God's War: A New History of the Crusades (17 page)

The success of recruiting in 1096 remains mysterious. The dilemmas of secular rule and war were hardly novel. It is difficult to reconcile eleventh-century history with a view that hundreds or even thousands of powerful arms-bearers suffered from debilitating individual or collective guilt complexes that suddenly became critical, as a literal acceptance of their charters might suggest. There was an increased focus by the church and hence by congregations and patrons on the problem of salvation for sinners. Urban II neatly summed it up: ‘there are only two gates to eternal life; baptism and genuine penitence’.
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The supernatural was perceived as real and proximate. Hell, heaven and the place between where souls waited for redemption, if not as yet fully understood as purgatory, were not abstractions. Yet it needed a combination of pressures to excite the response of 1096. Alone, ideology is insufficient explanation.

Concentration on faith by itself is inadequate to explain the genesis or progress of the war of the cross ideologically, sociologically, politically or militarily. Jerusalem was not won by faith alone; faith alone did not send men to Jerusalem. The reductionism implied by the idea of an ‘age of faith’ requires questioning. The picture is more complicated.
Faced with sermons repeatedly insisting on the basic merits and message of Christianity; with hagiography in which doubters featured regularly; with academics, such as Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), attempting to construct logically satisfactory explanations of God; and with innumerable anecdotes of lay (and some clerical) mockery of the pretentions of the church, it is hard to argue that we are dealing with an age any more credulous or unthinkingly accepting of religious truth than our own. One much-derided episode during the First Crusade concerned the story of a band of crusaders or pilgrims being led towards Jerusalem by a goose from Cambrai in northern France to Lorraine, where the creature died. The snobbish and irascible Guibert of Nogent dismissed the tale with contempt, as much social as academic, suggesting that the animal would have given more to the cause of Jerusalem ‘if the day before she had set out she had made of herself a holiday meal for her mistress’. Having earlier poured scorn on the credulity of the masses who believed they saw clouds at Beauvais forming (Guibert, who was there, thought they looked like a stork or crane), the abbot explained why he had mentioned the goose at all: ‘we have attached this incident to the true history (
historiae veraci
) so that men may know that they have been warned against permitting Christian seriousness to be trivialized by belief in vulgar fables’.
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Reactions to the Jerusalem journey were hardly undiscriminating.

Contemporaries had few doubts of the genesis of the expedition. Whether described as rumour or a great stirring, the emotions whipped up in 1095–6 were neither ephemeral nor superficial. A previous ‘terror’ in 1064 had been observed to inspire men of all classes to leave their families and possessions for Jerusalem, including bishops and at least one scholar who entertained his companions with vernacular songs about Christ’s miracles, a technique of boosting morale probably repeated in the armies of 1096.
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The well-attested astrological episodes early in 1095 – apparently a meteor shower – could be used to agitate moods, as had Halley’s Comet of 1066. Enthusiasm for the Jerusalem expedition was not the result of any famine or ergot-inspired hallucinations; if it can be described as a form of mass hysteria, it was by no means inchoate. The patterns of delivering the message and of recruitment tracked the dynamics and bonds of society; of lordship, kinship, locality, authority, towns, and of worship. Ceremony, symbolism and repetition of a simple creed provided focus for disparate ambitions
involving faith, self-image and the pressure of peers. Although, as one rather bemused onlooker noticed, the huge number moved by this single objective was inspired by word of mouth, one to another,
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the elites of church and lay rule provided the kernel of idealism as well as the prosaic but vital mechanics of action. Part revivalism, part politics, part a search for release and personal renewal, both a manipulation of popular beliefs and prejudices common to all social groups and an attempt to channel these towards a narrowly laudable yet essentially familiar and explicable end, the summons to Jerusalem succeeded because it caught the imagination of a society not necessarily ready but psychologically, culturally and materially equipped to answer the call. In the level of official enthusiasm, in the rapidity of popular acceptance, in the extremes of response, in the widespread uncertainty, indifference and regional variation shadowing extravagant and well-publicized bellicosity, 1096 was the 1914 of the middle ages.

1. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the First Crusade and Preaching Tour of Pope Urban II 1095–6

3

The March to Constantinople

The polity of western Christendom comprised regions rather than kingdoms. Consequently, recruitment, politics, structure and command of the First Crusade were dominated by provincial lords, not kings. Writers on and of the expedition to Jerusalem took pains to identify different regional identities. Sigebert of Gembloux specified recruits from Provence, Aquitaine, Brittany, Scotland, England, Normandy, Francia (i.e. roughly, in this context, the area from the Loire to the Meuse), Lotharingia (i.e. greater Lorraine), Burgundy, Germania, Lombardy and Apulia. From his Lotharingian perspective, Albert of Aachen listed Franks, Lotharingians, Alemans, Bavarians, Flemings, ‘all the people of the Teutons’, Swabians, Normans, Burgundians and Bretons. From the south, Raymond of Aguilers distinguished between Franks, northern French, and Provençals, southern French, amongst whom he further separated those from Provence itself, Burgundy (probably the county east of the Saône/Rhône corridor, not the duchy), the Auvergne, Gascony and ‘Gothia’ (i.e. what might now be called Languedoc). Fulcher of Chartres described his companions as western Franks; Albert of Aachen mentioned East Franks. Raymond commented that the Muslims called them all Franks, clearly well informed of the Arabic catch-all for western European Christians, ‘al-ifranj’. The anonymous, possibly Normano-Italian author of the
Gesta Francorum
, who often used general terms such as ‘Christiani’, carefully differentiated those from Italy who joined Peter the Hermit at Constantinople as ‘Lombardi’, from the Po region, and ‘Longobardi’, his neighbours from the centre and south of the peninsula. The
Gesta
retains the older name ‘Gauls’ for the geographic France. The fiercely xenophobic Guibert of Nogent insisted on a fabricated nationalism, arguing that Urban II had specifically summoned the ‘Franks’, not the Germans, to protect Christendom from the Turks, a
distortion of the events that rapidly gained favour with other ‘French’ writers such as Robert of Rheims and Baldric of Bourgeuil: thus were invented the
Gesta Dei per Francos
, the Deeds of God through the Franks, the title of Guibert’s admiring account, a national gloss that concealed the nature and structure of the expedition itself. So keen was Guibert on the Frankish monopoly on the
Gesta Dei
that he insisted that Bohemund – an Italian Norman – through his family’s origins and later marriage ‘might very well be considered a Frank’. Judged by their own letters, the members of the expedition called themselves ‘Christiani’, their clerics as ‘Latini’, in contrast to the local ‘Graeci’.
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Given the fame and aura of sanctity that surrounded the First Crusade, the Francophile gloss on the racial and regional diversity of the expedition played a part in the elevation and consolidation of a new sense of national identity apparent in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France, one exploited vigorously by the Capetian kings, not least in their own crusading ventures in 1147, 1190 and 1248. This nascent consciousness of unity encouraged by historians of the First Crusade such as Guibert of Nogent or Robert of Rheims was to contrast strongly with the older traditions of particularism maintained in Germany and Italy, whose actual experience of crusading differed little but lacked any specifically national dividend. The image of the French as dominating the crusades was not entirely misplaced: the majority of those we know as participants in 1096–9 came from lands between the Rhine and the Atlantic, the English Channel and the Mediterranean. However, to equate the ‘Franks’ with the French ignores their wide differences of language, law, landholding, history, tradition and culture as well as the contributions of other regions, from Denmark to Apulia, and England to Austria.

