God's War: A New History of the Crusades

heading for Jerusalem with the good intent of liberating Christianity’.²¹ The restoration to Christendom of the scene of the ideal church as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles represented more than a propaganda device or a sop and capitulation to ill-informed populism, as some twentieth-century historians such as Carl Erdmann have implied. Rather it signalled the ultimate libertas ecclesiae for which the whole church reform movement of the previous half-century had been striving.

Jerusalem in the eleventh as in other centuries defined an ideal as much as a terrestrial city. It could stand as a metaphor, ‘the holy city, God’s celestial Jerusalem’, as an English royal charter of 1093 put it, for the world redeemed by Christ.²² Jerusalem could represent a spiritual condition and aspiration, as in the religious life of an individual or community, or its attributes could be geographically transposed to create a virtual reality in relics and shrines. Clairvaux abbey in the mid-twelfth century was likened to Jerusalem by its abbot, St Bernard, as had been the imperial courts of Charlemagne or Byzantium. More pervasively, the liturgy recreated scenes from Jerusalem in the mass or enacted whole episodes, as in the increasingly popular Easter plays, each a glimpse of the Holy City. Yet for all its liminality, poised between heaven and earth, God and man, Jerusalem remained a place as well as an ideal, temporal as well as spiritual, corporal as well as supernatural. In the tenth and eleventh centuries its distance – loca remotissima, as one historian of Urban’s expedition put it²³ – and association with Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection ensured Jerusalem as the most meritorious goal of pilgrimage to such an extent that the chronicler Ralph Glaber noted that such a trip was in danger of becoming a fashionable social accessory rather than an act of piety.²⁴ The difficulties of the journey, magnified a hundred-fold by war, secured its penitential attraction.

Scriptural history and the pseudo-history of Christian prophecy confirmed this unique numinous status. Earlier in the eleventh century the Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes insisted on the historical primacy of Jerusalem over Rome itself as ‘the fountain of Christianity… the mother of all Churches’.²⁵ Throughout the century, notably in the 1030s and 1060s, huge bands of pilgrims trekked east, inspired by chiliastic enthusiasm condemned as misguided by one commentator, who nonetheless recorded the potency of such emotions to attract ‘not only the common people but the elites (primores)’.²⁶ Jerusalem played a prominent part in the genre of eschatological literature popular in western monasteries, cathedrals and courts from at least the mid-tenth century, the setting for the final scenes of Judgement at the end of the world. There, it was widely asserted, the Last Roman Emperor would surrender his crown as a preliminary to the Last Things. Unsurprisingly, such prominence in the Divine Plan appealed to imperialists during the contest between Henry IV and the reforming popes, Benzo of Alba advising the king to fulfil these Jerusalem prophecies himself. Western obsessions with the Holy City may have been sufficiently strong to have persuaded the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to cite the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre in enticing western nobles into his service in the years before 1095.²⁷

Pope Urban was particularly susceptible to the pull of Jerusalem. As a monk, later prior of Cluny from the late 1060s, he was exposed to vivid images of the Holy City in the interminable liturgical round, in Psalms (e.g. Psalm 79: ‘O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance’) as well as in special ceremonies surrounding Easter and Pentecost conducted in the great Burgundian abbey. As pope, Urban’s interest in the Apostolic church of Jerusalem is suggested by his patronage in the years immediately before 1095 of regular canons – secular clergy who lived in a community – in whom, he insisted, the virtues of the pristine church could be renewed. As a cardinal in Rome after 1079, Urban had been surrounded by relics of Jerusalem and the Holy Land, especially the collection housed at the Lateran, then the pope’s habitual Roman residence. These included Christ’s umbilical chord, foreskin and some of His blood, pieces of the cross, numerous objects associated with His ministry and Passion (such as a loaf and thirteen beans from the Last Supper), relics of Holy Land saints and numerous physical specimens, such as rocks from Bethlehem, the Mount of Olives, the river Jordan, Calvary and the Holy Sepulchre itself. Such a collection fitted the growing trend in eleventh-century religious devotion away from purely local saints towards those with worldwide appeal, such as St Nicholas at Bari or the cult of the Virgin Mary. It was in trying to establish the universal importance of his Limoges patron St Martial that Adhemar of Chabannes disparaged Rome in preference to Jerusalem, where he claimed the saint had been consecrated. Adhemar died on his own pilgrimage to the Holy City in 1034. International shrines such as St Iago of Compostela in Galicia as well as Jerusalem featured increasingly prominently in the spiritual life of western Christendom. Urban’s preaching of 1095 did not create such interest or enthusiasm, however much it confirmed and extended it; rather, as elsewhere, the pope reforged a new weapon from old shards.²⁸

