God's War: A New History of the Crusades

immediate, if unsuccessful, imitation, in particular by armies from Lombardy, Bavaria and France (1100–1102), and almost universal praise. Judged on any criteria, the achievement of the expedition to Jerusalem was stupendous.²

By explaining these spectacular events in terms of divine will, contemporaries found neither need nor inclination to inquire too deeply into the gestation, purpose, timing or nature of Urban’s appeal. Still less were they able to produce a comprehensive view of all operations connected with the journey east. Although there was disagreement between local traditions over details (as in different provinces boasting one of their own as the first man over the walls of the Holy City), and at least one account, that of the Lorrainer Albert of Aachen (Aix), attributing the original inspiration of the whole enterprise to Peter the Hermit rather than the pope, the events themselves provided their own explanation and justification without causing anxiety over what occurred beyond the vision or hearing of the writer and his sources. Thus the direct and indirect accounts of eyewitnesses, many of which fed off each other, were partial and artificial, literary and didactic. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, is frank about his concerns, lest the deeds of the victors of 1099 be distorted by rumours spread by ‘misfits of war and cowardly deserters’. His openness may stand for all:

It is a matter of record that God’s army, although it bore the whip of the Lord for its transgressions, nevertheless triumphed over all paganism because of His loving kindness. But it seems too tiresome to write of each journey since some went through Sclavonia, others by Hungary, by Lombardy, or by the sea. So, we have taken care to write of the Count of Saint-Gilles, the bishop of Le Puy, and their army without bothering with the others.³

As a result, although the most famous episode of its age and place, there is much about the First Crusade that is confused and irrecoverable. It is not only private motives that elude scrutiny. After the first five identifiable groups of Jew-persecuting crusaders had left the Rhineland by the beginning of June 1096, further attacks on Jewish communities occurred in June and July to the north, in Xanten, Geldern, Neuss, Wiehr and Wevelinghoren, hitherto untouched by the pogroms. Who precisely the perpetrators were, who led them and what happened to them is wholly obscure. When Peter the Hermit arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, he discovered a large army of Italians already there; again their provenance, leadership, organization and route have left no trace in the sources. When the princes’ army arrived in the environs of Antioch in October 1097, they discovered that two nearby ports on the coast of north Syria, St Symeon and Lattakiah, had already been captured by western fleets that included Genoese and angli (literally ‘English’). These may have acted in concert with crusade leaders or the Byzantine emperor, or not. For the next eighteen months, western shipping appeared regularly in Levantine waters without any clear account of their origins, such as another fleet of angli that reached St Symeon in March 1098, having put in at the Italian port of Lucca en route. These mariners, numerous other groups and thousands of individuals who joined the ‘great stirring’ (motio valida) have little or no history.⁴ To generalize about their expectations and experiences is inherently futile and possibly distorting. The picture of the First Crusade is far from clear, well delineated or fixed despite the fierce attention it has attracted over more than 900 years. Its story can only be tentative and incomplete, the stuff of legend indeed.

When Urban II stood before the crowd at the end of the council at Clermont neither was unprepared. In March 1095, at a council at Piacenza in Lombardy, ambassadors from the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, appealed for military aid against his hostile neighbours, the latest in a succession of such requests. A few years earlier, Alexius had asked Urban to organize help against the Pechenegs in the Balkans. Now, according to a western account, the enemy were described as ‘pagans’ who threatened eastern Christians and were menacing even Constantinople itself.⁵ Whatever the strategic validity of such claims, the combination of military danger and religious solidarity bore strong echoes of the schemes of the 1070s. Urban turned this opportunity to his own purposes. After years of defensiveness since Gregory VII’s expulsion from Rome by the imperialists in 1084, the papal party had begun to consolidate its position in Italy, France and Germany. The Council of Piacenza, a clear demonstration of papal power as the first international ecclesiastical assembly of Urban’s pontificate, witnessed Gregorianism in action, sitting in judgement on the state of the church and the morals of the clergy and debating the sins of emperors and kings, specifically the conduct of Henry IV of Germany and the adultery of Philip I, the Fat, of France. This latest Greek request could be incorporated into this new confident papal assertiveness. It was recorded that the pope exhorted ‘many’ to promise to help Alexius against the ‘pagans’ by taking an oath.⁶

