God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Mount Levounion (at the mouth of the Maritsa in southern Thrace near the modern Turco–Greek border) in 1091. Apart from the Italian possessions, only the losses to the Seljuks in Anatolia and northern Syria remained to be restored. That is where, in the eyes and strategy of Alexius I, the appeal to the west he made in 1095 and the First Crusade came in.

The shifting fortunes of Byzantium in the eleventh century were mirrored by the disorder in the Islamic Near East following the Seljuk invasions of the 1050s. After seizing control of the Baghdad caliphate in 1055, their leader receiving the apt title of ‘sultan’ (sultan is Arabic for power), the Seljuk Turks pressed westwards. After defeating the Greeks in 1071, they annexed most of Syria and Palestine by 1079. However, despite the appearance of unity, the Seljuks presided over a loose, often fractious confederation of regional powers, such as the more or less independent sultanate of Rum, i.e. Anatolia, and city states, such as Mosul, Aleppo, Antioch (taken in 1084/5), Damascus and Jerusalem. These old Arab cities, while often owing allegiance to one or other of a series of competing Seljuk lords, were often controlled by Turkish military commanders (atabegs) whose authority rested as much in their personal mercenary bands, often of slave troops (mamluks), as on higher Seljuk approval. Everywhere, ethnic and religious diversity complemented the alienation of ruled – whether town-dwellers, rural cultivators or Bedouin or steppe nomads – from ruler. In parts of Syria, immigrant Turkish Sunnis ruled indigenous Shia populations or exerted control over local Arab nobles. In Cilicia and northern Syria, significant religiously and ethnically distinct Armenian communities were squeezed between the competing powers of Byzantium, Arabs and Turks. Across this area and in the Jazira (modern northern Iraq) the political uncertainties offered opportunities for Kurdish as well as other Turkish incomers. Similar dislocation characterized the Fatimid caliphate of Egypt, which contested with the Seljuks ascendancy over southern Palestine. In Egypt, the Shia rulers dominated the majority Sunni inhabitants through powerful chief ministers, called viziers, who were often neither Egyptian nor Arab, but Turks or Armenians. The Near East presented no harmonious spectacle of civilized peace. The Turkish invasions from the 1050s destabilized the region, introducing an alien ruling elite backed by military coercion, causing as much if not more mayhem and disruption than the crusaders were able to achieve.

Elsewhere in the Muslim Mediterranean, the political pendulum was swinging towards Christian powers. After the implosion through internecine feuding of the Cordoba caliphate in 1031, Muslim Spain, al-Andalus, was ruled or fought over by competing so-called taifa or ‘party’ kings. Their weakness and disunity allowed Christian rulers north of the Ebro to take advantage of the lucrative offers of pay and alliance to extend their power southwards, a process driven by profit, not religion, but later given the accolade of the ‘Reconquest’ or reconquista, in largely propagandist reference to the Arab conquest of the eighth century. By the end of the eleventh century, distinctive political identities had been assumed by five Christian statelets: Catalonia; Aragon; Navarre; Leon; and Castile. These were joined in the 1140s by the creation of Portugal following conquests between the Duero and Tagus rivers along the Atlantic seaboard. Despite a Muslim counter-attack led by a puritanical north African Muslim fundamentalist sect, the Almoravids (c.1086–1139), these Christian principalities managed to exploit the enfeebled political system of their indigenous Muslim neighbours to forge lasting ascendancy in the northern half of the peninsula, which provided the basis for the sweeping conquests of the thirteenth century.

Across the western Mediterranean, between 1060 and 1091, the island of Sicily, a former Byzantine territory in Muslim hands since the later ninth century, was conquered by armies commanded by lords of Norman French extraction whose presence in the region exemplified the fluidity of high politics where skill in battle plus a private army could propel ambitious warriors, in western Europe as much as in the Near East, to unpredicted eminence. The collapse of an independent post-Carolingian kingdom of Italy in the tenth century had opened the north of the peninsula to German invasion and the assertion of civic independence by the commercial and manufacturing cities and entrepots of the Po valley (Milan, Venice), Liguria (Genoa) and Tuscany (Florence, Pisa). In the south, Byzantine rule in Apulia and Calabria rubbed uneasily against squabbling local dynasts in Capua, Salerno and Benevento, providing plenty of opportunities for hired professional fighters. The most militarily and politically successful of these came from Normandy, a duchy in northern France with a surplus of arms-bearers and an insufficiency of land, patronage and preferment. Normans, attracted perhaps by a familiar pilgrimage route but certainly by the prospects of profit and improved status, began making their presence felt in south Italian politics from the 1020s. By 1030, one contingent had acquired a permanent hold on Aversa between Naples and Capua. Within thirty years, Norman warlords dominated the area. After a disastrous attempt by Pope Leo IX to put papal theories of temporal jurisdiction into practice by trying to oust them ended in a crushing papal defeat at Civitate in 1053, the Norman lords acquired titles and respectability as the reforming papacy sought protectors. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II (1059–61) recognized Richard of Aversa as prince of Capua and Robert Guiscard as prospective ruler of Byzantine Calabria and Apulia and Muslim Sicily. To reinforce the honour, when Robert Guiscard’s brother, Roger, began the conquest of Sicily in 1060, the enterprise was awarded a papal banner.

