God's War: A New History of the Crusades

to excommunicate the archbishop of Rheims for crowning Louis at Bourges at Christmas, a move hardly designed to encourage enthusiastic cooperation. In the end it took Bernard at his most schoolmasterly to tell the pontiff not to be so silly; the king’s goodwill and the expedition to Jerusalem were far more important than ruffled vanities or procedural niceties.²⁴ By March, dispositions were complete. On 1 March the pope reissued Quantum praedecessores with minor amendments, chiefly tightening the clauses prohibiting luxury, a good Cistercian theme, and sent Louis VII a cross which he had blessed to wear. A new assembly of French magnates was called to meet at Vezelay in northern Burgundy on 31 March, Easter Day.

Bernard’s preaching at Vezelay assumed almost iconic importance in perceptions of the crusade in his own time and in subsequent centuries. The crowd gathered at the hilltop town was so large that, like Urban in 1095, Bernard preached outside the church, in the fields with their panoramic views across the Burgundian hills. Flanked on the platform by the king and other notables, Bernard used the papal bull to outline the need for action and the rewards on offer before adding his own impassioned appeal. Oddly, there survives no contemporary description, real or imagined, of what the abbot actually said as opposed to the psychological impact on his audience. Judging from his subsequent correspondence, Bernard may have argued that through the crisis in the east God had provided a unique offer of salvation. As he put it in letters to England, Lorraine and Bavaria, in return for fighting to secure the ‘land made glorious by His miracles, holy by his blood… in which the flowers of His resurrection first blossomed’ (a theme particularly suitable for Eastertide), God was putting himself ‘in your debt so that, in return for your taking up arms in His cause, He can reward you with pardon for your sins and everlasting glory’. Thus the cross became a ‘badge of immortality’, a ‘sign of salvation’. Turning from fighting each other, sinful malitia, to taking vengeance on the heathen, holy militia, ‘mighty men of valour’, ‘men of war’ were presented with a cause in which, paraphrasing St Paul, ‘to conquer is glorious and to die is gain’. The exchange was a ‘bargain’; for the small price of taking the cross, the return was full indulgence of confessed sins. It was no less than the ‘cause of Christ’.²⁵

The combination of the emotional account of the Holy Land and the direct offer of salvation, couched in very simple sets of repetitive logic, proved highly effective. The audience at Vezelay went wild, so many demanding crosses that Bernard’s supply, probably made of wool, ran out, forcing him to tear up his own habit to satisfy them. Yet for all the eloquence and recorded enthusiasm, the events at Vezelay, like those at Clermont just over fifty years earlier, were hardly spontaneous. The success of any recruiting or fund-raising campaign depended (and depends) on the message being familiar, the audience already receptive. The large and distinguished congregation at Vezelay had not been assembled by accident. They knew why they were there. The event had been carefully planned and meticulously orchestrated (even if, as one source mentioned, the platform for VIPs partially collapsed), Bernard bringing with him a ‘parcel of crosses which had been prepared beforehand’.²⁶ Presumably staged after celebration of the Easter mass, with Louis sitting beside the preacher already wearing the cross given him by the pope, the essentially ritualistic and ceremonial nature of the occasion was evident.

Ritual embellished practical purpose. The Vezelay assembly demonstrated royal authority as well as crusade enthusiasm, the former feeding off the latter, one account even transferring the main address from Bernard to the king. Some of those not present were enjoined to follow the king of heaven as well as the king of France, a significant association.²⁷ The laymen taking the cross alongside King Louis bore witness to the new royal embrace. Besides his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, brother, Robert of Dreux, and uncle, Amadeus of Savoy, count of Maurienne, came some of the grandest independent feudatories in the kingdom, Thierry of Alsace count of Flanders, a veteran of the Holy Land; Alfonso-Jordan count of Toulouse, the son of Raymond of St Gilles, born outside Tripoli in 1104; and Henry, son of Louis’s former adversary Theobald count of Champagne. The geographical reach matched the political: from central France, the counts of Nevers, Tonnerre and Bourbon; from the north, the counts of Ponthieu and Soissons and the lords of Coucy and Courtenay; from the Limousin and Poitou the lords of Rancon and Lusignan; from the Anglo-Norman realms, William of Warenne, earl of Surrey. Although not all embarked with Louis, by their presence at Vezelay they acknowledged his leadership, as one member of the assembly put it, by papal command, apostolico praecepto.²⁸

