God's War: A New History of the Crusades

thousand could have been prepared to leave for the east by May 1147 if its leadership had only been settled five months before. One guest at Speyer was an ambassador from Byzantium, responding to a secret embassy earlier in the year from Conrad to Emperor Manuel, conducted by the bishop of Wurzburg, on which the crusade, the subject of negotiations between Manuel and the French since the spring, almost certainly featured.⁴⁷

Politics as well as ritual lay behind Bernard’s oratory. In mid-1146, the tensions within the German nobility and between the empire and its eastern neighbours, especially Hungary, precluded Conrad’s personal involvement in the eastern adventure. Bernard’s visit was closely associated with attempts to engineer peace within the empire. Taking the cross could act as a focus for honourable resolution to domestic conflict under ecclesiastical supervision and guarantee. At Frankfurt in November, Bernard mediated a dispute between Count Henry of Namur and Albero of Trier, joining the crusade forming part of their reconciliation. On his visit to Constance in December, Bernard made contact with the circle of Conrad’s chief domestic opponent, Welf VI, a move that led to Welf taking the cross on 24 December. In the hyperbole of the chronicler Otto of Freising, ‘suddenly almost the entire West became so still that not only the waging of war but even the carrying of arms in public was considered wrong’.⁴⁸ By the time Bernard reached Speyer for Christmas 1146, it may have been clear to Conrad that his involvement was required to complete this unifying process by providing him with a share in the honour and privileges of a crucesignatus.

Conrad held a unique position among the monarchs of the west. By now in his fifties, an intermittently successful general and monarch caught in unpropitious times, he had previous experience of fighting in the Holy Land. His two military expeditions east, in 1124 and 1147–8, suggest, as with Thierry of Flanders’s four visits (1138, 1147, 1157 and 1165), a more than formal engagement with the needs of Outremer and the appeal of holy war. No other western medieval monarch campaigned twice in the Holy Land. The German empire possessed a strong tradition of holy war, on its borders, as part of internal feuding and, since 1096, in the eastern Mediterranean. Despite a lack of prominent settlement in Outremer, no cultural or emotional barrier needed breaching, no introduction to an alien concept was required. The German crowds that flocked to hear Bernard were as primed and receptive as those further west. Conrad’s elaborately staged assumption of the cross operated to a familiar pattern, a public ritual that emphasized a procedure of conversion and submission to the will of God, each participant following the choreography of a well-oiled religious ceremony. Ritual provided expression for religious and political messages as theatre. Even with interpreters in southern Germany, Bernard’s message transcended language, not least when, as at Speyer, it was delivered in the context of the Eucharist. During mass on 27 December, Bernard, ending his sermon by listing the material benefits bestowed on the king, adopted the voice of God: ‘O man, what is there that I should have done for you and did not?’ Responding to this familiar call to reject worldly priorities, amid loud cries of excited religious fervour, Conrad fulfilled the ceremonial fiction of sudden conversion, declaring: ‘I am ready to serve Him,’ before receiving from Bernard both the cross and a holy banner conveniently placed on the altar. Significantly, Conrad was accompanied in taking the cross by his nephew Frederick of Swabia.⁴⁹ This was not a quixotic act. The old, dying duke of Swabia, Conrad’s brother, bitterly resented the king enrolling his son as his absence might jeopardize the family holdings. That was the point. Only if as many of the great feudatories of the Empire as possible accompanied the king or, by virtue of taking the cross, were compromised if they stayed behind, could Conrad ensure both the success of the crusade and the security of his realm.

To confirm the political solidarity behind the enterprise, Conrad and Bernard’s representative, Abbot Adam of Ebrach, presided over another crusade mass at Regensburg in February 1147, where Conrad’s half-brother, Henry Jasomirgott, duke of Bavaria and margrave of Austria, and the bishops of Regensburg, Freising and Passau took the cross with a large press of recruits including notorious thieves and footpads, perhaps attracted by the prospect of legal immunity if not amnesty. One participant recalled the careful preparation, ‘all present had been aroused by previous report’, his subsequent insistence that everyone had taken the cross ‘of their own accord’ satisfying canonical requirements if not historical accuracy.⁵⁰ The adherence of Henry of Bavaria revealed the irenic uses of the crusade: he was now a fellow crucesignatus with the disgruntled and dispossessed pretender to his duchy, Welf VI. Conrad’s crusade, like Louis’s, embraced family, friends and foes and offered support for a sometimes beleaguered status. During his stay in the east, Conrad, although never crowned emperor, added the imperial ‘semper augustus’ to his titles, perhaps in response to his association with the Greek emperor or, even, a nod to the revived interest in the so-called Sibylline eschatological prophecies of the Holy Land and the Last Emperor. The image of the tall, well-built Conrad rescuing the slight, frail Bernard from an adoring mob during the Diet of Frankfurt in March 1147 by picking him up and carrying him out of the crowd provided a less cosmic but no less potent opportunity for royal association with the great forces of Christendom.⁵¹

