years, after long careers of secular knighthood, were not crucesignati in the ordinary sense; their crosses were signs of a lifetime vocation not a temporary act of penance. Entry to a military order was not an alternative to becoming a crucesignatus; the alternative to becoming a Templar or Hospitaller was to become a monk, an altogether more serious step into a new life not merely a temporary gesture of faith and chivalry. Even St Bernard, who repeatedly drew analogies between crucesignati and monks – vows, profession, liturgical entry ceremonies, special clothing, communal living – recognized that becoming a monk, or, by extension, a Templar or Hospitaller, and becoming a crucesignatus were neither genuine alternatives nor synonymous.
NEW WARFARE?
With the exception of the military orders, the development of new crusading institutions in the west in the early twelfth century is confused and obscure. There were few general calls to repeat the penitential warfare of 1095: Bohemund’s war in 1106–8; the eastern campaign promoted by Calixtus II in 1119–20; Fulk of Anjou’s expedition of 1129; the campaigns in Spain of 1114–16, 1118 and 1125–6 also attracted papal authority and indulgences. Even with these and other explicit associations of holy war and the armed pilgrimage of 1096–9, there appears little radical departure from pre-existing social and religious activities or attitudes connected with pilgrimage and church-sanctioned holy war. Little coherence existed between large-scale expeditions east (1107 or 1120–24); small, private armed and unarmed pilgrimages, many lacking any papal authority; the interests of Outremer settlers such as Fulcher of Chartres to create a process of constant reinforcement; and the emergence of the military orders. Each appeared distinct in operation even if related in terms of motive and appeal while reflecting extremely traditional responses of obligation, honour, service (to God or terrestrial lord), adventure or penitential anxiety. The First Crusade confirmed and extended existing acceptance of holy war but created no new settled legal framework, the hot rhetoric of its apologists bereft of accepted canonical formulae. In the great digest of Canon Law, Gratian of Bologna’s Decretum (c.1140), the extensive discussion of legitimate just warfare (Causa 23) ignored anything that could be regarded as specifically flowing from any new institutions established during or after the holy war of 1095–9, a silence pointedly filled by an Anglo-Norman commentary on the Decretum later in the century that referred explicitly to crucesignati and the manner in which the faithful should pray for them.37
These new institutions scarcely amounted to a revolution in Christian habits. The legacy of the First Crusade included spiritual and temporal privileges previously associated with those enjoyed by pilgrims, which by 1145 had become recognized by the pope as comprising remission of confessed sins (not just, as in some of Urban II’s pronouncements, the penalties of sin), protection by the church, legal immunity for the duration of the expedition, permission to raise mortgages and a moratorium on repayment of debts.38 In addition the ceremony of taking the cross asserted itself as characteristic of a certain form of pilgrimage. However, implementation was erratic and at times baffling to contemporaries faced with novelty. In 1107, a committee of clerics set up to investigate a claim for protection by a recruit for Bohemund’s campaign in the east failed to give a verdict because ‘the institution of committing to the church’s care the possessions of milites going to Jerusalem was new’.39 Uncertainty was explicable. With Jerusalem in Christian hands, no incentive existed to elaborate a new form of holy war to recover it. Thus repeated calls to arms simply evoked the precedent of Urban II and Clermont rather than developing it. Pilgrimage, not war, constituted the overwhelming response to the capture of the Holy Land, the language and practice of crusading and pilgrimage increasingly fused together, pilgrims and holy warriors indiscriminately described as peregrini (pilgrims), a dilution of any novel aspects of Urban’s holy war. This reflected reality. Not all armed pilgrims fought (e.g. Henry the Lion, duke of Saxony, in 1172) and not all who fought had taken the cross (e.g. the pilgrims employed by Baldwin I in 1102 and 1107). Crucesignati bore the staff and satchel of the pilgrim: pilgrims bore crosses and carried arms. Both shared the vocabulary of the peregrinatio, some of the same privileges and status as quasi-ecclesiastics. In twelfth-century charters it is rarely possible to distinguish the two activities. Taking the cross appeared to mark involvement in penitential warfare, yet chroniclers applied the word pilgrim. Notions of unarmed pilgrimage and armed penitential war were less discrete than the contradiction in purpose and function might imply. The cross tended to