God's War: A New History of the Crusades

of Outremer. Thus it may have appeared to restless westerners that Outremer indeed promised a land of opportunity which its rulers and patrons of settlements struggled to realize.

Despite acculturation, the comparative brevity of the Frankish presence in the Syrian and Palestinian countryside and the truncated occupation of the coastal cities precluded further developments towards either social integration or the creation of a distinctive cohesive cultural identity. The cosmopolitan backgrounds of the settlers, their lack of numbers and the constant influx of visitors and new immigrants was reflected in the diversity of art and architecture. Outremer has been described as a fragmentary colony of western Europe, displaying only disjointed facets or incomplete bits of the mother culture.⁵¹ Equally, it developed only a fragmentary unity with the indigenous Christian population and none at all with the Muslims. The divides of language, law, religion and status failed to coincide. Concerted attempts to convert Muslim subjects were limited. Owners resented the freeing of converted Muslim slaves. Elsewhere, conversions appeared as individual responses to circumstances, although there may have been some pull towards accepting the faith of the rulers of a confessional state, as there was in the later multi-faith Ottoman or Habsburg empires. Yet the ambiguity, if not of the Latin settlement than of the evidence for it, is well expressed in some surviving capitals from the cathedral of the Annunciation in Nazareth. While some have regarded their formalized, unrealistic depiction of Syrians as quintessential proof of the Franks’ colonial blindness and policy of apartheid, two of the capitals, depicting apocryphal conversion missions of the apostles Bartholomew and Matthew, have prompted suggestions that some of the Nazarene clergy desired the Christianization of their Muslim neighbours.⁵²

Twelfth-century Frankish Outremer did not disappear in the face of Saladin’s conquest of 1187–9. Some of the rural population must have survived. In places, on the plain of Acre perhaps, villages may have sustained themselves, subjugated but intact, surrounded as they were by other Christian communities; certainly with the reconquest of the coast after 1191, some settlements resorted to their previous ownership and inhabitants to their former privileges. In such a geographically diverse and complicated region, numbers of Franks may have stayed, survival not necessarily dependent on the fate of the lords or even of the cities. The castle of Montreal had held out against Saladin for a year and a half before surrendering early in 1189. Twenty-eight years later, in 1217, when a German pilgrim, Thietmar, visited the town beneath the castle, still in Muslim hands and inhabited by Muslims and Syrian Christians, he stayed with a Frankish widow. On Thietmar’s departure, she provided him with directions on the best route towards his destination of Mt Sinai and supplied him with provisions for his journey: twice-baked bread, cheese, raisins, figs and wine.⁵³ Here, at least, was one Frankish settler whose stay in the east was not temporary, superficial, transient or destitute. As Fulcher of Chartres had trumpeted optimistically a century before, the widow of Montreal was indeed an Occidental who had become an Oriental.

The Second Crusade

8

A New Path to Salvation? Western Christendom and Holy War 1100–1145

To the snobbish, mother-fixated failed abbot Guibert of Nogent, spinning his vision of ‘the Deeds of God performed by the Franks’ (Gesta Dei per Francos) before 1108, the Jerusalem campaign offered the laity a new path of salvation; the German abbot Ekkehard of Aura, a veteran of the 1101 fiasco, saw it as a new means of penitence.¹ Many western observers were quick to associate the Jerusalem enterprise’s uniqueness with a general manifesto for spiritual redemption, ecclesiastical discipline and Christian expansion, such rewarded, sanctified violence exploited by a reinvigorated papacy and its supporters to reinforce the tradition of penitential war in the church’s interests. However, the radical effect of the First Crusade can be exaggerated. Secular and clerical refinements of the story of the First Crusade, in poem, song, chronicle or sermon, confirmed as much as redefined long-standing cultural acceptance of the equality of physical with spiritual religious militancy. Urban II had not invented soldiers of Christ nor spiritually beneficial and meritorious warfare, a tradition that encompassed rather than surrendered to the First Crusade. While the first Jerusalemites basked in unique glory, their example did not lead to a succession of large expeditions east following the disasters of 1101. Some regions that had supplied large contingents between 1095 and 1101, including the Limousin, Champagne and Provence, provided few traceable military crucesignati between 1102 and 1146.² Those who assumed the cross and departed to fight in the east attracted admiration; the cause of Outremer received close, often anxious attention; yet, despite papal commitment and sporadic local recruitment, no mass movement emerged. The images, attitudes and actions of the First Crusade were disseminated across western society widely but fitfully, often as rhetorical evangelical tropes as much as calls to arms. Jerusalem in Christian hands stimulated a wave of pilgrims with the occasional military adventurer or princely swell, their motives possibly as chivalric as pious. Meanwhile, popes integrated aspects of Urban’s expedition into their increasingly authoritarian role as leader and protector of Christendom within as well as beyond its frontiers, encouraging use of the language and institutions of this new holy war against papal enemies in Italy or bandits in northern France as well as Muslims in Outremer or Spain.

