God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Urban II and the recruiters and propagandists of 1095–6, but sprang from a deeper culture of militant piety. That their casualties appeared to them as martyrs and that their efforts were crowned with victory merely confirmed them in their sense of battered righteousness.

Frankish Outremer

5

The Foundation of Christian Outremer

On 15 July 1149, fifty years to the day after the Christian capture of Jerusalem, a service was held in the southern corner of the compound of the church of the Holy Sepulchre to dedicate a complex of newly constructed chapels encasing the rock designated as Calvary, the site of the Crucifixion. To mark the event, an inscription was erected near the spot that began:

This place is holy, sanctified by the blood of Christ.

By our consecration we add nothing to its holiness.¹

The formal pious humility of this sentiment concealed the revolution in the religious and political affairs of the church, city and region and in the attitudes and habits of all those elsewhere in Latin Christendom interested in their fate that had characterized the previous half-century. In the aftermath of a great, if unproductive, incursion of western help, now known as the Second Crusade, and on the eve of a major reconstruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, Patriarch Fulk of Jerusalem and his colleagues cannot have been unaware of the reconfiguration of western culture caused by the occupation of the Holy Land. Fulk himself, a pious, dogged ecclesiastical second-rater, had abandoned the awkward political compromises of an Angouleme religious house for the escapism, exoticism and opportunism of colonial Palestine. The pilgrimage to Jerusalem had become almost an obligation, certainly a mass habit, for the faithful of Europe, the image of the Holy Sepulchre a new model in art as much as for public and private devotion. Replicas proliferated across western Europe as well as symbolic representations in chapels attached to parish churches and cathedrals that played an important part in Easter rituals and liturgies.² The holiness mentioned in the Calvary inscription had irradiated the west through the flood of relics that streamed from Palestine in the aftermath of 1099, in the process accelerating a trend towards a greater universality of cults and a closer concentration on the historicity of the Bible and hence the humanity of Christ. The traditional rhetoric and Gregorian standard of just and holy warfare were transfigured by the memory of the first Jerusalemites, fighting for the church in Spain, the Baltic, even within Christendom itself, now being assessed and rewarded in terms of the remission of sins gained on the first journey to Jerusalem. The glory of the victors of 1099 clung to them in name and fame, their deeds cited as periods in the lives and affairs of onlookers not themselves veterans. Just as in early twenty-first-century British conversation ‘the war’ invariably refers to the global conflict that had ended in 1945, so the ‘journey to Jerusalem’ for western Europeans of the early twelfth century meant only one thing. Beyond providing a benchmark of honour and service, ‘those men who obeyed the command of the pope, who left so many and so much and who, as loyal knights (boni homines), captured Jerusalem by arms and assault’, the Anglo-Norman baron Brian Fitz-Count recalled in the early 1140s, ‘established Godfrey, a good and legitimate king’.³

Heavenly Jerusalem may have been brought closer by the Christian liberation of the Holy Places, but the terrestrial Holy Land needed its walls defending, its fields tending and its ports to thrive. The new Christian land overseas, Outremer, provided a fresh field for ambition, endeavour and settlement. In contradiction of the hindsight of history, those gathered around the rock called Calvary did not imagine the political enterprise as any more doomed than the religious. Although nervous westerners seeking to buy property in Palestine in mid-century might prefer land ‘around Jerusalem not near the border with the Turks’, appreciation of the providential nature of the 1099 victory, the ‘greatest event since the resurrection’ as one enthusiast had proclaimed it, imposed its own confidence and anticipation of permanence.⁴

Obligation, adventure, status, profit, piety and confidence sustained the maintenance and expansion of the bridgeheads established in Syria and Palestine in 1097–9. Not all western visitors to Outremer came to fight or to pray; many arrived to settle, trade or seek preferment. In contrast to Spain, Sicily or the Baltic, as a region for western European political, social and economic colonization, Outremer was more remote. Given a mismatch of climate and cultural behaviour, notably in hygiene and diet, it faced a constant threat of demographic deficit, with high death rates, especially in infant mortality. It also had to accommodate the needs of transient pilgrims, adventurers and sightseers as well as settlers. The fate of lordships, including the very highest, could be determined by the vagaries of western politics and dynasticism. The requirements of tourism imposed particular constraints: in 1112, Arnulf of Chocques was hurriedly reappointed patriarch of Jerusalem so that there would be somebody to preside over Holy Week ceremonies for the expectant hordes of pilgrims. Pilgrims contributed to the local economy, through taxes paid at the port of entry or the flourishing trade in souvenirs: opposite the Holy Sepulchre ran the Rue des Paumiers, Palmers’ Street, where the pilgrims bought the palm leaves to show they had accomplished their vows (and saving them a trip down to Jericho, where the palms grew). By mid-century, a local Frank – as all the western settlers were called by the indigenous and immigrant communities alike – Rorgo Fretel of Nazareth, had produced a convenient guide book to the now carefully managed holy geography, which had been meticulously established since 1099.⁵

Not all pilgrims ignored the military dimension of protecting this greatest of all Christian relics, many following their devotions at Jerusalem and the other Holy Sites with temporary service in the armies of the king. More lastingly, the needs of visiting pilgrims as much as local defence produced Outremer’s distinctive contribution to the Latin church, the military orders. The Order of the Hospital of St John, the Hospitallers, recognized by the pope in 1113, while acquiring martial functions, never lost its duty of care for the infirm and sick, mostly visitors; the Order of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, began c.1120 as a fraternity devoted to guarding the pilgrim routes from Jaffa to Jerusalem. While civilian settlement followed patterns familiar to other frontiers of Christendom, the exigencies of defence, demography and devotion lent Outremer inherently distinctive characteristics. The modest level of western settlement compared with indigenous communities contrasted with the ideological imperative that drew westerners to the Holy Land in the first place. Whatever accommodations were reached with native peoples and powers, the inspiration and justification for western rule was not social or economic or even conventionally political. Christian Outremer could never completely lose its quality of a garrison created to protect the Holy Places of its faith.

THE EXPEDITIONS OF 1100–1101

A recurrent complaint voiced by combatants throughout the campaign of 1097–9 attacked backsliding crucesignati for failing to fulfil their vows. The army of God’s need for reinforcements always appeared urgent as massive casualties left the enterprise emaciated and vulnerable. Without reinforcements, the crusade would have failed, at Antioch as at Jerusalem. In the west preaching and recruitment had not stopped, the narrative neatness of later accounts concealing that the so-called Princes’ Crusade of 1096–9 formed part of a process that slowly gathered momentum, stimulated in part by letters and news from the front. In April 1099, perhaps in response to the crusade leaders’ letter to him from Antioch of September 1098 calling for the despatch of all remaining crucesignati, Urban II authorized a fresh preaching campaign in Lombardy, conducted by Archbishop Anselm of Milan with considerable success, for what was soon regarded by a contemporary Norman chronicler as a distinct, second expedition to Jerusalem.⁶

The modern fashion of regarding the military expeditions to the east of 1100–1101 as part of the First Crusade not only challenges twelfth-century and later historiography, it also appears to misrepresent the understanding and intentions of those concerned. While there continued to be a steady stream of westerners heading east, not least from the maritime cities of Italy, another Genoese fleet embarking in 1100, the 1101 expedition constituted a separate operation. Recruitment occurred in the clear knowledge that Jerusalem was in Christian hands. Even where many involved had taken the cross some time before, the armies only coalesced after a new call to arms by Urban II’s successor, Paschal II, in December 1099, followed by a series of special councils in the spring and autumn of 1100 and a preaching tour of France by papal legates, efforts supplemented by letters