The First Crusade Part I
Posted by Mitch Williamson in Crusade on Saturday, January 14, 2012
There was curiously little pacifism in the High Middle Ages.
St Augustine, already by the fourth century, had formulated a theory of just
war (bellum justum), and subsequent clerics interwove his theory into a wider
ideology of Christian kingship. The ideal Christian king tried to avoid war or,
if war was unavoidable, tried to find honourable ways to re-establish peace
(‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God’,
Matthew 5:9). The Christian prince whose lands were invaded without legitimate
reason or whose subjects were imperilled by the forces of a rival prince or by
rebellion would necessarily use war as an instrument of policy and could do so
legitimately.
War had rules – in time this elaborate set of rules became
known as chivalry. In the late eleventh century, it was widely accepted in
elite circles that non-combatants were not licit targets, unless they were
spies or harboured or supplied the enemy. Under special protection were those
considered as the most vulnerable non-combatants: women and children in
general, but especially widows and orphans, as well as priests, monks, nuns,
the aged and the infirm.
The just wars of the biblical past, for which the book of
Joshua provided textual proof, openly received the blessing of God. Had He not
made the sun stand still so that Joshua’s victory might be assured? (Joshua
10:12). In the most extreme statement of the case, it was said that wars
against non-believers who had attacked the people of God were waged by the
direct will of God. Apart from direct illumination from the Almighty, how
better to determine the will of God than to have a priest, preferably the high
priest, sanctify the war?
Jesus’s rebuke to Peter, who tried to defend him when he was
being taken prisoner in the Garden of Gethsemane on the eve of his crucifixion,
was the proof here: ‘Put up thy sword into the sheath’ (Matthew 26:52). The
sword of physical retribution was not to be wielded by the spiritual
descendants of St Peter – the clergy – but lordship over the sword still
remained with the clergy: ‘Put up thy sword.’ It therefore rested with the
Church, according to some ecclesiastical theorists, to determine how and under
what conditions secular rulers could legitimately unsheathe and wield the sword
of physical retribution. This was not in conflict with the older ‘doctrine of
the two swords’ – one, spiritual (humiliation, malediction, excommunication,
interdict), to be employed by the Church to coerce open but recalcitrant
sinners; the other, temporal (physical force), to be employed by secular
rulers. Rather, it clarified the traditional doctrine of the two swords by
explaining the Church’s superintendence of temporal authority.
There was a centuries-old liturgy of war that emphasized
certain other aspects of the intimate relationship between the clergy and
righteous military violence. Ideally there was general fasting before battles
were waged, and the clergy present in the entourage of the army celebrated
votive masses, asking for victory and promising eternal devotion to God. The
priests blessed the commanders and their troops and gave sermons of
exhortation, the spiritual equivalent of the secular commanders’ harangues.
They led the faithful in hymns and responsive readings like Psalm 20 (Vulgate
19), with the famous verse, ‘Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we
will remember the name of the Lord our God. They are brought down and fallen:
but we are risen, and stand upright.’
Also drawing on the stories in the biblical Book of Joshua
of the conquest of the Promised Land, the clergy and the commanders
commemorated victory, suggestive if not self-evident testimony, when and if it
came, of the justness of their cause. They did so in part by following the
example of the ancient Hebrews, who, at God’s command, despoiled their beaten
enemies during the conquest of the Promised Land (e.g., Joshua 8: 26–27). They
also obliged the army to hear mass, to rededicate itself to the vows of
devotion with which the soldiers had prepared for battle, and to honour the
weapons of war in the cult of military relics.
So, already in the eleventh century elite thinkers and other
high-born people knew what a just war was and how it should be fought, even if
they did not live up to their ideals. The Peace and Truce of God had done much
to disseminate and popularize some of these ideals, but a particular set of
events in the late eleventh century helped to create a more remarkable type of
just and holy war – the crusade.
There was, it has been argued, a significant strain of
millenarian feeling in eleventh-century western European society. This was
perhaps slightly more characteristic of the earlier part of the century, but it
may be that millennial and apocalyptic movements of a more or less popular
character were in train throughout the century. The idea of a decisive colossal
confrontation between the forces of good and the servants of evil was at the
prophetic centre of several of these movements.
Jerusalem and its liberation, and more particularly the
deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre, the Tomb of Christ, from pagan domination,
loomed large in apocalyptic discourse. (In the eleventh and into the twelfth
century Christians in northern Europe tended to regard Muslims as pagans.) Jerusalem
was being used as a first name for girls in the West (Riley-Smith, 1997, p.
33), evidence of the penetration of its image into popular consciousness; and
pilgrimages to Jerusalem from the West, relatively uncommon from the seventh to
the tenth century, began to increase in frequency in the tenth. They became
fairly common in the eleventh and also on occasion enormously large. In 1054,
one band of such pilgrims numbered 3,000. Seven thousand Germans are said to
have joined together to make the Jerusalem pilgrimage in 1064–5.
