cross but probably depended more upon a concentric circle of friends, allies and supporters, such as the archbishop of Lyons. Sympathetic abbots not only preached but used their local influence to encourage lay patrons to take the cross and to exchange property for money or war materials (e.g. pack animals). As religious centres possessed of bullion and cash, monasteries were the chief bankers for the First Crusade. The holy warriors desired their prayers and their capital. The necessary financial outlay on the expedition for each landowner was likely to represent many times his annual revenue, especially as the mid-1090s were times of agricultural depression. The price of sin was incalculable. In some cases monks deliberately – and successfully – touted for trade. Elsewhere, the process was indirect, clergy instilling into the faithful over time the sense of sin which provided the spur to many to take the cross.
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Beside the complementary efforts of the papally directed and local ecclesiastical apparatus, news of the expedition spread though informal contacts and association. The papal legate to the Anglo-Norman provinces, the abbot of St Bénigne, Dijon, in early 1096 negotiated an agreement between William II of England and his brother Duke Robert of Normandy under which Robert pledged his duchy to William for three years in return for 10,000 silver marks, a massive sum equivalent, it has been speculated, to a quarter of royal income, only available through a heavy land tax. If nothing else, this unpopular levy publicized the crusade. More direct contacts eased publicity. In southern Italy, Bohemund of Taranto apparently only learnt of the crusade from a passing band of French (or possibly Catalan) recruits in June 1096. His ignorance of the momentous events north of the Alps is surprising and, on the face of it, unlikely. Bohemund’s half-brother and nominal
overlord, Roger Borsa, was married to the sister of the count of Flanders, who had taken the cross. Bohemund had close links with the pope; between 1089 and 1093 he had entertained Urban twice and had met him on at least two other occasions. His half-brother Guy was prominent in the service of Alexius I, whose attempts to recruit Italian Normans may have intensified after the completion of the Sicilian conquest in 1091–2. The anonymous writer of one of the earliest accounts of the expedition, the
Gesta Francorum
, perhaps a knight or cleric in Bohemund’s army, may have accurately reflected the situation of the summer of 1096 when he wrote of the widespread rumours of Urban’s message sweeping through ‘all the regions and provinces of the Gauls’.
⁴²
Even if merely relying on what he later heard from companions on the march, the author hit upon three prime recruiting officers: emulation, the courts of lay nobles and princes, and rumour.

The rapidity of the spread of news of the Jerusalem campaign is attested not only in the literary accounts but in the rate of recruitment itself. Within twelve months of Clermont perhaps as many as 70–80,000 people had already left their homes for the east. The geographical spread was wide but uneven, the bulk of known crusaders coming from a shallow crescent stretching from the Dordogne in the south-west to Flanders in the north-east, covering the Limousin, Poitou, the Loire valley, Maine, the Chartrain, Ile de France and Champagne; there were also significant groupings in Languedoc, Provence, Burgundy, parts of western Germany and in Italy. Enthusiasm for the expedition was not universal. Although support crossed the ideological and political divide between papalists and imperialists, even Henry IV’s constable joining up as well as important imperial vassals such as Godfrey of Bouillon, only a minority even in areas of greatest enthusiasm took the cross. Contemporary chroniclers emphasized the magnitude of the response, which they attributed to the miraculous working of the Holy Spirit or to the potency of rumour. Although reconstruction of the details of how information spread through a semi-literate society is difficult, certain features stand out. The focal points of recruitment were lay courts and households, especially those with close links to monasteries (although this may be a distorted impression caused by the nature of charter evidence); networks of interlaced aristocratic families and, crucially, their dependants – humbler relatives, tenants, household knights and clergy, servants; and towns. Crusading was as much an
urban as a rural phenomenon. In both, wealth and status provided necessities and incentives. Just as the castellan, seigneur or count were pivotal in raising the countryside, so the ‘better sort’ (
meliores
), as a Genoese observer of 1096 put it, gave the lead in towns and cities.
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The expedition inspired by Urban’s preaching was not assembled at random, but followed the contours of a society dominated by wealthy lords, connected by bonds of family, obedience, locality, obligation, employment and commerce. A rural/urban divide is misleading. Many influential monasteries were situated within or just outside major urban centres; lords had rights over markets and, in areas of developed urban life, such as north Italy or Flanders, town and country were mutually bound together socially and economically as well as politically. Although managing to sell or pledge most of his properties to raise money, Godfrey of Bouillon also extorted 1,000 silver pieces from the Jewish communities of Cologne and Mainz to fund his campaign. Gossip and rumours thrive when people are in close contact; ceremonies exert maximum effect if witnessed. The success of recruitment in 1095–6 relied on wealth, social order and mobility, attributes of an underlying prosperity, as well as on skilful manipulation of cultural habits of violence and spiritual fears of damnation.

According to some witnesses, at the centre of the ‘great rumour’, as one contemporary called it, was the charismatic preaching of a diminutive, ageing Picard evangelist known as Peter the Hermit. In Lorraine, during and immediately after the crusade, he was regarded as having inspired the whole enterprise. This cannot entirely be dismissed, not least because, whatever his status, he managed to raise armies months before anyone else, in person led one of them to Constantinople and was thereafter accepted by the princes as a member of the expedition’s elite, if only in a minor capacity. Peter had experience as a preacher of apostolic poverty. It was later claimed that he was a pilgrim to the Holy City who had been entrusted with a letter from heaven to rouse Christians to liberate Jerusalem and a request from the patriarch of Jerusalem to send western help which he conveyed to Pope Urban. In fact, Patriarch Symeon may have been in Constantinople when Peter was supposed to have passed through on pilgrimage. It may or may not have been chance that one of the first contacts the Christian army made in northern Syria in 1097–8 was with the exiled patriarch, who then promptly wrote a
letter to the west appealing for further military aid, perhaps an echo, repeat or inspiration of the Peter the Hermit story.

