God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Flanders, Soissons, Bar, Ponthieu, Nevers, Tonnerre, the Bourbonnais, the Auvergne, Meaux in Champagne, Macon in southern Burgundy and Vienne in imperial Provence; the lords of Nogent in the Seine valley, Rancon and Lusignan in Poitou and Magnac in the Limousin. With these lords came their retinues and dependants, in considerable numbers in the case of Thierry of Flanders. The core of support rested with the king’s affinity; his brother Robert count of Dreux and La Perche; his formidable wife Eleanor, duchess of Aquitaine in her own right, who presumably secured the Poitevin and Limousin contingents: Geoffrey of Rancon, later notorious for causing the near-annihilation of the army in Asia Minor, had entertained Louis and Eleanor on their honeymoon.⁶⁶ The presence of women provided a notable feature of the Second Crusade. Apart from Eleanor and her household ladies, the counts of Flanders and Toulouse travelled with their wives and the statutes agreed by the northern European fleet at Dartmouth in May 1147 assumed the same for members of that force.⁶⁷ In the French king’s army, the household clerks, led by Bartholomew, the chancellor, and his personal chaplain, the monk Odo of Deuil, a coming man seconded from the abbey of St Denis, were joined by some ecclesiastical heavyweights, such as the bishops of Arras, Langres and Lisieux, the last two both claiming legatine authority, Godfrey of Langres partly on the ground of his close association with Bernard, having been his prior at Clairvaux.⁶⁸ The canon lawyer, classical scholar and acerbic wit Arnold of Lisieux contested Godfrey’s pretensions, famously describing him as ‘like the wine of Cyprus, which is sweet to taste but lethal unless diluted with water’. Neither behaved well, attracting gossip that they lined their pockets from alms given in return for absolution by sick and dying crusaders. Their bickering, while contributing little to the smooth running of the campaign, ignored the legate actually appointed, Guy of Florence, cardinal of St Grisogono, a man of some bureaucratic ability later displayed in Outremer after the end of the crusade, but on the march fatally hampered by his lack of fluency in French. Without Bernard, none took the role of Adhemar of Le Puy on the First Crusade.⁶⁹ Nonetheless, the dynamism that propelled so many disparate political, personal and clerical groups towards the east under the king’s Oriflamme testified to a sense of secular, even national as well as religious identity. Although able to speak German and holding land in the empire as well as France, Thierry of Flanders journeyed with King Louis.⁷⁰ Among those of the king’s personal bodyguard killed around him in the desperate hand-to-hand fighting in the Cadmus mountains were knights from across France but also William of Warenne, earl of Surrey, a pillar of the Anglo-Norman establishment.⁷¹ Under the sign of the cross new bonds of loyalty could be forged.

The popularity of the enterprise helped ensure the relatively easy agreement over the grand strategy of the holy war. Heavy recruitment, across France, western and southern Germany, the Low Countries, southern England, parts of Danubean central Europe, reaching northwards to Scotland and, for the Wendish campaign, Denmark, rested on piety, idealism, loyalty to lord or family and communal enthusiasm transmitted along the arteries of social and economic exchange. Religious values found expression in secular analogies directed at various propertied elites. One set of verses composed in 1146/7 talked of a tournament between heaven and hell.⁷² Bernard articulated the cultural aspirations of arms-bearers by praising their reputation for courage and of merchants in terms of an unbeatable bargain.⁷³ Concentric circles of contact produced substantial contingents. The economically linked networks within the Rhineland or Flanders or Normandy or East Anglia combined with an outer ring of commerce in the Narrow Seas to produce the fleet that gathered at Dartmouth in May 1147. The new community of Cistercian abbeys, Bernard’s own power base, supported older secular and ecclesiastical focal points of recruitment. So did the Templars, another new order that played a significant part planning and on campaign. Templars negotiated for Louis VII in Constantinople in 1146; they acted as the king’s bankers; and later held the French army together in Asia Minor during the grim weeks in January 1148. Bernard of Clairvaux’s own close Templar links were shared with crucesignati such as the Anglo-Norman patrons of the Templars Saher of Archel, one of the commanders of the Dartmouth fleet, and Roger of Mowbray.⁷⁴ The unanimity between secular and religious authorities in promoting the expedition as spiritual profit or social responsibility contrasted with the political and ecclesiastical divisions within western Christendom in 1096. Whereas Urban II’s call was clearly partisan, Bernard’s transcended political barriers and boundaries, only a few religious radicals distrustful of the church’s overt involvement in the world joining with the Roman commune and Roger of Sicily in openly standing aloof. Unlike 1096, potential crucesignati were supported by ceremonial and legal procedures, recognized in Quantum praedecessores, which, if not always familiar, demonstrated the progress in ecclesiastical discipline, hierarchical communication and canon law achieved in the fifty years between Clermont and Vezelay, backed by the cultural penetration of the story of the First Crusade in French and German vernacular literatures.