SPREADING THE WORD

Awareness of the First Crusade pervaded elite western culture. When, around 1143 in the midst of the backsliding and compromises of the English civil war, the Anglo-Norman baron Brian FitzCount wished to expose the mendacity of the turncoat bishop of Winchester, he naturally chose a familiar reference, the golden memory of the loyalty of the boni milites of the First Crusade.³ A monk from the Cambresis on the northern Franco-Flemish frontier, writing c.1133, refrained from a detailed account of the Jerusalem expedition, arguing that the events were better described in books, songs and hymns, a regrettable forbearance as he claimed to have attended the Council of Clermont four decades earlier.⁴ There was no need for either baron or monk to elaborate; the story was well known. The scale and rapid production of histories of the First Crusade by eyewitnesses and others eager to interpret the startling events didactically finds no parallel in medieval historiography. Within a dozen years of Jerusalem’s capture, at least four full eyewitness accounts, three major western histories and part of the great Lorraine version by Albert of Aachen were being circulated along with a bevy of other accounts, more or less derivative, imaginative or polemic. While originating in monasteries and cathedrals, these texts reflected and excited secular interests, for example in local heroes or national pride. Most of the histories sculpted stirring tales of faith, bravery, suffering, danger, tenacity and triumph. The theologians distilled the message of God’s immanence and Christian duty; the no less artful eyewitnesses provided accessible tales of miracles and butchery. One of the very earliest, the Gesta Francorum, included elaborate scenes with stereotype exotic Orientals declaiming extravagant, bombastic nonsense much in the style of the verse chansons de geste. Naturalistic representation, especially of the enemy, did not feature.⁵

Signifying this artificiality, accurate knowledge of Islam and the Prophet remained almost non-existent in western Europe until the translation of the Koran in the 1140s by the abbot of Cluny, Peter the Venerable. Despite a quickening of interest after 1099, accounts of Muhammed relied on translated Byzantine polemic or mangled accounts derived from Spain or returning Holy Land pilgrims. Around 1110, Guibert of Nogent’s life of the Prophet in his Gesta Dei Per Francos and that by Embrico of Mainz both provided Muhammed with a pet cow, presumably derived from a garbled false memory of the Sura of the Koran known as ‘The Cow’. Most discussion of Muslims failed to rise beyond the racist ignorance and abuse of the epics and romances, a tradition in which the Gesta Francorum, one of the most popular and copied sources, rested comfortably.

Such texts, while sketching an increasingly fixed canon of adventure stories, fed the language of preaching, as with the invented versions of Urban II’s Clermont address (i.e. all of them). A more or less distinctive, although never prescriptive or uniform, corpus of scriptural references and paraphrases became employed by popes and later propagandists and chroniclers of Jerusalem campaigns. In this narrow vocabulary of holy war a defined set of intellectual and religious attitudes and theories emerged at the precedent-obsessed papal Curia and among the propagandists and apologists of the Second Crusade (1146–8) but, until the fall of Jerusalem in 1187 once more made the story immediately relevant, not elsewhere beyond the cloister or the study. Twelfth-century circulation of