Read God's War: A New History of the Crusades Online
Authors: Christopher Tyerman
Tags: #Non-Fiction, #Eurasian History, #Military History, #European History, #Medieval Literature, #21st Century, #Religion, #v.5, #Amazon.com, #Retail, #Religious History
The assembly at Etampes concluded its business by appointing regents for France, led by Abbot Suger of St Denis, appropriate for the crusade’s leading critic, and fixing the muster for departure at Metz on 15 June to fit Conrad’s plans and the delays since Vézelay in organizing the French contingents. Louis’s formal leave-taking of his kingdom provided spectacular theatre. Held to coincide with the annual Lendit Fair at St Denis, 11 June, with the streets around the abbey church crowded with visitors, the ceremony began with Louis visiting a Parisian lazar house, a sign of humility, charity and, with its reference to the mystic royal power of healing, regality. On arrival at the recently rebuilt St Denis (parts of which still survive), before the pope, Abbot Suger, the monks and a crowd of family, courtiers and notables, and beneath newly commissioned panels of stained glass depicting the heroics of the First Crusade, Louis prostrated himself before the altar, kissed a relic of the
patron saint, finally receiving from Suger the Oriflamme, the vermilion banner mounted on a gold lance that under Louis’s father, Louis VI, had become the official royal ensign, and the pilgrim’s scrip from the pope, visual confirmation of the three elements of his enterprise: penitential pilgrimage; holy war and national honour. Proceedings ended with the king and a few (male) companions dining with the monks in their refectory.
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This elaborate show paraded the special relationship of the French monarchy with the papacy and between St Denis and the king, providing a ceremonial expression of leaving the kingdom in the hands of the saint and the abbot, the king becoming an associate member of the monastic community. The personal and political meaning of Louis’s holy war was thus carefully spelt out for the crowds to witness and later to relate.
Conrad III also faced tricky decisions, mainly provoked by his fissiparous nobility. A general, formal peace to which all the nobility were committed by oath lay at the centre of Conrad’s political strategy for the crusade. At a crowded Imperial Diet at Frankfurt on 13 March, Conrad’s ten-year-old son, Henry, was accepted as heir and crowned as joint king to legitimize the regency government headed by Abbot Wibald of Stavelot, later of Corvey. The land route for the crusade was announced, the muster fixed at Regensburg in May, the presence of Bernard of Clairvaux easing agreement. Henry the Lion, the young duke of Saxony and nephew of the disgruntled
crucesignatus
Welf VI, claiming his lost Bavarian patrimony, allowed himself to be fobbed off by Conrad who ‘postponed a decision until his return and persuaded him to wait peacefully’.
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Other nobles from Saxony were less easily brushed aside. Refusing to join the eastern expedition, they saw an opportunity to elevate political expansion across their frontier with the Wends into a holy war by incorporating it into a general scheme of anti-infidel militancy, ‘to take vengeance on the pagans’, in Bernard’s words, an argument not far removed from that used against the Jews in the Rhineland a few months earlier. Given Conrad’s main aim of political harmony and his penchant for seeing the crusade as reflecting honour on his realm, the Saxons received a sympathetic hearing. Binding Saxon expansionist raiding into the larger holy war and its penumbra of sworn peace offered the added advantage of providing occupation for Henry the Lion. Using his legatine authority, Bernard accepted the Saxon proposal as legitimate, granting
the participants all the trappings and privileges of the Jerusalem journey, except that the crosses they wore ‘were not simply sewed to their clothing, but were brandished aloft, surmounting a wheel’. The other difference lay in the objective, again according to Bernard, of the ‘wiping out or, at any rate, the conversion of these people’.
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Neither genocide nor forced baptism was canonically legal. However, some argued that these regions had accepted Christianity from missionaries in the previous decades and so could be regarded as apostates, thus action against them was, as in the Holy Land, a matter of reclaiming lost Christian territory, theoretically defensive. To erase any doubts, during his stay at Clairvaux in April 1147, Bernard persuaded Eugenius III to issue a bull legitimizing the Wendish adventure, conversion and all, and the grant of Jerusalem privileges, conveniently placing it in the somewhat wishful context of both the Holy Land expedition and attacks on the Muslims in Spain.