This was obvious with the employment of the cross as military banner, personal insignia and mystical symbol; part relic, part totem, part uniform. The ceremony instituted at Clermont tapped into another well of traditional devotion conjured up by the Crucifixion and Christ’s command: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me’ (Matthew 16:24; cf. Luke 15:26: ‘And whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after me, cannot be my disciple’). Two eyewitnesses later reported Urban use this invocation, as did a veteran of the expedition itself who probably heard of Urban’s appeal some months after Clermont. The theme of following Christ was a standard of eleventh-century eremitic (the ideal of the recluse) and revivalist rhetoric. On a popular as well as elite level, church reform was pursued by evangelists living and preaching a return to the Apostolic life. The idea was not confined to the Jerusalem journey; it inspired eremitical groups such as the new religious communities of Molesme and Citeaux established in Burgundy before and during the First Crusade as well as the influential Robert of Arbrissel, founder of the Order of Fontevrault, whose preaching tours coincided with Urban’s. Closer to the papacy, Peter Damian (d. 1072), hermit and cardinal, who exerted a strong influence on successive popes for a generation from the 1040s, was an enthusiast for the Jerusalem pilgrimage who propagated the cult of the cross. The two went together as symbols of practical and mystical remission of sin and redemption. From his Jerusalem pilgrimage of 1026–7, the saintly Abbot Richard of St Vanne of Verdun returned with a piece of the True Cross hanging in a bag around his neck.²⁹ By the 1090s many abbeys had received such relics from pilgrims, not least those, such as Moissac, that were active in support of both pilgrimage and crusade; as Urban’s consecration of Marmoutier indicated, such relics were sought after.

The use of the symbol of the cross at Clermont signalled a pivotal concern for Jerusalem. Urban himself certainly presided over cross-giving at Tours (March 1096) and probably Le Mans (February), and it is likely that he or his agents distributed crosses wherever he preached. Ceremonies conducted by Urban’s deputies, by local clergy or unofficially proliferated. Apparently at one such occasion at Rouen a riot ensued. Using relics of the cross as a prop to encourage participation, as Urban had done at Marmoutier, became fashionable. It could backfire. An English annalist described how, during the preaching of the Jerusalem expedition, a French abbot constructed his own cross, passing it off as having been made by God: as a punishment, he was afflicted with cancer.³⁰ It is an indication of the independent role assumed by Peter the Hermit, possibly retrospectively, that he carried as a preaching aid a letter from heaven rather than a relic of the cross which, within a year of Clermont, had swept all other symbols aside. Giving the cross was simple and non-discriminatory. Unlike the granting of the symbols of pilgrimage, which assumed a contractual imposition of a penance by a priest, in the first flush of the new ritual, presenting crosses was not a monopoly of those in holy orders. In June 1096, at Amalfi in Apulia, as a carefully staged demonstration of piety and power, the Italian-Norman lord Bohemund of Taranto provided crosses for his men. Although never becoming the exclusive preserve of holy warriors, wearing the cross was immediately distinctive. At Amalfi, Bohemund had been particularly struck by the crosses worn by passing crusaders. Those in the army to Jerusalem themselves referred to recruits who had not yet fulfilled their vows as being ‘signed with the holy cross’ while in 1098 they wrote to Urban himself that he had ‘ordered us to follow Christ carrying our crosses’.³¹ For others these badges carried more sinister implications. One of the words employed by Hebrew chroniclers to describe the perpetrators of the Rhineland pogroms of 1096 translates as ‘those bearing insignia’, signs of an obsession with the Crucifixion and vengeance on those allegedly responsible who still denied Christ’s divinity.³² For Christian warrior and persecuted Jew, the cross was definitive.

Urban’s message delivered at Clermont and repeated in sermons and letters over the next three years, emerged clearly: penitential warfare to rescue Jerusalem and the eastern churches from Islam; the liberation of the eastern church after centuries of bondage with the implication of the restoration of fraternal unity with, as one eyewitness at Clermont later had it, ‘blood-brothers’;³³ the prospect of the remission of all sins, as Urban clearly stated in December 1095, for those warriors who had taken the cross in sign of their acceptance of their duty to follow Christ; the obligation to revenge the loss of Christ’s Holy Land as a debt of honour; the realization of papal leadership of Christendom; the transformation of a sinful military aristocracy into a godly order. It is not entirely clear how far this was from what Alexius I had envisaged when he despatched yet another