After Vezelay, Bernard prepared for an extensive preaching tour, and diplomatic preparations began. Surprise, as at Bourges, led to meagre pickings. Local clerical and lay elites needed to be alerted to gather support and excite anticipation, Bernard’s arrival completing a process of engagement with the call to Jerusalem dependent on ties of family, locality and lordship as much as religious fervour. He was at Toul in May, but only in late July did Bernard begin a journey that took him to Arras and Ghent in early August, then in a loop through Flanders and the Low Countries in September and October before turning towards the Rhineland and the empire, returning to northern France early in 1147. By all accounts, including his own, he was extraordinarily persuasive: ‘towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are there widowed while their husbands are still alive’.²⁹ To inspiration Bernard added organization. Places he failed to reach, such as Brittany, England, Bavaria, Lorraine, Saxony and Bohemia, received letters or messengers, sometimes with copies of the papal privileges that the abbot insisted were the central selling points of the recruitment campaign. The network of the Cistercian order, which had helped propel Bernard to international prominence in the first place, proved central, providing many important ecclesiastical crucesignati. Indefatigably determined to contact as many people as possible, Bernard made the crusade his, even if professional cloistered humility prevented him from actually joining the expedition, leaving clerical leadership to other, as it happened, distinctly less able colleagues.

RESPONSES (II): THE EMPIRE

If the French were the first to be approached, numerically and politically the most significant recruits came from the German empire. For six months from late summer 1146, the imperial lands, including northern Italy, became the focus of preaching and recruiting. Eugenius III wrote to encourage Italians to take the cross.³⁰ After his swing through Flanders Bernard himself spent late October 1146 until mid-January 1147 crisscrossing western Germany, beginning in the central Rhineland at Worms (c.1 November) before turning north to Mainz and Frankfurt, where he met Conrad III, then south to Basel and Constance (12 December), before returning northwards again to attend the imperial court at Christmas in Speyer (24 December to 3 January), returning to Worms and finally taking in Cologne (9 January) and Aachen (15 January), before arriving on 18 January at Liege, which he had left three months earlier. This represented frenetic activity over hundreds of miles in midwinter. With the exceptions of his time at Mainz and Frankurt in November and at Speyer over Christmas, Bernard rarely spent more than a night or two at any one place, in contrast to the more stately progress of Urban II through France in 1095–6. No doubt conducting Cistercian business as well, given this hurried if extensive itinerary, Bernard’s crusade preaching operated as the sharp edge of a wider campaign of information and exhortation prepared by letters and emissaries, with Conrad III taking the cross at an emotional ceremony at Speyer on 27 December forming the centrepiece. As notable as the recruits Bernard secured were those who took the cross without the abbot’s personal touch, such as Welf VI of Bavaria, at his own estate of Peiting on 24 December, or, further east, King Ladislaus of Bohemia, the margrave of Styria and the count of Carinthia or the large gathering at Regensburg in February 1147 run by Conrad and Bernard’s representative, the Cistercian abbot of Ebrach.³¹

By his German trip, Bernard was able to retain control of a recruitment process. Twice, in late October 1146 and late January 1147, he passed near the monastery at Huy founded after 1099 by Peter the Hermit, the memory of whose remarkable but disastrous expedition remained green. On the first occasion Bernard was in pursuit of another rabble-rousing evangelist, Radulf (or Raoul or Rudolph), whose preaching threatened to confuse the plans of pope and abbot. Radulf, another Cistercian, once possibly a hermit, had undertaken a hugely popular preaching tour of the Rhineland, from Cologne to Strassburg, in the summer and autumn of 1146. Although attacked by the archbishops of Cologne and Mainz and demonized by Bernard and most subsequent commentators, some remembered Radulf fondly for his sanctity and humility, ‘a splendid teacher and monk’.³² In Hainault, he may have received support from the Benedictine abbot of Lobbes. Even the fastidious Otto of Freising admitted Radulf’s true monastic profession, his effectiveness in recruitment and his popularity, reserving his disdain for his lack of scholarship and message of violence against the Jews.³³ Initially, at least, Radulf may not have been far outside the pale of licensed preachers. Like many charismatic twelfth-century holy men, including Bernard, Radulf established himself as an arbiter of social behaviour outside the formal political and religious hierarchies: two of Bernard’s main criticisms of Radulf concerned his ‘unauthorized preaching and contempt for episcopal authority’. Otto of Freising noted disapprovingly how Radulf’s preaching against the Jews encouraged men