The fortunes of Robert Guiscard’s dynasty presaged those of many later crusaders, the family business of war now accorded religious legitimacy and gaining enormous success. Guiscard had conquered Calabria by 1060 and Apulia in 1071 with the surrender of the last Byzantine garrison in Bari. Despite Guiscard’s failure to carve out a principality for his eldest son Bohemund in the western Balkans in the 1080s, to die in 1085 as ruler of southern Italy and arbiter of the destiny of the Vicar of St Peter was no mean feat for a younger son of a minor Norman aristocrat, Tancred of Hauteville. The conquest of Sicily by Guiscard’s brother Roger (d. 1101) provided a new focus for profit and a centre of Norman-Italian political endeavour. Once finally subdued after a bitter three decades’ fighting, Sicily proved far wealthier than the family’s mainland holdings. Under Roger’s son, Roger II, the two parts of the Hauteville inheritance were brought together to the anxiety of popes and western and eastern emperors. In 1130, in return for support, the anti-pope Anacletus II crowned Roger II king of Sicily, Calabria and Apulia, and acknowledged his overlordship over Capua, Naples and Benevento, titles that Roger retained by forcing the legitimate pope, Innocent II, whom he had just defeated and captured, to recognize them in 1139. The combined lands of the kingdom of Sicily created one of the wealthiest, culturally and politically most dynamic, ambitious and disruptive powers of the twelfth-century Mediterranean. By comparison, the Norman-Italian enclave founded by his cousins Bohemund and Tancred in Antioch in 1098 scarcely matched Roger’s lavish regime, which, at its height, sought to emulate, rival, even usurp Byzantium itself. Such entrepreneurial opportunism supplied one vital context for the early crusades. It may have been no coincidence that Alexius I timed his invitation to the west to send military aid shortly after the end of the Sicilian conquest, when, at least in the mind of the canny Greek emperor, there would be available a rich stock of soldiery, some disappointed perhaps at the Sicilian land settlement and eager for new chances to make their fortunes and save their souls.

In many ways the rise of the Hautevilles constituted an experience typical of eleventh-century France. The disintegration of the Carolingian empire in the late ninth century not only permanently divided the constituent political entities into East Francia (essentially Germany from Lorraine to the Elbe), Italy and West Francia (between the Rhine and the southern Pyrenean marches). The chaos of civil war and invasions by Vikings from the north and Arab pirates in the south also caused effective civil power within West Francia to become devolved on to the local royal agents, the counts, who wielded vice-regal military, fiscal and judicial authority. By the end of the tenth century the kingdom of France remained a legal and ideological construct, but its kings exerted little genuine power outside their own family lands. The main political foci were the great counties ruled as autonomous principalities by comital families who rapidly acquired their own grand, if often fictional, pedigrees to match their practical status. The most important counties, some later elevating themselves into duchies, were Flanders, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, Burgundy, Blois-Chartres, Anjou, Paris (i.e. the Ile de France), Poitou-Aquitaine, which acquired the duchy of Gascony, Toulouse and Barcelona, which was to be attracted away from the French orbit by the opportunities and successes of its Iberian neighbours. Beside these, numerous lesser counties sprang up, some owing allegiance to the greater lords, some autonomous.

To this political patchwork were added wide geographic, economic, linguistic and ethnic contrasts. Brittany was still a Celtic region; the Basques had given their name to Gascony. Elsewhere the chief linguistic divide was between those in the north who spoke langue d’oil (so described after the word used for ‘yes’, oil) and the speakers of langue d’oc in the south, the dividing line running east–west well to the north of the modern Midi. These linguistic contrasts mirrored different histories, customs and laws. The far south retained a tradition of written law and limited urbanization to match its Mediterranean climate. Elsewhere, there was no uniformity of rules of landholding, judicial systems, weights, measures or currency. A kingdom often in name alone, nonetheless in 987 the great magnates of northern France, perhaps on the promptings of pro-German interests, decided to change the royal dynasty from the remnants of the