From the North Sea to the Mediterranean, recruits conformed to Quantum praedecessores, raising money on their property, in particular from religious houses, with the permission of relatives and overlords. In the increasingly competitive land market of the twelfth century, such guarantees by the king, local count or bishop were as necessary as was the compliance of interested family members, relicts and heirs who often needed firm persuasion to honour the deals of deceased crusaders. The attractive provisions regarding church protection and immunity from civil law suits required similarly careful management. In November 1146, the bishop of Salisbury had to be reminded by the pope that church jurisdiction did not extend to land disputes originating before the defendant took the cross. Even so, the popularity of the crusade with thieves, noted by Otto of Freising, may not have been coincidental.⁷⁵ The emotional or spiritual dimensions behind the legal framework emerged fitfully. In contrast to papal letters and chronicles, references in monastic land charters to taking the cross or to preaching are rare. Some charters, but not a majority, related the donations or mortgages to remission of sins; ‘love and fear’ apparently moved one Poitevin, Raynard rusticus, the countryman.⁷⁶ However, large numbers of non-combatant or otherwise militarily incompetent pilgrims did travel with the German and French armies, giving the enterprise a dogged if inconvenient revivalist tinge that drained efficiency and resources on the march and in battle. For aristocrats and arms-bearers, the imperative to translate property into cash generated expediency. Bishop Godfrey of Langres pawned gold and silver vessels from his cathedral church while promising restitution to a suspicious chapter.⁷⁷ Acquisitive religious houses skilfully played the market. In the face of royal demands for tax, the monks of Fleury protested a lack of cash, offering a miscellany of precious candlesticks and thuribles instead, yet at the same time provided money to local worthies in return for pledges of property.⁷⁸ The business could be highly lucrative, in both the short and long term. The English abbey of St Benet Holme in Norfolk made an effective profit on its deal with Philip Basset of Postwick of a minimum of 133 per cent spread over seven years, the frowned-upon usury hidden here as ubiquitously elsewhere behind the fiction of mutual gifts.⁷⁹ The cost of crusading is difficult to underestimate. Reiner von Sleiden sold outright part of his allodial (i.e. freehold) patrimony to the abbey of Klosterrad, near Aachen.⁸⁰ Dozens of land charters record landowners raising sums many times (three in Philip Basset’s case) their annual revenue; they also chart those who failed to return.

The elaborate organization of the Second Crusade matched its vast human and geographic scale. The expeditions of the kings rested on the collaboration of socially, financially and politically distinct military households of the great nobles, each with their own regional and personal identity, cohesion and loyalties. However, where the armies of 1096 retained their separate regional identities to the end, Conrad and Louis, through deference and convenience, imposed an element of unity, providing, for better or worse, field leadership and chairmanship of the baronial high command. As the papally sanctioned chief organizers, they conducted the preparatory diplomacy; negotiated with local rulers during the march; set the schedule of departure and muster points; and supplied men and money. Both Conrad and Louis possessed continuing access to large funds, either cash in their own coffers or sums held on account by third parties such as the Templars. Once in Palestine in the spring of 1148, Conrad was able to reassert his authority after a disastrous journey by taking troops into his pay while Louis, using his assets in France, presumably including his church tax, as collateral, borrowed heavily from the Templars in the east; during the stumbling march across Asia Minor Louis repeatedly bailed out his impoverished nobles, knights and infantry.⁸¹

The geographic, political and social diversity of recruitment challenged coherent mustering, leadership, strategy, structure and timing. Yet most of the land and naval contingents for the east embarked between April and June 1147, arriving together, despite contrasting vicissitudes, a year later in the Holy Land. Planning, not chance, lay behind the musters at Dartmouth in May 1147, Regensburg the same month or Metz a month later; the adherence to the German force of Ottokar of Styria at Vienna in late May or early June; the arrival of the Anglo- Norman contingent to join Louis at Worms in late June; or the secondary French muster at Constantinople in October, where Louis waited for the counts of Maurienne and Auvergne and the marquis of Montferrat and those