The Knight in History (6 page)

Gregory, famous for his “Gregorian Reform” of the Church, and his investiture struggle with German Emperor Henry IV, promoted a revolutionary theory of the relationship of the laity to the Church that proved to be of foremost importance to the knightly class. Building on the Peace of God and Truce of God movements, Gregory boldly carried the Church’s intervention in worldly affairs a long step further. The interests of the Church took precedence over all others, according to Gregory. The role of the laity, and of the knights in particular, was to serve those interests, both in secular politics and elsewhere. In case of conflict, a knight’s loyalty to the Church superseded his loyalty to his lord and even canceled his oath. Cleverly adopting feudal vocabulary, Gregory declared that knights were “the vassals of St. Peter.”

Conservatives among the feudal nobility and clergy reacted strongly. In their eyes the pope’s concerns should be limited to matters of faith. Gregory’s pretensions threatened to reduce kings to the status of “village bailiffs,” wrote one conservative churchman.
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Another protested, “Hitherto, knights were bound by the covenant of the oath. They were shocked by injuries to their lord and avenged his wrongs; they protected his power, defended his dignity and remained vigilant for the sake of their own salvation; and it seemed equal to sacrilege if they rebelled against their vassal-duty. Now…knights are armed against their lords…right and wrong are confounded, sanctity of the oath is violated.”
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Gregory demanded obedience from temporal rulers in worldly as well as spiritual matters, and to exact it he was prepared to resort to armed force. The laymen who would fight the pope’s battles were
milites Christi
, knights of Christ. For centuries the Church had stood strictly for peace, in the tradition of St. Martin of Tours: “I am the soldier of Christ; I am not permitted to fight.” Gregory discarded this pacifist ideology in favor of the “theory of the two swords”: the pope, a representative of St. Peter, held two weapons, a spiritual blade to be drawn by his own hand, and a secular one to be drawn at his command by nobles and knights.

Gregory did not rely merely on theological reasoning to persuade. He added a powerful inducement: service as a “soldier of Christ” would be paid by total remission of sins. A knight, he said, could hardly hold secular lords dearer than the pope, “for they confer what is but wretched and transitory,” that is, land and booty, while the pope promised “eternal blessings, absolving [the knights] from all sins.” Those who fought for Gregory against Henry IV would win “[St. Peter’s] blessing in this life and in the life to come.”
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Gregory’s vision of the Christian soldier, who wins salvation by his sword, provided the psychological and ideological motivation for the Crusade. Gregory’s successor and protégé, Urban II, wielded the instrument forged by his predecessor with history-making effect. In the “great stirring of the heart in all the Frankish lands”
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that he set in motion, the knights enthusiastically accepted the role of “the army of the Lord” fighting against “God’s enemies and ours.”
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In fact, the success of Urban’s appeal far outran his own expectations. He may have intended no more than the enlistment of a modest army to aid Byzantine emperor Alexius Comnenus, who had appealed for help against the Turks. From the varying reports of his sermon, all written at second hand, it is not certain that Urban even mentioned Jerusalem, but the holy city was seized on by popular imagination as at once a more definite and a more inspiring goal than the mere succor of persecuted Christians and churches in Asia Minor. The Jerusalem the Crusaders pictured was the celestial city of the Book of Revelations, with gates of pearl, walls studded with precious stones, and streets paved with gold, with “no need of the sun, neither of the moon, to shine in it, for the glory of God did lighten it,”
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where the water of life flowed and the tree of life bore leaves “for the healing of the nations.”
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The magical attraction of the idea of Jerusalem was reinforced by economic and social motivations. The prospect of acquisition of land was inviting for younger sons excluded from inheritance by primogeniture. To land, booty, and adventure was added for many like the Hongres the chance to escape from the tutelage of the head of the family. Yet the main appeal was undoubtedly religious. “Let those who have hitherto been robbers now become soldiers,” Urban proposed, according to one version of his address. “Let those who formerly contended against their brothers now fight as they ought, against the barbarians…. On one side will be…the enemies of God, on the other his friends,”
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whose reward would be the remission of sins, in the novel form of the Crusading indulgence. The value of the indulgence was heightened by the ambiguity of the existing penitential system, which left Christians unsure that the penances they did were equal to their sins. Although the intricate theology of the indulgence was not yet worked out, it was understood that the sinner received absolution by an act of grace.

The Crusade was closely connected with an older form of penance popular with the knightly class: the pilgrimage. The Hongres’s lord, Bernard Gros, went on pilgrimage to Rome in 1050 to atone for his land disputes with the abbey of Cluny.
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The armed pilgrimage of the Crusade might be seen as a superior form in which a knight could win total remission of his sins through skill and valor. Significantly, “pilgrimage” was the term by which contemporaries referred to the Crusades, or alternatively “journey to the Holy Land,” or “journey to Jerusalem.” The Latin term for “Crusade” did not appear until the thirteenth century, the vernacular not until the eighteenth (along with “feudalism,” “Gothic,” and “Middle Ages”). The custom of pilgrimage itself contributed to the Crusade, as pilgrims were easily convinced that it was intolerable for the Holy Places to be in the hands of the infidels.