Shared objectives and shared perils created the cohesion of the First Crusade. After receiving a serious fright in the first field battle with the Turks in July 1097, the expedition’s military decisions were scrutinized by a common council; Adhemar of Le Puy enforced a chairman’s control. At Antioch, a common fund was created to fund expensive capital projects such as a siege tower and, briefly, a commander-in-chief was appointed, Stephen of Blois, who promptly ran away. For battle, leadership was agreed beforehand. Some factions were suspicious of the Provençal monopoly on helpful visions and the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch, and Raymond of Toulouse remained an isolated
figure, perhaps because he spoke
langue d’oc
(southern French) not, like the rest of the high command, versions of
langue d’oil
(northern French). Even at Jerusalem, the princes kept a certain distance from each other, preserving their autonomy.
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This reality of frequent regional and ethnic tensions reflected the basic structure of the expedition which revolved around those lords and knights with sufficient means to support an entourage. Initially such groups mirrored the local circumstances of recruitment and travel. At least seven different currencies circulated in the army, perhaps even as late as May 1099.
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As medieval armies shared many characteristics of moving markets, such distinctions cannot have made transactions easier, exacerbated as they already were in Syria by a silver-based coinage operating within a gold currency area. Different contingents voiced different battle cries. Nevertheless, as funds ran out and leaders died, deserted or opted out of the main campaign, patronage became fluid, and not only for well-connected opportunists such as Tancred, who bartered his services between his uncle, Bohemund, Raymond of Toulouse and Godfrey of Bouillon. In the surviving rump before the walls of Jerusalem, allegiance followed sustenance and the provision of horses rather than race or region. This had not been the case at the outset.

THE FIRST WAVE, 1096

By the time Peter the Hermit entered Cologne on 12 April 1096, Easter Saturday, considerable numbers from northern and eastern France, Lorraine and the Rhineland were already mobilized. Walter lord of Boissy-sans-Avoir in the Ile de France was preparing to leave the city immediately after Easter; on 15 April he set out on the traditional pilgrim route up the Rhine and Neckar to Regensberg and down the Danube to Hungary and the Balkan routes to Constantinople. With him was an infantry force, mainly French, led by eight knights, seemingly an advance guard for Peter’s larger army of levies raised on his march from Berry through the Ile de France and Champagne to the Moselle and the Rhine. Already, Peter had attracted a smattering of French nobles and volunteers from the towns he had visited. Some have seen his force as more of a pilgrimage than a military operation, yet, apart from Walter Sans Avoir, Peter established a military command under Godfrey Burel
of Etampes, Reynald of Broyes from Epernay, Walter Fitz Waleran of Breteuil in the Beauvaisis and Fulcher, brother of the vidame of Chartres.
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His concentration on the urban centres of Lorraine and the Rhineland was not fortuitous. Arriving at Trier on the Moselle in early April, Peter bullied the local Jewish community into supplying provisions by showing a letter from French Jews urging them to accede to his demands: news of threatened or actual violence against northern French Jewish communities had probably already filtered through. From Trier, Peter headed north, down the Moselle, to Cologne on the Rhine, probably as much in search of funds and supplies as of men. Cologne possessed a large Jewish community, which at about this time was being blackmailed into subsidizing Godfrey of Bouillon’s expedition. A major commercial centre, although hardly on a direct route from Trier to the Danube and Constantinople, the city provided a convenient muster point for Lorraine recruits, including some German knights.

Peter’s movements displayed deliberation and control. He may have threatened the Jews of Trier and elsewhere by anti-Jewish preaching, but his forces abstained from organized attacks on them, unlike the troops of the armies collected in his wake and scavenging local citizens. Even if, as hostile commentators maintained, his followers were ‘the leftover dregs of the Franks’ with children in tow who, ‘whenever they came upon a castle or city, asked whether this was Jerusalem’, Peter, a small but charismatic figure, unafraid and competent later to negotiate in person with the Byzantine emperor and the atabeg of Mosul, displayed neither ignorance nor naivety.
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He was either well briefed or able to extemporize with skill in delegating further recruitment to the priest Gottschalk. He, in turn, raised an effective and well-funded force, 15,000 strong according to Albert of Aachen, with as many knights as infantry, sufficiently impressive and organized for King Coloman I of Hungary to negotiate a truce and the surrender of their arms, providing him with the opportunity, eagerly embraced, to massacre them at Pannonhalma in early July.