God's War: A New History of the Crusades (47 page)

The combination of the emotional account of the Holy Land and the direct offer of salvation, couched in very simple sets of repetitive logic, proved highly effective. The audience at Vézelay went wild, so many demanding crosses that Bernard’s supply, probably made of wool, ran out, forcing him to tear up his own habit to satisfy them. Yet for all the eloquence and recorded enthusiasm, the events at Vézelay, like those at Clermont just over fifty years earlier, were hardly spontaneous. The success of any recruiting or fund-raising campaign depended (and depends) on the message being familiar, the audience already receptive. The large and distinguished congregation at Vézelay had not been assembled by accident. They knew why they were there. The event had been carefully planned and meticulously orchestrated (even if, as one source mentioned, the platform for VIPs partially collapsed), Bernard bringing with him a ‘parcel of crosses which had been prepared beforehand’.
²⁶
Presumably staged after celebration of the Easter mass, with
Louis sitting beside the preacher already wearing the cross given him by the pope, the essentially ritualistic and ceremonial nature of the occasion was evident.

Ritual embellished practical purpose. The Vézelay assembly demonstrated royal authority as well as crusade enthusiasm, the former feeding off the latter, one account even transferring the main address from Bernard to the king. Some of those not present were enjoined to follow the king of heaven as well as the king of France, a significant association.
²⁷
The laymen taking the cross alongside King Louis bore witness to the new royal embrace. Besides his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, brother, Robert of Dreux, and uncle, Amadeus of Savoy, count of Maurienne, came some of the grandest independent feudatories in the kingdom, Thierry of Alsace count of Flanders, a veteran of the Holy Land; Alfonso-Jordan count of Toulouse, the son of Raymond of St Gilles, born outside Tripoli in 1104; and Henry, son of Louis’s former adversary Theobald count of Champagne. The geographical reach matched the political: from central France, the counts of Nevers, Tonnerre and Bourbon; from the north, the counts of Ponthieu and Soissons and the lords of Coucy and Courtenay; from the Limousin and Poitou the lords of Rancon and Lusignan; from the Anglo-Norman realms, William of Warenne, earl of Surrey. Although not all embarked with Louis, by their presence at Vézelay they acknowledged his leadership, as one member of the assembly put it, by papal command,
apostolico praecepto
.
²⁸

After Vézelay, Bernard prepared for an extensive preaching tour, and diplomatic preparations began. Surprise, as at Bourges, led to meagre pickings. Local clerical and lay elites needed to be alerted to gather support and excite anticipation, Bernard’s arrival completing a process of engagement with the call to Jerusalem dependent on ties of family, locality and lordship as much as religious fervour. He was at Toul in May, but only in late July did Bernard begin a journey that took him to Arras and Ghent in early August, then in a loop through Flanders and the Low Countries in September and October before turning towards the Rhineland and the empire, returning to northern France early in 1147. By all accounts, including his own, he was extraordinarily persuasive: ‘towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive’.
²⁹
To inspiration Bernard added organization. Places he failed to reach, such as Brittany, England, Bavaria,
Lorraine, Saxony and Bohemia, received letters or messengers, sometimes with copies of the papal privileges that the abbot insisted were the central selling points of the recruitment campaign. The network of the Cistercian order, which had helped propel Bernard to international prominence in the first place, proved central, providing many important ecclesiastical
crucesignati
. Indefatigably determined to contact as many people as possible, Bernard made the crusade his, even if professional cloistered humility prevented him from actually joining the expedition, leaving clerical leadership to other, as it happened, distinctly less able colleagues.

