God's War: A New History of the Crusades

embassy to the pope early in 1095, but it is certain that Urban’s scheme owed more to his own rather than the Greek’s designs. Not the least remarkable feature of the inception of the Jerusalem expedition was that the casus belli was the sole invention of the aggressors, almost entirely unimagined by their target. In the west, Urban’s penitential war marked a significant step on the path towards incorporating all Christendom into a militia Dei against unbelievers and sinners.

Urban called for a penitential holy war rather than, as many have maintained, specifically an armed pilgrimage. While no authentic account of the Clermont speech exists, the council’s Jerusalem decree and Urban’s surviving letters from the period emphasized the spiritually meritorious temporal goal of the expedition, the liberation of the eastern churches and that of Jerusalem. The method to be employed was unequivocally military. In a letter to his supporters in Flanders written days after the end of the Clermont assembly, Urban talked of the expedition in terms of a procinctus, a military undertaking.³⁴ To the monks of Vallembrosa a year later he referred to his hope that the knights who set out ‘might be able to restrain the savagery of the Saracens by their arms and restore the Christians to their former freedom’, warning the monks not to join up ‘either to bear arms or go on this journey’. Urban was remembered as calling for an armed struggle in his preaching at Limoges in December 1095. Count Fulk of Anjou, who entertained Urban in March 1096, shortly afterwards noted how the pope had exhorted recruits ‘to go to Jerusalem to hunt the pagan people who had occupied the city’. Many of those who received the pope’s message of liberating Jersualem by force understood his meaning clearly enough, as a Gascon charter put it, ‘to fight and to kill’ those who had defiled the scene of the Resurrection. The countess of Flanders recalled in 1097 how the Holy Spirit had inflamed the heart of her husband, Count Robert II, to curb the perfidy of the Turks with armed force. In the surviving letters of the crusaders, the sense of the army as a militia rather than a pilgrimage is strong. When Pope Paschal II announced the capture of Jerusalem to the French clergy in December 1099, he described the expedition as a Christiana militia, only the following April adding the word peregrinatio and the language of pilgrimage.³⁵

For Urban, holy war and its associated remission of confessed sin needed no additional justification; he claimed the authority of God. The Clermont decree avoided any direct reference to pilgrimage. The Clermont ceremony of taking the cross appeared deliberately novel, independent of the rite performed by departing pilgrims. Libertas ecclesiae by force needed no further sanction, as the Investiture Wars of Gregory VII had shown – at least to the radicals at the Papal Curia, of whom Urban was one. It has been argued that the oblique language of Urban’s letters, using words such as labor, via and iter, implied pilgrimage. Rather, they implied an equally meritorious penitential military alternative to pilgrimage. Overt language of pilgrimage was avoided or ignored by Urban in his own correspondence, the closest evidence for what he may have been thinking. Urban’s own words explicitly and unequivocally described holy war, in the style of Gregory VII; they did not refer explicitly to an armed pilgrimage even if he were conscious of the tempting parallel. However, the sacralizing of war in all its aspects, shedding blood, killing, securing booty and plunder, appeared extreme and for some, especially among the clergy, no doubt disconcerting. The point was made by the famous battle cry of the hard-pressed crusaders at the battle of Dorylaeum in July 1097 as recorded by a widely circulated anonymous author who gave the impression of being an eyewitness: ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in God and the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’.³⁶ This was not, as many have assumed, a surrender to material greed. Instead, the chronicler was attempting to convince his audience of the spiritual legitimacy of the form of warfare in all its practical ramifications, in recognition, perhaps, of its contentious nature.

Other witnesses, such as Bishop Gaston of Cahors or Abbot Geoffrey of Vendome, took Urban’s holy war and, whether or not the pope intended it, by analogy interpreted it as a form of pilgrimage, a familiar and more clerically palatable model.³⁷ This was facilitated by the goal of the enterprise being the supreme pilgrimage destination, Jerusalem. The association with pilgrimage diluted the radicalism of Urban’s message, even if it set up an inherent conceptual contradiction by linking extreme violence with a previously pacific activity. Earlier stories of pilgrims carrying arms for defence and fighting attackers, as on the German pilgrimage of 1064–5, simply did not embrace the idea of pilgrims whose whole purpose was to fight. The appeal of thinking of the Jerusalem expedition as a pilgrimage was obvious; the typology of journeying, penance and remission of sins was recognizable, demonstrated by the hordes of non-combatant pilgrims who tagged along with the armed forces. From the evidence of some charters, a few crusaders’ letters, such as those of Count Stephen of Blois, and early chronicle accounts, it is clear that this conservative approach, probably peddled by local clergy in search of a means of comprehending this novel phenomenon, possessed force and acquired ready adherents.³⁸ Thereafter, pilgrimage and the holy wars of the cross became almost inseparable. This may not have been Urban’s doing. His vision was more radical, more disturbing and more penetrating.

