God's War: A New History of the Crusades

cross, a banner of victory but also a badge of faith and sign of repentance. Extending the idea of communal penance contained in Gregory VIII’s bull Audita Tremendi, crusade publicists extrapolated the act of crusading into a clear general scheme of religious revivalism. This they associated with a firmer distinctive vocabulary of personal commitment mirrored in legally more explicit privileges of the crusader, the crucesignatus. Taking the cross now in theory clearly separated crusading from pilgrimage, even if surviving written liturgies and chroniclers retained the link. To the crusader’s special spiritual status coupled with the now customary privileges were joined precise and immediate secular benefits, such as exemption from the novel taxes levied to pay for the armies bound for the east. The experience of 1188–92 established in lay as well as ecclesiastical circles the technical name for participants in crusading even if it failed to discover an agreed term for the activity in which they were involved. Propagandists began to talk almost exclusively of ‘crucesignati’, a habit that soon found its way into chronicles, histories and government records. In the accounts of the English Exchequer, crusiatus appeared in 1188/9 and crucesignatus, for the first time, in 1191/2.¹ Vernacular equivalents, such as the verbs croisier and croiser, began to appear in the poems of departing crusaders and within a generation croisie had become common when describing a crusader.² While Jerusalem dominated the language of preparation for the campaigns in the east, the failure of the Palestine war of 1191–2 to restore the Holy City to Christian rule produced a subtle but significant shift in linguistic focus that shadowed military reality. Thereafter the iter Jerosolymitana gave place to the broader inclusive euphemisms of negotium Terrae Sanctae or even simply the negotium sanctum, the business of the Holy Land, the holy business.

THE MESSAGE

The effort to mobilize Christendom involved every available medium of communication in a carefully organized campaign. Although published in late October and early November 1187, only days after his accession, Gregory VIII’s Audita Tremendi had taken weeks of drafting since September when definite news of Hattin reached the papal Curia, then in Verona. Its release had awaited the arrival at the Curia, now moved to Ferrara, of Joscius archbishop of Tyre from Sicily, and been further delayed by the death of the already ailing Urban III on 20 October. The bull provided the basic ingredients of the appeal for action.³ Proceeding from an account of Saladin’s victory to a call for general Christian repentance, it emphasized the opportunity the crisis provided for the dutiful believers to follow in the path of the Maccabees and to serve the will of God. After the casus belli and the exhortation came the statement of the spiritual and temporal privileges, based on those declared by Eugenius III in 1145–6. With Audita Tremendi were sent other letters affirming papal and curial commitment and enjoining fasts and a seven-year truce on all Christian princes.

By the time they issued Audita Tremendi, Gregory VIII and his advisors probably guessed it was assured an eager reception. With Archbishop Joscius would have come news of William II of Sicily’s plans to send a fleet to the Holy Land.⁴ Already western courts were full of rumours, backed by hard evidence from correspondents from Outremer and southern Europe that preceded the formal authorization of a new crusade. Richard of Poitou’s hasty and impulsive adoption of the cross at Tours in November 1187, without his father, Henry II’s, permission, almost certainly anticipated the arrival of the papal bull.⁵ While papal legates – Archbishop Joscius of Tyre to France and the former abbot of Clairvaux, Cardinal Henry of Albano, to Germany – accompanied the bull, by the end of the year preparations to receive the message they brought were in full swing. At an imperial diet at Strassburg in December, encouraged by the rhetoric of Bishop Henry of Strassburg, German lords had begun to take the cross, overcoming an initial wariness.⁶ At the Christmas 1187 court of Canute VI of Denmark at Odense, apparently surprise and shock both at what had happened and what was being proposed inhibited spontaneous response.⁷ On both the emotional and political levels, reassurance of the priority to be given any projected campaign was necessary. As elsewhere, many German lords were probably reluctant to make any move before they knew the intentions of their king-emperor, Frederick Barbarossa. Deference to rulers’ decisions characterized the reception of the papal call to arms. Given the financial and political implications, it was small wonder Richard of Poitou’s failure to wait for his father’s lead left the old king speechless.⁸

