God's War: A New History of the Crusades

August of a substantial Egyptian army, perhaps 20,000 strong, commanded by the Vizier al-Afdal himself. For the westerners, defeating al-Afdal was essential to secure their conquest; battle could not be shirked. By 10 August, leaving a skeleton garrison in Jerusalem with Peter the Hermit to lead prayers of intercession for their success, the Christian leaders had mustered at Ramla, with an army perhaps 10,000 strong, advancing the next day towards Ascalon on the coast twenty-five miles away. The following morning, 12 August, they caught the unprepared Egyptians encamped before the northern walls of the city. Repulsing a vigorous infantry sally, the western knights launched a concerted cavalry charge that put the Egyptian force to flight and captured the enemy camp with its rich pickings of booty. Once again, flexibility, coordination, speed, boldness and surprise allowed the westerners to overcome a force perhaps twice their size. Only continued bickering between Godfrey and Raymond prevented the surrender of the demoralized city itself, which remained in Muslim hands for another fifty-four years, a troublesome Egyptian presence in the kingdom built by Godfrey and his successors.

The battle of Ascalon marked the completion of the campaign launched from Constantinople in the spring of 1097. Jerusalem was secured; the veterans could depart. Squabbling persisted to the end. In mid-August, Godfrey forced Raymond to abandon an attempt to capture the coastal town of Arsuf. After a final reconciliation with Godfrey, Raymond and the other leaders, Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders, and the majority of the surviving crusaders left for the north. At Lattakiah, where they found Bohemund and the newly arrived papal legate, Daimbert of Pisa, with a large fleet attempting to dislodge the Byzantine garrison, they persuaded the attackers to withdraw. Daimbert prepared to continue south to Jerusalem to assert his authority over both church and state. Bohemund withdrew to Antioch. Raymond assumed command of the citadel of Lattakiah in agreement with the Greeks, who, in contradiction of their reputation for hostility and duplicity soon to be popularized in western Europe, helped provide the shipping to carry the crusaders back home. By the end of August, the survivors, including the duke of Normandy and count of Flanders, hundreds of other lords and knights and thousands of humbler soldiers and pilgrims, finally embarked for the west to resume their spectacularly interrupted lives.

The success of the armies called together by Urban II, whose death on 29 July 1099 robbed him of knowledge of the triumph, was neither inevitable nor incredible. The miserable failure of successive substantial western armies in Asia Minor in 1101 testified to the importance of battlefield tactics, good generalship and luck. After the near- disaster in July 1097, the main expedition performed with increasing cohesion, boldness and skill. By June 1098 these hardened troops presented a frightening proposition for the coalition armies of their opponents. Common identity was reinforced by the regular transfer of allegiances and new patterns of lordship within the contingents, as with Tancred’s abandonment of Bohemund and later serial loyalty to Raymond and Godfrey; or Robert of Normandy’s acceptance of Raymond’s leadership in January 1099. Such permeable structures of allegiance and affinity characterized the expedition from the winter of 1097–8. The chronicler Fulcher of Chartres joined the entourage of Baldwin of Boulogne in Cilicia and at Edessa eight months before the desertion of his previous lord, Stephen of Blois. Having set out in 1096 as head of a Lorrainer army, by the time Godfrey became ruler of Jerusalem in 1099 he had attracted supporters from across northern France, a consequence of his wealth; his willingness to accept the support of knights and lords outside his original entourage; the deaths of other lords; and the casualty rate amongst his own vassals and regional allies.⁵⁷ Attrition and the search for patronage acted as powerful centripetal forces.

In their determined pursuit of victory and consequent booty, the First Crusaders bear comparison with Viking armies of the ninth to eleventh centuries. A necessary esprit de corps was established though always operating in potentially hostile territory, dependent on constant success for survival, in the process establishing a micro-culture of militancy, community and purpose, which found expression in extremes of violence no less than in the drive for material profit or diplomatic gain. Like those of the Carolingians, the Christian army supplied the institutional context for social, political, material and religious exchange. Militarily and politically, the First Crusade exemplified a consistent feature of medieval warfare: the effectiveness of armies, not necessarily of massive numerical superiority, operating and dominating war fronts far from home. While a familiar feature of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds, subject to regular incursions from the Eurasian steppes and dependent on foreign mercenary bands, western Europe supplied only a few analogous examples, such as the Catalan Company of the early fourteenth century, which successively terrorized Asia Minor on behalf of the ailing Greek empire and then occupied and ruled parts of Greece for themselves.⁵⁸ But it was never remotely on the scale of the First Crusade. The nature of medieval warfare allowed for such campaigns as armies, wherever they found themselves, relied on self-sufficiency in food, equipment and horses rather than being dependent, as in modern wars, on home bases.