PLANNING AND RECRUITMENT

A flurry of conferences and assemblies early in 1147 settled the timing and routes for the crusaders. While at Regensburg securing the Bavarians, Conrad sent ambassadors to discuss plans with Louis and Bernard at Chelons- sur-Marne in early February, prior to the French deciding on their strategy and arrangements for the king’s absence at a large council at Etampes beginning on 16 February. Conrad followed suit at a diet at Frankfurt on 13 March, also attended by the tireless Bernard hot foot from Etampes. By late March, a fresh round of meetings acknowledged the presence north of the Alps of the pope. Eugenius III, making a virtue of his expulsion from Rome by its radical commune, had set out from Viterbo in January, travelling via Lucca and Vercelli to Susa, where on 8 March he discussed the crusade with Louis VII’s uncle, Amadeus of Savoy, thence through imperial Burgundy to Lyons (22 March) and into France, reaching Dijon by the end of the month, where he was met by German ambassadors eager to arrange a meeting between the pope and Conrad in Strassburg. Rejecting the German overtures, Eugenius turned aside to Clairvaux (6 April), perhaps to relive his youth there, certainly to be fully briefed by his old master, before proceeding to Paris with King Louis, celebrating Easter (20 April) at St Denis. There, on 11 June, the pope presided over an elaborate ceremony marking Louis’s formal departure. From St Denis Louis marched towards his muster at Metz in late June. The pope, his role as diplomatic facilitator and legitimizing observer complete, remained in France and Lotharingia for another year. Conrad meanwhile spent Easter at Bamberg, a city especially associated with the recently canonized Emperor Henry II (1002–24) and his attempts to extend Christianity (and his empire) eastwards, before moving towards the Danube via Nuremberg and Regensburg, whence he embarked eastwards in late May.⁵²

The involvement of Conrad and the Germans may have influenced the French plans. After taking the cross in March 1146, Louis had explored different options for his journey east. Conrad, King Geza of Hungary, the Emperor Manuel of Byzantium and King Roger II of Sicily were each consulted over passage, supplies and support, suggesting that no immediate decision had been made between the land route via the Danube and the Balkans and a sea route via southern Italy. There was even talk of the French preparing their own fleet, perhaps to shadow any land army (as Richard I of England was to organize for his crusade in 1190), although as Louis controlled no ports himself this would have required negotiation.⁵³ The response to French requests, received during the summer of 1146, appeared to be universally positive, leaving the choice of route open. The likelihood of active and substantial German participation delayed any decision until the assembly at Etampes in February 1147 just after Conrad’s arrangements had been communicated to the French at the Chalons conference. It is sometime argued that Louis had decided in 1146 to accept the offer of transport by sea from Roger of Sicily, only to be deflected by German involvement. Yet the Franco-Byzantine exchanges of 1146 indicated that no such decision had been reached. After a long and possibly heated debate, the assembly at Etampes decided on the land route via Byzantium.⁵⁴

Although with hindsight condemned by some as misguided, this option presented a number of advantages. For the bulk of the French contingents, including the largest, from Flanders, and the king’s, the land route was the most accessible and the cheapest, as the troops could be supplied en route by local markets and, in enemy territory, by forage. Given the difficulties in raising cash from their property, this may have appealed to most crucesignati. Although the prospect of travelling in the wake of the large German armies raised concerns over inadequate local provisions, it offered certain benefits; on their march the French found a number of new bridges constructed by the Germans in front of them.⁵⁵ Most French nobles had no experience of the sea, many would never have seen it, the logistics and finance involved in hiring a fleet being wholly unfamiliar. Transport of horses by sea presented further complications: those Rhinelanders, Flemings and English who did travel by sea via the Iberian peninsular in 1147 may have carried few if any horses with them,