RESPONSES (II): THE EMPIRE

If the French were the first to be approached, numerically and politically the most significant recruits came from the German empire. For six months from late summer 1146, the imperial lands, including northern Italy, became the focus of preaching and recruiting. Eugenius III wrote to encourage Italians to take the cross.
³⁰
After his swing through Flanders Bernard himself spent late October 1146 until mid-January 1147 crisscrossing western Germany, beginning in the central Rhineland at Worms (
c.
1 November) before turning north to Mainz and Frankfurt, where he met Conrad III, then south to Basel and Constance (12 December), before returning northwards again to attend the imperial court at Christmas in Speyer (24 December to 3 January), returning to Worms and finally taking in Cologne (9 January) and Aachen (15 January), before arriving on 18 January at Liège, which he had left three months earlier. This represented frenetic activity over hundreds of miles in midwinter. With the exceptions of his time at Mainz and Frankurt in November and at Speyer over Christmas, Bernard rarely spent more than a night or two at any one place, in contrast to the more stately progress of Urban II through France in 1095–6. No doubt conducting Cistercian business as well, given this hurried if extensive itinerary, Bernard’s crusade preaching operated as the sharp edge of a wider campaign of information and exhortation prepared by letters and emissaries, with Conrad III taking the cross at an emotional ceremony at Speyer on 27 December forming the centrepiece. As notable as the recruits Bernard secured were those who took the cross without the abbot’s personal
touch, such as Welf VI of Bavaria, at his own estate of Peiting on 24 December, or, further east, King Ladislaus of Bohemia, the margrave of Styria and the count of Carinthia or the large gathering at Regensburg in February 1147 run by Conrad and Bernard’s representative, the Cistercian abbot of Ebrach.
³¹

By his German trip, Bernard was able to retain control of a recruitment process. Twice, in late October 1146 and late January 1147, he passed near the monastery at Huy founded after 1099 by Peter the Hermit, the memory of whose remarkable but disastrous expedition remained green. On the first occasion Bernard was in pursuit of another rabble-rousing evangelist, Radulf (or Raoul or Rudolph), whose preaching threatened to confuse the plans of pope and abbot. Radulf, another Cistercian, once possibly a hermit, had undertaken a hugely popular preaching tour of the Rhineland, from Cologne to Strassburg, in the summer and autumn of 1146. Although attacked by the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz and demonized by Bernard and most subsequent commentators, some remembered Radulf fondly for his sanctity and humility, ‘a splendid teacher and monk’.
³²
In Hainault, he may have received support from the Benedictine abbot of Lobbes. Even the fastidious Otto of Freising admitted Radulf’s true monastic profession, his effectiveness in recruitment and his popularity, reserving his disdain for his lack of scholarship and message of violence against the Jews.
³³
Initially, at least, Radulf may not have been far outside the pale of licensed preachers. Like many charismatic twelfth-century holy men, including Bernard, Radulf established himself as an arbiter of social behaviour outside the formal political and religious hierarchies: two of Bernard’s main criticisms of Radulf concerned his ‘unauthorized preaching and contempt for episcopal authority’. Otto of Freising noted disapprovingly how Radulf’s preaching against the Jews encouraged men to rebel against their lords, who generally appeared willing to protect local Jewish communities.
³⁴
Even Bernard’s condemnation of Radulf’s anti-Semitic propaganda focused narrowly on its theologically misguided incitement to murder and its reprehensible display of ambition and arrogance.

Radulf’s demotic anti-Semitism was expressed in a simple argument. In summoning men to take the cross to fight the Muslims abroad, he drew the same parallel that had been drawn in 1096, as a Jewish eyewitness recalled: ‘Avenge the crucified one upon his enemies who stand before you; then go to war against the Muslims,’ or, as Otto of
Freising put it: ‘the Jews whose homes were scattered throughout the [Rhineland] cities and towns should be slain as foes of the Christian religion’.
³⁵
Such approaches were not the unique preserve of ‘barking’ demagogues (the phrase of one of Radulf’s victims, Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn). Overt anti-Semitism dominated the academy of western Christendom in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, often expressed by those unmoved by practical or communal resentment or fear. The monks, not the townspeople, of Norwich invented the Jewish blood libel of William of Norwich in 1144 to raise funds for their priory. Not all intellectuals could keep their dislike and prejudice separate from their academic detachment. Writing in 1146 or 1147 to Louis VII, Abbot Peter the Venerable of Cluny argued a point very close to Radulf’s; if it is a meritorious act to fight enemies of Christianity in distant lands why are Jews allowed to live undisturbed in the heart of Christendom? If Muslims were detestable, how much more were the Jews? In profiting from Christians, even the church, through usury, they polluted Christendom. Abbot Peter was careful to follow the theologically orthodox line that Jews should not be killed but, he insisted, they should be punished as enemies of Christ. While Christians were being taxed for the crusade, why not the Jews?
³⁶
Peter’s letter mirrored the social and financial resentments, heightened by crusade preparations, on which Radulf played so effectively. Ephraim of Bonn identified the persecution of the Jews specifically with the preaching of the cross, which wrecked the normally peaceful relations between the communities of the Rhineland. Radulf, Peter the Venerable and Otto of Freising all noticed the association of Jews with other enemies of Christ. Bernard of Clairvaux, ‘a decent priest’ in Rabbi Ephraim’s grateful memory, while rejecting simple and violent analogies, lacked sympathy or more than legal tolerance, stating:

The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed or even put to flight… The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord suffered. They are dispersed all over the world so that by expiating their crime they may be everywhere living witnesses of our redemption. Under Christian princes they endure a hard captivity… when the time is ripe all Israel shall be saved [i.e. converted]. But those who die before will remain in death. If Jews are utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for their promised salvation, their eventual conversion?
³⁷

Radulf’s robust populism represented the obverse of Bernard’s refined passion, his message a product of the mass appeal to avenge the injuries done to Christ’s heritage by the ‘enemies of the cross’ (a phrase used by Bernard and Eugenius). Although the focus of official censure, Radulf did not operate in isolation. Attacks on Jews may have begun in Mainz as early as April 1146. With the heaviest persecution in the Rhineland in the autumn of 1146, Jews in Würzburg suffered from a possibly unrelated blood libel in February/March 1147 and a rabbi at Ramerupt in Champagne was beaten up, his house looted and the Torah scroll desecrated in the spring probably of 1147 by French crusaders perhaps on their way to join the king’s muster at Metz. Three other massacres were recorded by Ephraim of Bonn a quarter of a century later, although it is unclear whether they occurred in France or central Europe. In England, the new Jewish communities, planted since the Norman Conquest with royal approval, needed and received the king’s protection.
³⁸
Bernard’s encyclical letter
inter alia
condemning Jewish persecution acknowledged a potentially widespread problem. Anti-Jewish motifs found extended circulation. The crusaders at Ramerupt were reported as having deliberately, almost ritualistically, inflicted five wounds on the head of Rabbi Jacob, jeering as they did so: ‘Thus we shall take vengeance on you for the crucified one and wound you the way you inflicted five wounds [i.e. the stigmata] on our god.’ A song composed in France in 1146 that closely echoed official crusade propaganda contained exactly the same image of the Jews, to whom God gave his body at the Passion and Crucifixion, wounding Him in five places.
³⁹

The scale and course of the Rhineland assaults provoked by Radulf differed from the 1096 pogroms. The secular and ecclesiastical authorities provided more consistent and competent protection for the Jewish communities, encouraged, perhaps, by the proximity of King Conrad. The Jews themselves appeared cannier in their own defence. Rabbi Ephraim of Bonn was thirteen in the autumn of 1146, living in Cologne, when he, his family and neighbours with members of other local Jewish communities, took refuge in the archbishop of Cologne’s fortress of Wolkenburg.
⁴⁰
The archbishop was well paid for his charity, as was his castellan. Similar precautions were followed across the Rhineland, as were Jewish payments to Christians of protection money. Radulf progressed from Strassburg to Cologne, whipping up enthusiasm for the crusade and violence against the Jews in equal measure. By the time
Bernard caught up with him at Mainz in November 1146, Radulf had established himself as a local celebrity, Bernard attracting local hostility when successfully browbeating him to return to the cloister (presumably by the threat of something much worse, probably temporal punishment by the king under whose protection the Jews lay). Unlike 1096, the impetus to attack the Jews came not from the local nobility, who seemed to have provided shelter, but from
crucesignati
and ‘the poorer segment of the population who derive joy from things of no consequence’.
⁴¹
Church, town and village authorities attempted to maintain order, at a price, and even justice: one Christian murderer of Jews near Cologne was punished by having his eyes gouged out, dying soon after. The archbishop of Mainz complained directly to Bernard of Clairvaux about Radulf, perhaps suggesting the abbot’s responsibility.
⁴²
But in common with 1096, economic jealousy and financial anxiety fuelled the ferocity of the attacks at a time when converting capital into cash had become a major concern for crusaders, especially as Eugenius III’s bull that excluded legitimate Jewish banking, by also prohibiting interest repayment by
crucesignati
, discouraged loans by bankers of any faith without lucrative material collateral.