Reports of various Muslim victories over Near Eastern and
Spanish Christians and of the gestures that sometimes followed fuelled the
smouldering hatred and desire for vengeance by western Catholics. In October
1086, the Muslim victors at the battle of Sagrajas in Spain had the heads of
the Christian victims gathered up into wagons and in a gruesome procession the
wagons made their way down the peninsula and thence through North Africa with
their rotting trophies. Pope Gregory VII himself, a decade or so before, seems
to have envisaged the papacy’s retainers, the fideles of St Peter, as a
possible army, to be accompanied by him, for delivering eastern Christians from
the onslaught of their Muslim enemies and also for redeeming Jerusalem. Because
of the Investiture Controversy and perhaps lingering doubts about the
appropriateness of direct papal involvement in fighting, the fantasy never
became reality, and important features of genuine crusade ideology, such as the
penitential vow of the troops, were lacking in his vision, but Gregory’s
musings helped inspire and sustain other images of a just war of liberation in
reform circles.
After his election in 1088, and being obliged to vie with
the imperial anti-pope Clement III for backing, Pope Urban II cast about for
support in numerous ways. In part owing to the Peace Movement a close
relationship had emerged between local aristocracies and a number of powerful
monasteries, especially in France. Focusing on prayer – the prayers of the monks
for the ancestors and living members of these aristocratic lineages – the
relationship implicitly and sometimes explicitly raised the hope of these
aristocrats’ salvation because of the good work they did in protecting the
monastic life, the highest form of the Christian life and, by extension,
Christendom in general. In practice, protection was ordinarily achieved by
persuasion or the threat of force rather than by the actual use of force
against would-be malefactors. But when persuasion and threats failed, the
application of force against those who attacked monks and other vulnerable
Christians was believed to be righteous in itself.
Force in the service of retributive justice (the bellum
justum) was carefully distinguished from the fury and chaos attending ‘petty’
disputes among lords, the acts of internecine violence (guerrae, the origin of
our modern word ‘war’) that had plagued the Central Middle Ages and helped
excite the Peace Movement in the first place and which were still thickly woven
into the fabric of social life in the late eleventh century. But Urban II or
one of his advisers, drawing on the legacy of Gregory VII and inspired by pleas
for help from eastern Christians, took another decisive step in the development
of the idea of the crusade. The same lords who protected monks could protect
Christendom east and west by directing their violence against the Muslim
invaders and conquerors of the eastern Mediterranean, including the Holy Land.
There is some uncertainty as to the rewards the pope promised
these would-be soldiers in his famous sermon at the Council of Clermont in
southern France on 27 November 1095. But there is no doubt that the idea of
fighting to regain the Holy Sepulchre or to help fellow Christians in the east
was in the air and met a genuinely enthusiastic response. Although the mutual
excommunications of pope and patriarch of Constantinople in 1054, emphasized so
much in traditional interpretations, had exacerbated tensions between the
western and eastern churches, they had not set them in malignant combat or
reduced all mutual feelings of respect to nothing.
At the Council of Clermont shouts went up of ‘God wills it!
God wills it!’ in response to the pope’s words. He appealed to lords and
lordlings to put aside their petty strife, which would lead them to hell, and
instead to take up the Cross, to offer their lives to save threatened
Christians. Would there be sin in killing their enemies in what was clearly
conceived of as a just and holy war? No. Would there be remission of sins in
some wider sense, a wiping clean of the slate or immediate entrance into
paradise if one died in the effort? The pope might have been carried away and
uttered ambiguous words on this occasion or on any of the many subsequent
occasions on which he gave similar speeches in favour of an expedition to the
east. Certainly some of his audience that first day and many others later on
believed that faithfully fighting in such an expedition would be rewarded with
full forgiveness of all past sins and that death in such fighting was
equivalent to martyrdom. Although learned churchmen understood and stressed the
penitential nature of crusading, they were far more insistent on the limited
nature of the forgiveness that joining or dying on a crusade might entail.
The pope recognized from the moment he addressed the crowds
in Clermont that he had touched a well-spring of militant devotion. He
continued in future sermons to make the same plea and to urge those lords who
responded to make firm plans for an expedition in the spring of 1096. It may
well be that some of the enthusiasm at subsequent councils and rallies in late
1095 and early 1096 was scripted, with supporters of the pope’s plan
strategically planted in the crowds to get the chanting of ‘God wills it!’ started.
It may also be the case that the genuine enthusiasm of the moment sometimes
ebbed in the weeks that followed, as lords came to recognize the dangers and
expense of the long and otherwise unpredictable journey they were going on.
Fear of dying in a far-off place when one’s expectation had been to be buried
in the choir of the family church, or at least in Christian soil, troubled
their souls. It would later be stipulated that the flesh could be buried but
the bones of dead crusaders had to be brought back for separate burial in their
native lands.
