Those listening to Urban could have been forgiven for thinking that Jerusalem had only recently been captured by Muslim hordes. In fact, Jerusalem had been under the rule of one Muslim prince or another since the seventh century, and Christian pilgrims had rarely been denied access. Even the brief, albeit shocking, depredations of the mad caliph Hakim had taken place nearly a century before Urban stood in Cler-mont and made his history-altering speech. But the motivation for launching the Crusade had less to do with goings-on in Jerusalem than with the situation in Western and Central Europe.
As many have noted, the Crusades proved to be a brilliant solution for the anarchy and chaos of Europe. The princes of France in the eleventh century, aside from the successful Norman invasion of England in 1066, were engaged in constant battle with one another, and the situation wasn’t much better to the east, in Germany. The church, aside from centers like Cluny, functioned at the whim of nobles. By calling for the liberation of Jerusalem, Urban hoped to focus the energies of the princes on something other than infighting and thereby increase the prestige and influence of the church. He enjoined the knights to wear the symbol of the cross in order to mark themselves as soldiers of Christ, and he instructed his bishops to spread the word. They did, and the response was immediate. The Normans were especially keen. So were the peasants of central Germany, led by an enigmatic figure known as Peter the Hermit, whose rough-shod, ill-clad army assembled around the Danube and followed it south and east
The road to Jerusalem went through Constantinople. While some of the Italian cities had ships, there was no fleet in Europe capable of transporting an army of fifty thousand and its retainers across the Mediterranean. The legions of the West had to go overland, and that meant a journey of thousands of miles to Constantinople and from there across Turkey and into Syria and Palestine.
The First Crusade was blessed with extraordinary, perhaps even divine, luck. The timing could not have been better. Much as the early Muslim conquests took place at a nearly perfect juncture just after the Byzantines and the Sasanians had exhausted each other after decades of war, the Crusaders arrived in Constantinople just as both the Byzantines and the Seljuk Turks were struggling to retain their empires. By the eleventh century, the Seljuks had replaced the Abbasids as the primary threat to the Byzantines. In 1071, at the battle of Manzikert, the Byzantine army was annihilated by the Turkish sultan, and the emperor was captured. As a result of this decisive and humiliating defeat, all of Asia Minor except for the ancient imperial city of Nicaea, a scant few hundred miles from Constantinople, fell under the control of the Seljuk federation.
After Manzikert, however, the Seljuks fragmented. They had never been a centralized federation, and each Seljuk prince commanded the loyalty of his own small army. With multiple marriages, the number of princes tended to balloon. Corralling them into a unified force was the exception, not the rule, and in perfect illustration of the law of entropy, the Seljuk state disintegrated into dozens of small units almost as soon as it had formed. These units then dissolved into even smaller units, until many of the cities that ringed Jerusalem, including Antioch and Damascus, were ruled by different and often antagonistic Seljuk factions, none of whom were willing or prepared to come to the aid of the others. Quite the contrary. As long as they themselves were not the object of a Crusader assault, they were perfectly content to let the Christians eliminate rival city-states on their way to Jerusalem.
Not only were the Seljuks disunited and the Byzantines hobbled, but the Fatimids of Egypt, who still nominally controlled Jerusalem and much of the territory of Palestine, were also a shadow of their former selves. Unable to mount an effective challenge to the splintered Seljuk emirs in Syria, the Fatimids welcomed the Crusaders as an effective deterrent. When the Fatimid caliph in Cairo learned that Christian armies from Europe were advancing toward Syria from Constantinople, he sent envoys offering them assistance. The enmity between the Sunni Seljuks and Shi’a Fatimids could hardly have been greater, but neither of them had strong feelings about the princes of Europe. The Crusaders were unfamiliar, and their motives were a mystery. The Fatimid caliph unfortunately overlooked the most trenchant detail, which was that the
ultimate goal of the Crusaders was not Syria but Jerusalem, which was then ruled by the Fatimids themselves.
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In short, when the Crusaders set out for Jerusalem, not a single strong state stood in their way. Had the movement begun only a decade earlier, the Seljuk sultan who orchestrated the victory at Manzikert would still have been alive, and the Crusaders would not have stood a chance against him. At any other time in the eleventh century, they would have faced a powerful and hostile Byzantine emperor in Constantinople, as well as a cohesive Fatimid empire, had they somehow managed to make it to southern Syria.