The hints of distinctive features in Peter’s appeal – apocalyptic, populist, visionary, charismatic – in contrast to the uniform outline of the theologically focused message emanating from the pope reflected in most chronicles and charters – authority, penance, pilgrimage, cross, war – may be taken as a sign of Peter’s insignificance or the reverse. Even hostile witnesses attest to the popular if naive element in his following. Part of the motive for the massacres of the Rhineland Jews identified in Jewish sources was a crude, vindictive and violent assertion of Christian supremacy and lust for vengeance for Christ Crucified; many of these pogroms were the work of contingents associated with Peter. That there was little or no such barbaric persecution of Jews by the armies recruited by Urban and his agents may point to a distinct difference of tone and content in Peter’s preaching. However the evidence is viewed, Peter played a prominent and semi-independent role in at least some theatres of propagandizing and recruiting for the Jerusalem expedition. The Lorraine perspective contained in the chronicle of Albert of Aachen is probably as valid as others which ignore Peter.
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It is incontestable that the armies he inspired were on the road by Easter 1096 (13 April); even the anonymous chronicler attached to Bohemund placed Peter’s as part of the ‘official’ campaign.
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To organize, equip and supply perhaps up to 30,000 troops and non-combatants at the end of winter and in spring, following poor harvests, some local famines and plagues in the previous year, suggests that Peter must have begun preaching before Clermont and that his powers of organization were of an order beyond his image of a dishevelled hedge priest. It is possible that Urban appointed him to preach the Jerusalem journey weeks before Clermont: the pope had been discussing his plan with potential leaders at least as early as August 1095. It is notable that Peter’s itinerary, from Berry through the Orléannais and Champagne to Lorraine and the Rhineland, avoided those areas visited by the pope. Peter, in a more demotic style, appealed to audiences not dissimilar to the pope’s. He recruited a number of significant lords, one of whom, Walter, lord of Boissy Sans Avoir, whom he despatched with eight knights and a large company of infantry in early March, was already in Constantinople in July 1096, no mean logistical effort. The forces Peter raised lacked the tight social authority lent by the presence of many
great lords. His preaching campaign, which he combined with leading an army, apparently operated apart from the hierarchy of religious houses that so crucially underpinned Urban’s efforts: unlike the pope, Peter is absent from surviving monastic charters.
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His message was revivalist, probably peppered with visions and atrocity stories. These were neither new nor exclusive to Peter. The Limousin chronicler and pilgrim Adhemar of Chabannes had peddled stories of persecution, assassination and murder of Christians by the Muslim rulers of the Holy Land seventy years earlier. The memory of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre may have formed part of a propaganda campaign by the monks of St Peter’s Moissac, visited by Urban himself in May 1096.
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On arrival in the Rhineland, Peter appears to have delegated his own preaching commission to a local priest, Gottschalk, who, demonstrating that he was no rabble-rousing bumpkin either, in turn recruited a large army in southern Germany, which reached Hungary via Bavaria only to be massacred in late July by the Hungarian army, outraged at the violent and indiscriminate foraging. Gottschalk’s force may have been intended as the right flank of Peter’s own army, predominantly comprised of Frenchmen and led by lords from Chartres and Champagne, which marched through the Rhineland in April before travelling down the Danube to Hungary and across the Balkans to reach Constantinople on 1 August. It is possible that Peter also delegated recruitment to another German, Volkmar, whose contingent followed a route to Peter’s north, through Saxony and Bohemia before being dispersed by the Hungarians in late June. To Peter’s preaching may be attributed the participation of numerous other German lords, in particular the Swabian count Emich of Flonheim and Count Hartmann of Dillingen-Kybourg, who joined forces with lords from the Ile de France as well as, apparently, some Englishmen. Even if these groups took the cross independent of Peter, his contribution was significant, possibly papally authorized and suggestive of just how much is unknown about the genesis of the First Crusade. Peter, a man of some learning and habitually boastful, may have spent his retirement at the abbey of Neumoustier in Lorraine embroidering his own legend. The tragedy of the subsequent military failure of all of his contingents and Peter’s own equivocal fortitude during the sieges of Antioch ensured the relegation of his initial contribution by writers eager to emphasize the successes of their favoured leaders for didactic purposes. Yet between the two extremes, those returning to Lorraine
from the Jerusalem adventure in 1099 did not dismiss him; some even remembered him as its ‘
primus auctor
’.
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Urban’s initiative, like that of Gregory VII, could have been still-born. That it was not indicates a social and cultural predisposition to accept his radical concept of guiltless, meritorious violence and a skilful publicity campaign. Both are evident in the events of 1095–6. However, the question of timing remains. Why did 1095 strike Urban II as the ‘acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God’ (Isaiah 61:2)? Western aristocratic arms-bearers had been anxious for their souls for generations; Greek emperors had been asking for and receiving western military aid for decades; campaigns against Muslims in Spain, Sicily or north Africa had become an increasingly common feature of western Mediterranean warfare; church discipline of secular society had been at least notionally acknowledged though the Peace and Truce of God movement in many areas; papal thinking on holy war and penance had a long pedigree. Yet a convergence of circumstances persuaded Urban to recast Alexius’s appeal; and the immediate context of 1095 allowed for its success.