suggest violence, yet the English hermit Godric of Finchale (d. 1170) twice took the cross, the vexillum crucis, before visiting Palestine and yet each time, according to his contemporary biographer, he contented himself with sight-seeing, fasting and penance. In a charter of 1120 Guillaume le Veneur (i.e. huntsman) from Maine was said to have ‘accepted the cross as a sign of his pilgrimage (in signum peregrinationis)’. A liturgical rite for taking the cross survived the events of 1095–6. Some evidence suggests that it was perceived as separate from the adoption of the signs of pilgrimage; other the opposite: for Guillaume le Veneur in 1120 and Fulk of Anjou in 1128, taking the cross was said to follow ‘the custom of such pilgrimages’.40 This may indicate regional differences similar to those found in the liturgies themselves: no standard liturgical rite for taking the cross existed for the rest of the middle ages. Such disparity, while typical of the practice if not the rhetoric of the high medieval church, hardly confirms the creation of a homogeneous movement, more a changing series of modified and conservative associations, habits and responses, stimulated by new political and ecclesiastical circumstances but rooted in tradition. Even the novel military orders grew out of existing attitudes to holy knighthood. If the new penitential warfare, especially to the east, was innovative in its eschatological resonance and its physical demands, the spiritual, social, political or economic tensions assuaged were not.
Potentially the new exercise possessed wide implications if the privileged legal and fiscal immunities claimed for crucesignati found guarantee with the church and support from secular power. There is little evidence before the very end of the twelfth century, from the period of the Third Crusade (1188–92) and later, for the active operation, either in church or lay courts, of these immunities. Despite a decree of the First Lateran Council (1123), the first general council of the western church in the middle ages, reinforcing the church’s duty to protect crusaders’ property, much depended on the local secular context and the willingness of interested parties to cooperate. When they did not, confusion ensued, as in the case of the property dispute between Hugh II of Le Puiset and Routrou of Perche in 1107, which exposed the ecclesiastical authorities as both muddled and ineffective as the case ping-ponged between secular and clerical courts, with one of the best canon lawyers of the time manifestly unable to identify clear legal cause let alone remedy.41 Even after 1123, uncertainty persisted. As late as November 1146, Pope Eugenius III had to inform the bishop of Salisbury that the immunity only operated in regard to law suits and seizure of property after the cross had been taken. During the Second Crusade, the pope received numerous complaints that church protection simply did not work. It took another half-century for the immunities of crucesignati to find a place in accounts of law courts and in the records of secular government.42 For much of the earlier twelfth century, in any given region, taking the cross was uncommon and military expeditions of the cross rare: hardly the dawn of a new age.
WARS OF THE CROSS
This ephemeral nature of the wars of the cross can partly be explained by lack of occasion. The disastrous campaigns of 1101 killed extravagant optimism. Jerusalem remained in Christian hands. The very success of the Franks of Outremer in carving out principalities militated against any sense of crisis, relatively few laymen thinking in terms of permanent holy war, fewer even than those wishing to settle in the east. Pilgrimage and later the military orders provided the main connection between the two parts of Catholic Christendom, not crusading. Yet sporadic attempts were made to summon up enthusiasm for the old cause as well as to apply its forms to conflicts elsewhere.
Bohemund of Antioch’s campaign of 1107–8 demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of attempts to revive the spirit of 1096. On his release from Danishmend captivity in 1103, Bohemund was faced by the loss of much of his conquests in Cilicia to the Byzantines and, in 1104, of his eastern provinces to Ridwan of Aleppo. Western assistance provided an obvious solution; Bohemund’s reputation would act as the chief recruiting officer. Arriving in Italy in 1105, after securing the approval of Paschal II, Bohemund proceeded to France early in 1106, accompanied by a papal legate, Bruno of Segni, a veteran of Urban II’s preaching tour a decade before. Bohemund planned to harness concern for the Holy Land to an attack on the Byzantine empire, a sleight of hand highlighted by the presence with him on his triumphal tour of France of a spurious pretender to the Byzantine throne and other Greek exiles. During his sermon at Chartres in early April, Alexius I was identified as a target, those who joined up