Not only were the Crusades blessed with good timing, but they were also graced with adversaries who had scant knowledge of their tactics, ambitions, and ideology. In retrospect, the First Crusade was clearly a holy war waged by Christians against Muslims, but it is striking how unaware ofthat fact Muslims at the time were. The Seljuks and then the Fatimids viewed the initial forays by the knights of Europe as a nuisance and then as a military challenge, yet even after the fall of Jerusalem, there was no sense in the Muslim world that this was a religious war or a clash of civilizations.
In fact, it is stretching matters to even speak of a “Muslim world.” There was no unity among Muslims even when faced with a Christian invasion of the Levant. As we will see, after the success of the First Crusade, some Muslims tried—and failed—to create a pan-Muslim alliance against the Christians. Even when, nearly a century later, Saladin united the disparate city-states and led them to retake Jerusalem, he succeeded primarily because of his abilities as a military commander, not because of people rallied to a pan-Islamic banner. In the years after the First Crusade, while there was no shortage of platitudes about Muslim solidarity in the face of a Christian challenge, few in a position of authority did more than give lip service to the idea of a unified Muslim community.
In short, religion mattered, except when it didn’t, and it didn’t matter, except when it did. The link between faith and action is blurry. The call of Urban spurring armies to march on Jerusalem in the name of God is often treated as proof that men will fight and die for their religion. The reaction of Muslims almost a hundred years later, when Jerusalem was retaken in 1187, is treated the same way. But what about the times when Muslims or Christians called on their brethren to rise up in the name of God and no one listened? What about the periods in between the
fighting, after the fall of Jerusalem? Where was religion when Christian knights formed alliances with Sunni Muslims to fight Shi’a Muslims or when one Christian lord looked for help from a Muslim Kurd in order to subdue another Christian lord? If religion mattered more than anything, how do we explain those times when it mattered hardly at all?
Though the Crusades eventually became synonymous with conflict between Christianity and Islam, at the time the picture was decidedly more ambiguous. It’s not that the war to take Jerusalem and the subsequent efforts of various Muslim rulers to retake it were not colored by religion. It’s that religion was one of several reasons for fighting. Omitting these other factors reduces the Crusades to one dimension. Yes, faith was vital—at least for the Christian knights. From what we can tell at many centuries’ remove, they were driven by piety, which Pope Urban tapped but did not create. They believed that the struggle to liberate Jerusalem would serve as a penance for their sins and lead to rewards in the hereafter. They were drawn by a potent promise of material and spiritual rewards, and they were moved by the image of the city where Christ played out his passion being occupied by people who had little regard for that blessed legacy. But even here, the fury of the Crusaders was easily channeled not just against Muslims, but also against Jews or other Christians who did not see the universe in quite the same way. Conflict between faiths was one of many conflicts, and not always the one that mattered most.
The intra-Muslim rivalries and antagonisms were mirrored by similar divisions among the Crusaders themselves and between the Catholic Crusaders, who at least nominally followed the edicts of the pope in Rome, and the Eastern Rite Byzantines, who had their own clerical establishment and refused to recognize the pope’s supreme authority. Arriving at the borders of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusaders expected to be greeted warmly by the emperor Alexius Comnenus, and to be welcomed as allies in the war against the infidel. This was in spite of the fact that the Eastern and Western Churches had split in 1054 when the papal legate in Constantinople excommunicated the patriarch for heresy, in the Church of Hagia Sophia, which was the Eastern equivalent of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The Byzantines did not appreciate the public insult to their church father, and had someone loudly insulted the pope in Saint Peter’s, the reaction would have been much the same. Among the reasons for the schism, the Byzantine church refused to accept
Rome’s addition to the Nicene Creed of the
word filioque
, which signified that the Holy Spirit flowed from both the Father and the Son, and not, as the Eastern Church believed, from God the Father alone. There was also the delicate and inflammatory matter of the use of unleavened versus leavened bread in the Eucharist. These issues were enough to cause a rupture.
In the decades before the First Crusade, both churches had attempted to heal the wound. As a result, by the end of the eleventh century, the princes of Europe viewed Byzantium as a natural friend in the war against the infidels, and they tended to overlook the chasm that had opened between the Catholic and Orthodox religious establishments.