That the First Crusade was able to achieve such results reflected the context for its operations. The expedition formed part of a pre-existing process opening the eastern Mediterranean to western adventurers, merchants, pilgrims and mercenaries. Pivotal was the role played in its inception and nurturing by the Byzantines, a debt that was soon to become embarrassing for commentators and politicians who preferred an adversarial model and the myth of an autonomous victory. Political chaos in the Near East denied their opponents unity while allowing the crusaders opportunities for diplomacy and alliances. The leaders of the western force adapted quickly not only to the diplomatic possibilities but also to the alien military tactics of their enemies.⁵⁹ Although westerners were possibly familiar with siege techniques, in the west there were few pitched battles and fewer post-conflict massacres. The central elements of war in the west were cavalry and infantry, including archers, and it was characterized by the charge and the skirmish. In the east, in addition to heavy cavalry, the impetus in battle was provided by light armed cavalry, often archers, the massed charge being replaced by the rapid and fluid tactics of the feint and the ambush, which, by early 1098, the crusaders knew how to counter. The fighting march, unknown in the west, was a staple of Levantine warfare which the westerners perfected, the march from Ramla to Ascalon on 10–12 August 1099 providing a textbook example.

Yet the political, material and military pillars of victory fail adequately to describe the structure of the First Crusade or alone explain its success. Although it is misleading to assume that all recruits and followers shared a similar intensity of religious motivation and zeal, without the element of ideology and spiritual exhilaration there would have been no march to Jerusalem, let alone a successful conquest. As the expedition shed its appearance of a Byzantine mercenary force in the winter of 1097–8, so spiritual leadership and direction came to the fore, visions, relics, liturgical ceremonies and the theatre of communal penitence binding the army together. There are contradictions here. The siege of Antioch appears in the retrospect of veterans to have been crucial to this process. Yet by then the mass of unarmed pilgrims and camp followers had been reduced to a rump, increasingly integrated into the military function of the expedition. At Antioch, too, the one acknowledged spiritual leader, Adhemar of Le Puy, died, not to be replaced, the response of the leaders appearing anything but spiritually inspired. Yet the fractured leadership after the Antioch triumph, the prospect of annihilation removed, created a vacuum of purpose that was filled by religious symbolism and exhortation expressed through increasingly vocal and organized popular elements. The language of participants from at least the early summer of 1097 points to fundamental and well- established attitudes, aspirations and beliefs that predated the crises of Antioch and Jerusalem.

When Stephen of Blois wrote in June 1097 of ‘the blessed journey’ of ‘the army of God’, he was doing more than parroting the cliche and slogans of the preachers and priests. He was expressing an understanding that the enterprise was especially holy, uniquely part of God’s purpose. By March 1098, Stephen was talking of the dead as martyrs, an increasingly common theme in accounts of the later stages of the crusade: the language, images and examples of celestial help suffuse the letters sent home by clergy and laity. In two surviving letters to the archbishop of Rheims, of November 1097 and July 1098, Anselm of Ribemont, who was to be killed in February 1099 at the siege of Arqah and was reported as himself having experienced celestial visions, emphasized the unique status of the army, calling on the clergy in the west to pray for the Christian host, conscious of fighting for Christendom as a whole, spiritually bound to the western church however far removed physically.⁶⁰ The appreciation of a unique providential purpose marked out this holy war from previous conflicts with infidels in Sicily or Spain. As privations deepened and dangers grew, the awareness of the supernatural and a feeling of its proximity became more acute. This spiritual intensity did not derive solely from the conditions of the march; it was inherent from the start in the enterprise’s system of belief and understanding of failure and success in terms of sin and God’s favour. There was little or no perceived conflict between material and religious motives. Booty and land were justified as well as necessary reward for labouring in God’s service. The crusade encompassed the pious, the adventurer, the zealot, the thug, the tourist, the driven, the bored, the penitent, the professional and the desperate within its ideology of service, warfare and faith. Grasping opportunists such as Baldwin of Boulogne observed the proprieties. The conviction of leaders and led in the transcendent worthiness of their cause had been legitimized by