To capitalize on the achievement of Piacenza, Urban planned his elaborate tour of France, the first by a pope for almost half a century. This was to culminate at the Council of Clermont, attended by at least thirteen archbishops, eighty-two bishops, countless abbots and a host of other clerics. The geographical embrace of this gathering was impressive, from the Anglo-Norman realms and Artois in the north to Upper Austria in the east to Italy in the south; the assembling of such a gathering was a matter of weeks if not months; its business neither random nor spontaneous but premeditated. However, the council provided only part of the pope’s business and itinerary. Urban arrived in Provence in July 1095. During the following fourteen months before returning to Italy in September 1096, he conducted a unique papal tour, covering much of southern, central, western and south-eastern France: Provence, Languedoc, the Rhone valley, Burgundy, the Auvergne, the Limousin, Anjou, Maine, Touraine, Poitou, the Bordelais, his journey punctuated by theatrical ceremonies, assemblies and preaching in some of the most important religious and urban centres: Nimes, Avignon, Lyons, Cluny, Macon, Clermont, Limoges, Angers, Le Mans, Tours, Poitiers, Bordeaux, Moissac, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Montpellier, Arles. His avoidance of the territories under the direct control of the Capetian king, in the Orleannais and the Ile de France, and those of the feuding heirs to the Anglo-Norman lands, William II of England and Duke Robert of Normandy, was political and deliberate; the French king was to be excommunicated at the Clermont Council; the Normans were too successfully old-fashioned in their control of their clergy and too ambivalent in their loyalty to the Urbanist cause for comfort. Flanders and Lorraine were too far north and close to strong imperialists. The impact of the papal visit was great, the physical presence of such an august figure attracting special excitement in regions unused to such grand progresses.

By the time he reached Clermont in November Urban had already been on the road for four months, visiting significant religious and secular centres in Provence, Languedoc and Burgundy, including his alma mater, the abbey of Cluny, where on 25 October he dedicated the high altar of the new church that Abbot Hugh had begun to build, the ruins of which still stand as a reminder of the awesome scale and grandeur of Cluniac monasticism. Before arriving at Clermont he had almost certainly discussed his eastern project with Raymond IV of St Gilles count of Toulouse, a veteran of wars in Spain, and Adhemar of Monteil, bishop of Le Puy, both of whom were to play central roles in the expedition, as well as the bishop of Cahors and, very probably, the archbishop of Lyons and the abbot of Cluny, in addition to the cardinals and Italian clerics in his entourage, which included Daimbert, archbishop of Pisa, later patriarch of Jerusalem after its capture in 1099. To the Clermont meeting, diocesans were asked to bring with them the most powerful magnates from their regions (excellentiores principes); the bishop of Arras was specifically encouraged by his archbishop to invite Baldwin of Mons, count of Hainault, who was later to join up, dying in an ambush while on an embassy to the Greek emperor in Asia Minor in 1098.⁷ In Burgundy, a story persisted that at a regional council at Autun, possibly held during Urban’s stay in late October 1095 on his way to Clermont, ‘the first vows for the Jerusalem journey were sworn’.⁸

The consistency of Urban’s correspondence with what was later thought he had said at Clermont by eyewitnesses and with contemporary perceptions revealed in charters of departing soldiers and in accounts such as that of Count Fulk le Rechin (the Sour) of Anjou, who left a description of the pope’s preaching in the Loire valley in early 1096, strongly suggest that Urban travelled to France with most, if not all, the elements of his eastern project in place: a penitential journey in arms to Jerusalem to recover the Holy Sepulchre and to ‘liberate Christianity’ and the eastern Christians, the expedition earning warriors satisfaction of penance and remission of sin, signalled by a vow to enforce the obligation and the adoption of the sign of the cross to distinguish those who, in the words even of a grudging papal critic, had swapped the ‘militia of the world’ (militia mundi) for the ‘militia of God’ (militia Dei).⁹ With him, Urban carried relics of the True Cross, one of which he used to consecrate the abbey church of Marmoutier, near Tours, in March 1096, an event that coincided with local magnate recruits ‘in the presence of the pope stitch(ing) onto their clothes the insignia of the holy cross’.¹⁰ Taking the cross became the emblematic and defining gesture of crusading. The crosses to be worn were usually of textile, wool or occasionally silk, large enough to be noticed but small enough to