God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Chaumont, lord of Amboise, faced with the loss of his inheritance, acted vigorously and violently; yet he returned east with Count Fulk of Anjou in 1128. Belligerent resolution to disputes still came naturally. Only a few years after his return, Raimbold Croton, a hero at Antioch and Jerusalem, where he lost a hand, had a monk castrated over some stolen hay. Despite a fourteen-year penance forbidding him to bear arms, effectively suspending his social status, Raimbold appealed successfully to Pope Paschal II on account of his bravery at Jerusalem, although he soon died in one of the interminable petty wars in the Ile de France.¹⁹

Just wars and godly knights were not invented in 1095 or first consecrated in 1099. Not all subsequent accounts of war echoed the heroics in Syria. Orderic Vitalis’s description (c.1140) of the motives of Henry I’s troops in refraining from slaughtering their defeated French opponents at Bremule (1119) rested on accepted rhetoric of Christian wars:

they spared each other… out of fear of God and fellowship in arms… As Christian soldiers they did not thirst for the blood of their brothers, but rejoiced in a just victory given by God for the good of the Holy Church, and the peace of the faithful.

In fact Henry’s men thirsted for juicy ransoms. By contrast, in Orderic’s description of the fighting around Fraga in 1134 between Alfonso I of Aragon and the Almoravid Muslim fundamentalists from Morocco, the Aragonese wore ‘the cross of Christ’ (whether Orderic meant literally or metaphorically is unclear), their battle cries ‘in the name of Jesus’.²⁰ In the account of the battle of the Standard (1138) by the contemporary English writer Henry of Huntingdon, the English soldiers facing the invading Scots received absolution before the conflict, which was declared ‘very just’ by a bishop present, who promised full remission of sins to any who died in the fight in defence of their homeland (‘patria’). The symbols of the church and the appeal to patriotism as well as martyrdom in this description may have been sharpened by the new holy war but in essence derived from older traditions. Similarly, although in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s fanciful but widely circulated Historia Regum Brittaniae (History of the Kings of Britain) of 1136, King Arthur’s troops at the battle of Bath have been ‘marked with the sign of the Christian faith’, i.e. the cross, they were only promised absolution from all sins if they perished in the fight. There is no explicit suggestion that fighting the pagans, however praiseworthy, was itself penitential.²¹ As with Charlemagne’s doomed paladins in the epic poem The Song of Roland, c.1100, paradise, where souls rested ‘amid the rose-blossoms’, beckoned only those slain in the good fight. Such conservatism embraced even the papacy: in December 1118 Gelasius II granted Alfonso I of Aragon plenary indulgences only to those killed fighting the Moors.²²

While memories of the First Crusade undoubtedly influenced the sharper confidence in describing and prescribing holy war, especially against infidels and pagans, the haphazard adoption of specifically new forms of penitential warfare by writers and popes alike points to a contingent appreciation of the significance of 1095–9. Even the rhetoric lavished on the new military order of the Templars by Bernard of Clairvaux in his De laude novae militiae (In Praise of the New Knighthood) c.1130, for all its radical reworking of St Paul’s spiritual metaphors of fighting for Christ into literal calls to arms, dwells on martyrdom and the prospect of salvation, at once traditional and immediate anxieties of the fighting classes. The images, language and ideology specifically related to penitential holy war as coined by the preachers, leaders and led of 1095–9, distinctive by association as much as by any liturgical, juridical, ceremonial or semantic coherence, formed only one part of a wider articulation of holy war and militant Christianity. In no sense did the early twelfth century knowingly witness the dawning of a pervasive ‘age of the crusade’.

Instead, the dynamic force of the idealized and physical Jerusalem provided the prime focus, for travellers, in arms or not, as for theorists. Pilgrimage not holy war proved the most immediate legacy of the Christian occupation of the Holy City. King Eric I of Denmark in 1102–3 and King Sigurd of Norway in 1107–10 went east as pilgrims as well as warriors, their martial intent an extension of traditional Scandinavian service for Byzantium, which acted as host to both monarchs; fatally for the Norwegians, many dying from excess of undiluted retsina. Eric died in Cyprus before reaching the Holy Land; his wife on the Mount of Olives. In 1110, King Sigurd only allowed himself to be recruited ‘to the service of Christ’ by Baldwin I for the siege of Sidon once his vows had been fulfilled at Jerusalem, where he may have received the cross.²³