All these apprehensions notwithstanding, the crusading
movement, once started, grew exponentially in territories like France, the
southern Low Countries, and those parts of Italy where the legitimacy of
Urban’s pontificate was recognized. And, given its later successes, attributed
to the intervention of God (He simply worked through the Franks), it raised
disturbing questions about the evident lack of imperial sponsorship for the
project. Emperor Henry IV was well aware of this, for at one point he offered
to join the crusade himself. But as he would not yield on the point of lay
investiture, his offer came to nothing.
Pope Urban II encouraged those who took the vow to prepare
conscientiously, and the principal leaders, including many Flemish, Rhine-land,
northern French and Provençal barons – though in the end no king – ultimately
settled on 15 August 1096, the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin,
as the date of departure. However, it was difficult to co-ordinate and control
efforts that were taking place all over northwestern Europe, and what is
sometimes known as the Peasants’ Crusade or Popular Crusade – the expeditions
of several dispersed groups under the leadership of various itinerant preachers
and knights – set off in the late spring. A small group at Rouen in Normandy
helped set the violent and almost anarchic tone of these early expeditions by
massacring several Jews in the city. Another of these groups, somewhat better
commanded by a knight known as Walter the Penniless (Sansavoir), left France
and travelled through Germany and Hungary, making it to the outskirts of
Constantinople by July. A third group, led by the charismatic preacher, Peter
the Hermit, arrived there by the end of July, but on their way these poorly
disciplined troops provoked any number of bloody and, for them, humbling
skirmishes with Hungarian and Byzantine soldiers.
Many of the earliest crusaders never made it, even to
Constantinople. The disorder and depredations of one group, whose leader was a
priest by the name of Gottschalk, provoked the Hungarians, through whose lands
they were marching, to destroy them. An otherwise unknown preacher named
Volkmar led his followers to a similar fate in Nitra on the Hungarian border with
Bohemia, but only after they had violently attacked the Jews of Prague. The
most notorious of the bands was led by the Swabian Count Emich of Flonheim. He
and his followers, inspired in part by the desire to loot but mainly, it seems,
to force the Jews’ conversion, carried out a series of violent attacks in the
Rhineland, repercussions from which would reach down the centuries.
Before they left Germany on their way to the east and were
themselves cut down by Hungarian forces, Emich’s men and other bands ravaged
the Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Cologne, Trier, Metz and
Regensburg. In some cases, like Mainz, the entire Jewish population of these
towns was annihilated; at others (Regensburg is an example) nearly every Jew
was forced to convert to Christianity. Even where Christian authorities,
especially bishops, intervened to protect the Jews, the situation continued to
be ferociously dangerous. Occasionally, for example, Jews were dispersed into
the countryside to prevent the crusaders from besieging them en masse, but
search parties hunted down the refugees in villages and hamlets. On other
occasions, churchmen promised protection at the price of conversion. Most
arresting, perhaps, was that in several places Jewish resistance to the
crusaders’ demands for conversion assumed the form of voluntary suicide. Many
Jewish women led the way, urging the men of their communities to take their own
lives rather than convert. Parents also slaughtered their children as a supreme
act of devotion.
There had been rare instances of mass suicide earlier in the
history of Judaism, but in 1096 and later years rabbis were troubled as to the
moral legitimacy of the suicides. In the end, they came to accept them and
subsequent ones as legitimate responses to the threat of forced conversion, and
generations of poets would celebrate the heroism of the martyr suicides and the
martyred children. Many of their names would be inscribed in memorial lists.
The poetry celebrating their sacrifice entered the liturgy of the synagogue, so
that the memory of the events of 1096 and of the martyrs and victims in later
crusades and at other crises would never be forgotten.
Oh, how the
children cried aloud!
Trembling, they see
their brothers slaughtered;
the mother binding
her son, lest he profane the sacrifice by shuddering;
the father making
the ritual blessing to sanctify the slaughter.
Compassionate women
strangle their own children;
pure virgins shriek
bitterly;
brides kiss their
bridegrooms farewell –
and all rush
eagerly to be slaughtered.
Almighty Lord,
dwelling on high,
in days of old the
angels cried out to You to put a halt to one sacrifice.
And now, so many
are bound and slaughtered –
why do they not
clamour over my infants?
(Carmi, 1981, pp. 372–3)
Relations between Christians and Jews were affected in at
least one other way by the horrendous incidents of 1096. A fissure developed in
the Jewish community between those who seem to have developed a more restricted
understanding of proper Jewish life and those who went back to the way of life
they knew before. It is probably unfair to see the movement or sect attributed
to these hasidim or pietists of the Rhineland only as a reaction to the crusade
massacres, but that slaughter must have had an enormous impact in sustaining
the rigorous beliefs of those survivors who insisted on a more pious way of
living and an even greater avoidance of social and religious contamination by
contact with non-pious Jews, let alone Christians. The sect disappeared in time;
its ideas, embedded in an important body of texts, especially the Sefer Hasidim
(‘Book of the Pious’), have repeatedly inspired revival movements among
European Jews.
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