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As far as Conrad was concerned, the Baltic campaign did not materially weaken his eastern force, while it directed some otherwise possibly troublesome nobles into taking out their acquisitive instincts beyond the empire’s frontiers. The importance of this was underlined by the presence in one of the raiding parties of the regent Wibald of Corvey. Despite the official ecclesiastical gloss, and the presence of a gaggle of bishops, there was little edifying in the motives or conduct of the war against the Wends and, as Wibald confessed, it failed.
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King Conrad’s crusade mobilized or neutralized the power brokers of the German empire. With him were staunch supporters based on his family and household: his half-brothers Duke Henry of Bavaria and Bishop Otto of Freising; his nephew, Duke Frederick of Swabia; and his chancellor Arnold of Wied; and allies such as Frederick of Bogen, advocate of Regensburg. Alongside them was his arch-enemy Welf of Bavaria. No less impressive was the geographic spread, not only men from Franconia, Swabia and Bavaria, but Saxons, such as Count Bernard of Ploetzkau, and Lorrainers under the bishops of Metz and Toul (brother of the count of Flanders) and the count of Monçon, and the contingent led by the bishop of Basel, the fruits of Bernard’s visit in December 1146. Joining this German coalition came the kings of Bohemia and Poland as well as the counts of Styria and Carinthia. Although the Lorrainers defected to, for them, the more congenial French at Constantinople, this gathering represented the firmest practical demonstration of the reach of German imperial power north of the Alps for almost a
century.
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The wider context of the king’s leadership of Christendom in alliance with the pope was witnessed by the papal legate, Theodwin, Cardinal of St Rufina, the Curia’s German expert who had helped engineer Conrad’s election as king in 1138.
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In recruitment, leadership and organization, Conrad’s expedition received important support throughout the German church. Viewed in the perspective of German and imperial politics, Conrad’s eastern adventure temporarily resolved domestic political tensions while making manifest his grander claims to world leadership. The febrile optimism of the summer of 1147 contrasted with the subsequent dull disillusion of defeat was well captured by one of the campaign’s leaders and close royal ally, Otto of Freising:
And so, when the rigour of the winter cold had been dispelled, as flowers and plants came forth from the earth’s bosom under the gracious showers of spring and green meadows smiled upon the world, making glad the face of the earth, King Conrad led forth his troops from Nuremberg, in battle array. At Regensburg he took ship to descend the Danube and on Ascension Sunday (1 June) he pitched camp in the East Mark near a town called Ardacker… He drew after him so great a throng that the rivers seemed scarcely to suffice for navigation, or the extent of the plain for marching… But since the outcome of that expedition, because of our sins, is known to all, we have purposed this time to write not a tragedy but a joyous history, leave this to be related by others elsewhere.
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Except in the eyes of his own apologists, Louis VII’s international prestige fell short of Conrad’s. Yet, as with Conrad, the extent of recruitment and active political involvement of the leading provincial magnates encouraged his role as the driving force behind this eastern policy and, more generally, as king. The blend of pious show, military exertion and administrative direction in providing men, money, command and strategy provided Louis with a unique opportunity to establish himself and his dynasty. The muster roll of French lords who travelled east with the king testified to the potential political dividends. While the counts of Toulouse and Nîmes sailed independently from ports on the French Mediterranean coast, most of the rest of the kingdom was represented in Louis’s great army: Flanders, Soissons, Bar, Ponthieu, Nevers, Tonnerre, the Bourbonnais, the Auvergne, Meaux in Champagne, Mâcon in southern Burgundy and Vienne in imperial Provence; the lords of Nogent in the Seine valley, Rancon and Lusignan in Poitou and Magnac in the Limousin. With these lords came their retinues and
dependants, in considerable numbers in the case of Thierry of Flanders. The core of support rested with the king’s affinity; his brother Robert count of Dreux and La Perche; his formidable wife Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, who presumably secured the Poitevin and Limousin contingents: Geoffrey of Rancon, later notorious for causing the near-annihilation of the army in Asia Minor, had entertained Louis and Eleanor on their honeymoon.