It is sometimes argued that Urban’s original plan had been for a limited expedition to assist Alexius I and press on to the Holy Sepulchre rather in the fashion of Gregory VII’s embryonic scheme of 1074, and that it was only the astonishing response to his call that forced him to change his rhetoric and policy. This underestimates the grandeur of his scheme. His tour of France was extensive and exhausting. At Clermont in late November and again at Tours in March, the sixty-year-old pope preached in the open air. His schedule was punishing, with the travelling followed by regular public appearances at long-winded liturgical ceremonies even without preaching. He presided over three major church councils, at Tours (March 1096) and Nimes (July 1096) as well as Clermont. The vigour and geographic embrace of Urban’s preaching argues against modest recruitment plans; his role in local consecrations of altars and the like, the ease of passage through different provinces and lordships and the orderly crowds of notables assembled reflected careful premeditation. Despite the attempts of apologists to imply otherwise, enthusiastic crowds were not gathered by chance in the early weeks of Urban’s tour. On Christmas Day 1095 at Limoges he attended three separate services, progressing between them in full regalia. Within the week he had rededicated the cathedral and the chief local shrine of St Martial. Only then did he preach about Jerusalem.³⁹ His visit to Poitiers coincided with the feast of that city’s patron saint, St Hilary (13 January). At Angers (January 1096) and at Tours and Marmoutier (March), his preaching was linked to local ceremonies or assemblies that were far from haphazard and probably long planned (dedications of churches, translations of bodies of local dignitaries, church councils, etc.). The liturgical theatricality, emphasized by regular processions in full ceremonial finery, was not staged at random. His successor Paschal II noted Urban’s attention to towns (civitates). While he tried to impose a southern French bishop, Adhemar of Le Puy, as leader of the expedition in his place, he still wrote to the Flemish in the north urging participation and dispatched a legate to the Anglo-Norman realms. Although the expedition lacked the cohesion Urban may have wished for, Adhemar’s authority was widely accepted on the march once the armies had combined at Nicaea in June 1097. Urban’s later injunctions to the Bolognese (September 1096), prohibiting clergy from joining and encouraging laymen to consult their parish priests or bishops, do not speak of alarm at numbers but canonical rectitude, very much part of the package from Clermont or even Piacenza onwards. The timing of the preaching, seen by some as oddly late in the year, suited elaborate recruitment. Urban’s journey to France covered two penitential seasons, Advent and Lent, appropriate to his message of repentance, as well as the major Christocentric festivals of Christmas and Easter, when images and dramatic representations of Jerusalem accompanied church and civic celebrations. Urban’s announcement that the expedition would set out on 15 August 1096 provided time for armies to be raised: in the event all the main contingents north of the Alps left by October. It also recognized the importance of waiting for the harvest, traditionally begun in northern Europe on 1 August. Thus the timetable of the church year, including the departure date, the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, a major cult in Le Puy itself, was suited to military requirements; logistics matched liturgy.

Urban’s own preaching seems to have been highly effective. From the admittedly partial and limited evidence of charters between recruits and monasteries, it has been observed that a ‘high proportion’ of noble recruits came from areas Urban visited or within a couple of days’ ride from his itinerary. His preaching impressed eyewitnesses, and he had an advantage that Gregory VII lacked, in that he himself came from precisely the arms-bearing aristocratic milieu of the French nobility that he sought to exploit, as did his chosen legate, Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy, a nobleman reputed as an excellent horseman.⁴⁰ Like many contemporary bishops, Adhemar was evidently almost as at home on a battlefield as in a cathedral, some of his colleagues even donning armour (like Odo, bishop of Bayeux at the battle of Hastings as depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry) and wielding maces in deference to the canon law prohibition on clergy spilling blood, a ban that apparently did not include crushing and bruising.