Within weeks of the circulation and reception of the papal bull, the preaching campaign assumed coherent regional patterns. In Germany, after the Strassburg diet, it was spearheaded by Bishop Henry of Strassburg and Bishop Godfrey of Wurzburg, whose eloquence helped create a mood of mass enthusiasm that culminated in a great assembly at Mainz on 27 March 1188. Billed by the papal legate Henry of Albano as a ‘curia Christi’, court of Christ, there Frederick received the cross. Subsidiary preaching tours were organized, such as the bishop of Strassburg’s journey to Hainault, Nesle, Louvain and Lille.⁹ A similarly rapid but controlled response was evoked in England and northern France. Before the end of 1187, Henry II had ordered the sequestration of the profits from the pilgrim trade at the shrine of Thomas Becket at Canterbury in order, he claimed, to assist Jerusalem and ransom Christian captives.¹⁰ Political rivalries and resentments between Henry and Philip II of France were quickly if temporarily submerged. At Gisors in the Vexin, between Normandy and Philip’s royal lands, the two rulers took the cross on 21 January 1188 in the presence of Joscius of Tyre, less than three months after the papal bull. With them were most of the counts of northern France: Flanders, Blois, La Perche, Champagne, Dreux, Clermont, Beaumont, Soissons, Bar and Nevers (King Henry himself being duke of Normandy and count of Anjou, Maine and Touraine).¹¹ By the time Frederick of Germany took the cross two months later, a carefully organized crusade preaching tour of Wales by Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury was approaching its fifth week. The preaching in Henry II’s lands in France and England had been organized at a conference at Le Mans in late January and Geddington, in Northamptonshire, on 11 February 1188, where sermons were delivered by the archbishop of Canterbury, who took the cross there, and his deputy, the bishop of Rochester. By the end of the month, Archbishop Baldwin was preparing his Welsh tour; the bishop of St Asaph may have already begun preaching.¹² In France, Philip II managed to gather a large assembly to Paris, also on 27 March, mid-Lent, to discuss the crusade tax and related financial provisions for crusaders. By Easter 1188, coordinated preaching and recruitment campaigns, coupled in Angevin and Capetian lands with attempts to raise the crusade tax, were well established and credited with dramatic success in attracting tens of thousands of crucesignati, from Germany to the Atlantic.

Central to the commitment of taking the cross was the concurrent resolution of outstanding internal and diplomatic problems. At Gisors, Henry II and Philip II agreed (only temporarily as it turned out) to shelve their territorial disputes. In Germany, the general peace was extended to Frederick’s opponents, such as the archbishop of Cologne, and the troublesome duke of Saxony, Henry the Lion, who was presented with a choice of accompanying the crusade all expenses paid or exile. Henry chose the latter. Under the possibly sincere guise of promoting the crusade, Henry II attempted to assert his authority over the Welsh princes, through Archbishop Baldwin’s tour, and, unsuccessfully, over Scotland, by trying to extract a contribution to the crusade tax. Despite an attached offer to settle a border dispute, the Scottish barons declined to treat Henry as their lord for crusade finance or anything else.¹³ For Philip II, no less important than ensuring that his uncontrollably powerful Angevin vassal Henry II accompanied him on any eastern expedition was the similar commitment of other great feudatories, such as the duke of Burgundy or the counts of Flanders and Champagne. Philip, a calculating, cautious and resourceful opportunist who tended to wait on favourable events rather than risk grand gestures, needed to ensure that the bold undertaking of the crusade did nothing to limit his prospects of widening royal control within the French kingdom.

Although across Christendom reactions to the call to arms were conditioned by considerations of material and political advantage, as one contemporary observed, ‘for the love of God, remission of sins and respect of the kings’, there can be no doubt the message produced strong psychological and religious responses.¹⁴ At its most straightforward, the effectiveness of the promotion of the crusade relied on two related elements. The shock of the loss of Jerusalem and the Holy Cross was heightened by the images of both being so familiar. Western audiences, primed by Scripture, liturgy, songs, popular stories, sculpture, stained glass, relics and the travellers’ tales of returning pilgrims, could easily feel personal engagement, involvement and hence responsibility, emotions crusade publicists took care to encourage. The enormous twelfth-century popularity of Jerusalem as a pilgrimage destination encouraged identification with the place that went beyond liturgical metaphors, biblical narratives or