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The presence of women provided a notable feature of the Second Crusade. Apart from Eleanor and her household ladies, the counts of Flanders and Toulouse travelled with their wives and the statutes agreed by the northern European fleet at Dartmouth in May 1147 assumed the same for members of that force.
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In the French king’s army, the household clerks, led by Bartholomew, the chancellor, and his personal chaplain, the monk Odo of Deuil, a coming man seconded from the abbey of St Denis, were joined by some ecclesiastical heavyweights, such as the bishops of Arras, Langres and Lisieux, the last two both claiming legatine authority, Godfrey of Langres partly on the ground of his close association with Bernard, having been his prior at Clairvaux.
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The canon lawyer, classical scholar and acerbic wit Arnold of Lisieux contested Godfrey’s pretensions, famously describing him as ‘like the wine of Cyprus, which is sweet to taste but lethal unless diluted with water’. Neither behaved well, attracting gossip that they lined their pockets from alms given in return for absolution by sick and dying crusaders. Their bickering, while contributing little to the smooth running of the campaign, ignored the legate actually appointed, Guy of Florence, cardinal of St Grisogono, a man of some bureaucratic ability later displayed in Outremer after the end of the crusade, but on the march fatally hampered by his lack of fluency in French. Without Bernard, none took the role of Adhemar of Le Puy on the First Crusade.
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Nonetheless, the dynamism that propelled so many disparate political, personal and clerical groups towards the east under the king’s Oriflamme testified to a sense of secular, even national as well as religious identity. Although able to speak German and holding land in the empire as well as France, Thierry of Flanders journeyed with King Louis.
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Among those of the king’s personal bodyguard killed around him in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the Cadmus mountains were knights from across France but also William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, a pillar of the Anglo-Norman establishment.
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Under the sign of the cross new bonds of loyalty could be forged.
The popularity of the enterprise helped ensure the relatively easy agreement over the grand strategy of the holy war. Heavy recruitment, across France, western and southern Germany, the Low Countries, southern England, parts of Danubean central Europe, reaching northwards to Scotland and, for the Wendish campaign, Denmark, rested on piety, idealism, loyalty to lord or family and communal enthusiasm transmitted along the arteries of social and economic exchange. Religious values found expression in secular analogies directed at various propertied elites. One set of verses composed in 1146/7 talked of a tournament between heaven and hell.
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Bernard articulated the cultural aspirations of arms-bearers by praising their reputation for courage and of merchants in terms of an unbeatable bargain.
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Concentric circles of contact produced substantial contingents. The economically linked networks within the Rhineland or Flanders or Normandy or East Anglia combined with an outer ring of commerce in the Narrow Seas to produce the fleet that gathered at Dartmouth in May 1147. The new community of Cistercian abbeys, Bernard’s own power base, supported older secular and ecclesiastical focal points of recruitment. So did the Templars, another new order that played a significant part planning and on campaign. Templars negotiated for Louis VII in Constantinople in 1146; they acted as the king’s bankers; and later held the French army together in Asia Minor during the grim weeks in January 1148. Bernard of Clairvaux’s own close Templar links were shared with
crucesignati
such as the Anglo-Norman patrons of the Templars Saher of Archel, one of the commanders of the Dartmouth fleet, and Roger of Mowbray.
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The unanimity between secular and religious authorities in promoting the expedition as spiritual profit or social responsibility contrasted with the political and ecclesiastical divisions within western Christendom in 1096. Whereas Urban II’s call was clearly partisan, Bernard’s transcended political barriers and boundaries, only a few religious radicals distrustful of the church’s overt involvement in the world joining with the Roman commune and Roger of Sicily in openly standing aloof. Unlike 1096, potential
crucesignati
were supported by ceremonial and legal procedures, recognized in
Quantum praedecessores
, which, if not always familiar, demonstrated the progress in ecclesiastical discipline, hierarchical communication and canon law achieved in the fifty years between Clermont and Vézelay, backed by the cultural penetration of the story of the First Crusade in French and German vernacular literatures.