The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres described the departure of the Crusading knight: “Oh, how much grief there was! How many sighs! How much sorrow! How much weeping among loved ones when the husband left his wife so dear to him, as well as his children, father and mother, brothers and grandparents, and possessions!…The wife reckoned the time of her husband’s return…. He commended her to the Lord, kissed her, and promised as she wept that he would return. She, fearing that she would never see him again, not able to hold up, fell senseless to the ground; mourning her living husband as though he were dead. He, having compassion, it seemed, neither for the weeping of his wife, nor…for the grief of…friends, and yet having it, for he secretly suffered severely…went away with a determined mind. What, then, can we say? ‘This is the Lord’s doing; it is marvelous in our eyes.’ ”
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The knightly armies of the Crusade were preceded eastward by the ragtag throng of the “People’s Crusade,” a bizarre product of Urban’s appeal quite unforeseen by him. Inspired by two charismatic leaders, Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless (actually an impoverished German knight), this horde made up of bands numbering some tens of thousands (100,000, the chroniclers exaggerated), entirely out of the control of the Church or the princes, made a calamitous march through central Europe and the Balkans to perish at the hands of the Turks on the road to Nicaea in the fall of 1096.

In sharp contrast to the disorganized march of the rabble, the campaign of the knights was a model of efficiency. Its five armies, led by the great regional princes of France, Flanders, and Norman Italy (no kings took part), arrived in Asia Minor intact and in fighting trim, well-supplied through the able support of the Italian merchants and mariners, who had their own interests in the venture. Three years of march, battle, and siege were climaxed by the storming of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099.

The success of this most remarkable of medieval military operations reflects well not only on the Crusade’s leadership but on the training, equipment, and morale of the individual knight who bore the hardships and fought the battles. Despite his near anonymity, the knight is the central actor in the story. Without repeating the well-known history of the Crusade, we may profitably examine his conduct in this largest single event in the annals of knighthood.

The factor that made a knight a Crusader was the Crusading vow, introduced by Urban at Clermont. By it the knight swore to march to Jerusalem and pray at the Holy Sepulchre. The cross sewn on his clothing was the public sign of the commitment. Vow and cross gave the clergy a measure of control over enlistment, allowing them to screen out those who were “unfit for bearing arms” and who would be “more of a hindrance than an aid”
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The same two elements conferred a temporary ecclesiastical status on the Crusader. With vow and cross, the Crusader acquired privileges similar to those enjoyed by pilgrims. By becoming a kind of temporary cleric, he made himself subject to Church courts and therefore exempt from lay jurisdiction. The Church promised to protect his lands and family during his absence and granted him freedom from tolls and taxes, a moratorium on debts and exemption from interest payments, and delay in the performance of vassal services or in judicial proceedings.
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Of the approximately 30,000 fighting men in the Crusade, perhaps 4,000 were knights, the rest foot soldiers. An undetermined number of unarmed pilgrims, including women and children, accompanied the troops. Modest compared with modern armies, the Crusading army was nevertheless very large by medieval standards. To the local populations it looked huge. The Armenian chronicler Matthew of Edessa likened the “formidable and immense throng” to “locusts who cannot be counted or the sands of the sea which are beyond the mind’s calculation.”
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Organization and financing were improvised. Urban had named Bishop Adhémar leader
(dux)
of the Crusade, and Adhémar, fighting in person at their side, lent unity to the five armies, but he was in no sense a commanding general. There was no central command structure, even after arrival in Syria. Each prince continued to lead his own troops. Under the princes, lesser nobles, some with their own vassals, formed their corps, and parties of knights from the same region banded together to elect their own leaders. In combat, the knight fought essentially as an individual. He might seize the initiative, sometimes to the dismay of his leaders, to lead a scaling party, signal for an advance, or impulsively begin a skirmish. The knights were also capable of acting in concert; at Antioch they successfully pressed the leaders to continue the march to Jerusalem.
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Not surprisingly, strife was chronic among the leaders, who quarreled from Constantinople to Jerusalem (should the city be a possession of the Church or be ruled by one of them as a king?). But at critical moments they were able to resolve or overlook their differences and come effectively to each other’s aid. Also noteworthy was the degree of discipline that the normally unruly knights accepted.

Both nobles and knights pledged or sold their lands to outfit and provision themselves. Achard de Montmerle, scion of a castellan family of the Mâcon region, mortgaged his patrimony to the abbey of Cluny to finance his participation.
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Others sold their allodial lands outright, often to the Church. In a foreshadowing of future policies, Robert Curthose pledged his duchy of Normandy for 10,000 silver marks borrowed from his brother William Rufus, king of England, raised by William through a heavy tax on his English subjects.
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There is no record of the fiscal arrangements of the Hongres in the First Crusade, but in the following century their knightly descendants pledged and sold lands to finance Crusading.
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Most knights provided their own horses and equipment, as for normal military expeditions. Two leaders, Bohemund d’Hauteville and his nephew Tancred, supplied some of their knights’ equipment and horses,
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and Raymond of Toulouse set up a fund of 500 marks to replace losses, after which “our knights boldly attacked the enemy because those who had worthless and worn-out horses knew they could replace their lost steeds with better ones” (Raymond d’Aguilers).
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On the final march to Jerusalem, “our knights and more affluent people” bought Arabian horses.
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