Links with Jerusalem established the domestic respectability of lords, especially kings. In the winter of 1102–3, the German emperor, Henry IV, for a quarter of a century the papacy’s most hated and implacable enemy, voiced his intention to travel to the Holy City, probably as a pilgrim. The public announcement at a diet at Mainz in January 1103, accompanied by solemn masses and an exhortatory sermon by the bishop of Wurzburg, attracted wide interest, cynics suspecting a trick. Privately, in a letter to his aged godfather, the enormously grand Abbot Hugh of Cluny, Henry made his desire to see where Christ had lived, conversed with mortals and died conditional on a peace settlement with the papacy over the Investiture dispute. No deal, no pilgrimage.²⁴ In seeking to use the Jerusalem pilgrimage in helping resolve intractable secular conflicts, Henry was not alone. From England to Sicily, political outlaws, such as the would-be assassins of William I of Sicily (1160) and the actual murderers of Thomas Becket (1170), worked their passage back to respectability or found a nobler form of exile through the trip – or the promise of a trip – to Jerusalem.²⁵ In 1102/3, Henry IV hoped a commitment to visit Jerusalem would expedite a deal with the papacy and pacify his kingdom just as St Bernard’s preaching and King Conrad III’s taking of the cross did in 1146–7. It may have been the failure of such a strategy to resolve family feuding in the Danish royal house that led to the murder of Duke Canute, Eric I’s son, by his cousin Magnus in 1131. Apparently, Magnus had vowed to go to Jerusalem, probably as a pilgrim, leaving his wife and children in the care of Canute, whom he then murdered as an alternative to clinching the deal.²⁶ In 1128, on the death of William Clito count of Flanders, many of his followers not pardoned by his hostile uncle, Henry I of England, ‘took the Lord’s Cross and, becoming exiles for Christ’s sake, set out for His sepulchre in Jerusalem’.²⁷ As a technique of resolving feuds, the Jerusalem journey became embedded into the public culture of western Europe: successive treaties between Henry II and his French overlords Louis VII and Philip II featured mutual commitments to go east. However, using Jerusalem (and other) pilgrimages for political ends, to re-establish respectability and authority or as a form of temporary exile, predated the twelfth century: notable eleventh-century pilgrims included the bloodthirsty Count Fulk Nerra of Anjou, Duke Robert I the Devil of Normandy and the Anglo-Danish murderer Sweyn Godwinson, older brother of the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.

The twelfth-century explosion of peaceful pilgrimages to Jerusalem stood in marked contrast to the occasional and, after the debacle of the Second Crusade, limited enthusiasm for holy wars to the east. Yet there developed a ready association between noble pilgrims and deeds of arms, highlighted by the creation in Jerusalem of the Order of the Knights of the Temple of Solomon, the Templars, in 1119 to whom visiting grandees, such as Count Fulk of Anjou in 1120, could temporarily attach themselves. The habit began earlier. In the first decade of the twelfth century, pilgrims were repeatedly pressed into military action by inducements from the Christian rulers of Outremer. Shortly after being knighted, some time before 1111, Charles of Denmark, a nephew of Robert II of Flanders and later count of Flanders himself, underwent a pilgrimage on which he fought against the pagan ‘enemies of the Christian faith’. In 1124, Conrad of Hohenstaufen, the future King Conrad III and leader of the Second Crusade, possibly after some sort of conversion experience, vowed to go to Jerusalem as a soldier for Christ, the only European monarch to campaign in the Holy Land twice.²⁸ Charles and Conrad were not unique. In the generation after 1100, a steady trickle of affluent French nobles visited Outremer, a few of them First Crusade veterans revisiting as pilgrims the scenes of their youthful martial glory; one or two, like Stephen of Neublans from Burgundy in 1120 or Hugh of Chaumont in 1128/9, even signed up to fight again. Interest in the east ran in families, such as those of comital Burgundy – roughly modern Franche Comte – (which included Pope Calixtus II, who proclaimed a new holy war in the east in 1119), or of the French lordships of Montlhery and Le Puiset, a concern that embraced fighting and settlement as well as pilgrimage. Such contacts spread unevenly across western Europe, with German speakers lacking established links in Outremer ‘as they… had no mind to stay there’, to the regret of John of Wurzburg in 1170.²⁹ Settlers’ relatives provided a conduit for interest, information and material help for the Holy Land. By the 1130s, these associations could find outlet in new, permanent institutions of holy war.

MILITARY ORDERS

Hugh I count of Troyes went east three times, 1104–8, 1114 and 1125; the final visit saw him enrolling in the new religious order of the Knights Templar; he was not alone. By 1131, when the childless King Alfonso I of Aragon (d. 1134) drew up a will in which he bequeathed his possessions jointly to the canons of the Holy Sepulchre, the