The Byzantines were skeptical. Alexius, the heir to a rich and sophisticated tradition, understood that Jerusalem was not cause enough to align his interests with the Crusaders. He was a shrewd man, erudite and hard-nosed, who was also graced with a favorable biographer in his daughter. When he ascended to the throne, the empire was in disarray and in need of leadership. The Turks were only one of several threats, and Alexius had to repel Slavic and Serbian tribes invading from the northern Balkans as well as the vulturous Venetians and Normans. The tax system was in shambles; the army was undermanned and fragmented; and while the court and the palaces of Constantinople remained as magnificent as ever, there was a dispiriting sense that the end might be near.
Alexius reversed the tide. He rallied the army, appointed skilled governors, replenished the treasury, and looked to the West for mercenaries, especially Normans. He had fought Norman princes in Sicily and in the Balkans, so he knew that they excelled at combat and chafed at being ruled, but he was willing to take the risk of hiring them in return for the reward of using them. In a similar vein, he intended to use the Crusaders to loosen the grip of the Seljuks on Asia Minor, but he had to make sure that they did not keep what they conquered. In addition, their armies were not under his command, and when they needed food and supplies, they tended to loot. Alexius was faced with a challenge that a man of lesser abilities could not have met. He wanted to exploit the Crusaders for his purposes without allowing them to jeopardize his lands. As the price of his assistance, he demanded that the princes swear an oath that if they captured any territory that had previously been ruled by Constantinople, they would return it to him.
The cultural gulf between the Byzantines and the Crusaders could hardly have been wider. Byzantine splendor had faded, but it still shone brighter than anything in Europe. The proud Byzantines saw the Crusaders as ignorant peasants, albeit well armed and pious. While some chroniclers called the Byzantines “Greek” because of the language they spoke, the Byzantines called themselves “Romans,” because they saw themselves, with justification, as the heirs of the empire that had been founded a millennium before by Augustus. While the Crusaders were also descendants of the Romans, they had long since lost touch with Roman learning and culture, so much so that they were dependent on the Muslims of Spain for the wisdom of antiquity. The Muslims referred to the Crusaders as the “Franks,” because most of them, including the Normans, were from Frankish lands once ruled by Charlemagne. The Byzantines, however, referred to the Crusaders as “barbarians,” which was what the ancient Greeks had called the uncultured, uncivilized tribesmen of Central Europe.
The Crusaders were a curiosity to the Byzantines, and the emperor’s daughter Anna Comnena recorded her impressions of them with the critical, bemused eye of an anthropologist writing about a primitive tribe. She was particularly struck by the character and physique of the Norman prince Bohemond of Taranto. According to Anna, he “was so tall in body that he exceeded even the tallest men by almost fifty centimeters…. The flesh on his body was very white His hair was light brown and did not hang on his back as it did on other barbarians Some charm also manifested itself in this man, but it was obscured by the fear he inspired all around him.” Anna’s account, penned years after the fact, was undoubtedly colored by the fact that Bohemond went on to become ruler of Antioch and an uneasy, often antagonistic vassal of the emperor. Other Crusaders, such as Godfrey of Bouillon and Baldwin of Boulogne, later of Edessa and later still king of Jerusalem, also merited description, but Bohemond stood out as the archetype—the faithful, barely civilized knight heading to Holy Land as a warrior for God.
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And at the time, that is all they were. The term “Crusader” was not invented until the thirteenth century, although the absence of the word does not mean the absence of the concept. Scholarly debates notwithstanding, the men who set off for Jerusalem in 1096 thought of themselves as what one French historian called “armed pilgrims.”
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There was a long and established history of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, especially as
penance for sins, and Pope Urban and his messengers had dangled the promise of spiritual reward for taking up arms to restore the Holy Land to Christian control. These armed pilgrims may have exhibited behavior that our contemporary morality would condemn as brutal and barbaric, but however greedy and rapacious they may have been, they lived in a world of deep and simple faith, one that not only coexisted with the sins of the flesh but was often fueled by them. The Crusaders knew that they had committed petty and not-so-petty sins, and that made the act of pilgrimage far more significant.