God's War: A New History of the Crusades

western images, models and imitations of the Holy Sepulchre. Acquaintance with the Christian history of the Holy City and particularly the True Cross was reflected in the adoption in the west in the twelfth century of the name Heraclius, commemorating the Byzantine emperor who in ad 630 restored to Jerusalem the fragment of the cross captured by the Persians, a highly relevant historical precedent after 1187.¹⁵ Confronted with Saladin’s alleged atrocities, engagement translated horror into guilt, anger and a sense of collective duty, sentiments propaganda sought to direct. The effect was registered throughout western Christendom in hundreds if not thousands of charters drawn up for departing crusaders by monks to whom they had given or mortgaged their property for the good of their souls and, usually, for some ready cash to allow them, as the documents explicitly state, to depart for Jerusalem.

Exhortation and admonition in official letters, sermons and propagandist tracts remained consistent. The destruction of the kingdom of Jerusalem, Saladin’s capture of the Holy City and, especially, the loss of the True Cross represented a disaster of biblical proportions, redeemable only by individual and collective repentance. The rhetorical themes elevated the pragmatic to the transcendent. In a tract designed to accelerate preparations, Henry of Albano declared the cross ‘the ark of the vassal of the Lord, the ark of the New Testament’, ‘the glory of the Christian people, the remedy of sin, the care of the wounded, the restorer of health’.¹⁶ The image of the cross dominated written and spoken appeals, Henry of Albano’s formulae being mirrored, at times verbatim, by others, such as Peter of Blois, Archbishop Baldwin’s secretary, one of the most insistent crusade publicists. The language of the liturgy jostled with that of the Old Testament, the Eucharist with the Psalms and the Maccabees. ‘Christ’s blood cries out for help,’ proclaimed Peter of Blois.¹⁷ The crusade was carefully and closely identified with spiritual renewal. Specifically this process was associated with voluntary poverty and amendment of life. One contemporary preacher of the cross, Alan of Lille, emphasized that the poverty being praised by propagandists implied spiritual humility, not economic destitution. He made this clear by citing the version of the Sermon on the Mount Beatitudes in Matthew 5:3, ‘blessed are the poor in spirit’, not the socially more radical Luke 6:20 (‘blessed are you poor; for yours is the kingdom of Heaven’).¹⁸ The sumptuary regulations in Audita Tremendi, published by Henry of Albano in Germany and Henry II in England in 1188, underlined the thrust of the preaching, directed at prosperous audiences and aimed at moral regeneration, not social reform or redistribution of wealth. Adopting simple dress could be a gesture of reform only for those used to fine clothes, not an option for paupers and beggars. The repeated themes were of penance, not vainglory, humility of spirit, not in an embrace of indigence but a rejection of the mentality of wealth. As Gregory VIII put it, ‘we are not saying “give up the things you have” but “send them off to the heavenly barn and entrust them to God”’.¹⁹ Such entreaties became more urgent as political in-fighting delayed the departure of the crusade in 1189 and 1190. However, presenting this mixture of obligation and opportunity for Christian renewal through the recovery of the Holy Land was not left to metaphor. Repeated emphasis on Saladin’s violence, the fate of the vanquished of Hattin, as captives or, like Reynald of Chatillon, martyrs, and the desecration of the Holy Places firmly located the forthcoming struggle in the temporal as well as spiritual sphere.

The process of disseminating the message was carefully managed. The designated papal legates recruited local ecclesiastics to proselytize their own regions. Not least this helped bridge the language barrier. Henry of Albano, legate to the Germans, reputedly knew no German.²⁰ Interpreters were essential members of any preaching team in alien country, whether at Mainz in 1188 or on Archbishop Baldwin’s Welsh tour, when the archdeacon of Bangor performed the job.²¹ Occasionally, and perhaps for the same reason, laymen were recruited to speak, as, it was later recorded, in Denmark, where Esbern, brother of the Slav-bashing archbishop of Lund, stirred his fellow nobles by evoking their Viking past, the glory of which nonetheless paled in comparison with ‘the greater and more profitable conquests’ of holy war.²² Partially hidden networks of affinity underpinned the operation. Both Henry of Albano and Baldwin of Canterbury were former Cistercian abbots. Their order played a distinctive role in fostering crusade enthusiasm at this time by devising special regular prayers for crucesignati included in their liturgical round. Perhaps not unconnected, in the lands of the French king, Cistercians managed to win exemption from the crusade tax.

Besides official ecclesiastical support, political, social and personal contacts exerted similar pressure. After the meeting at Gisors in January 1188, the English and French kings agreed to levy a special tax of 10 per cent on movables, soon nicknamed the Saladin Tithe. The process of collecting this tax, which seems to have begun in the spring of 1188, spread the news of the enterprise perhaps more effectively than any grandiose preaching campaign. The great Paris assembly in March 1188, at which the Tithe was authorized in Philip II’s lands, was attended by large numbers of clergy, nobles and an ‘innumerable multitude’ of knights and commoners.²³ Given that those who had taken the cross were exempted for payment, the tax may also have proved a highly effective recruiting agent. One departing crusader from the Dauphine in the foothills of the Alps referred more generally to the ‘magna mota’, the great movement, of the Jerusalem expedition, suggesting a similarly wide exchange of information through the networks of trade, social dialogue and travel.²⁴

The ears of the great were repeatedly bent by crusade enthusiasts. Especially vulnerable were those, such as Henry II, who could be accused of procrastination. Peter of Blois, who had first alerted the Angevin court to the shocked reaction of the papal Curia to the news of Hattin in September 1187, composed a series of exhortatory crusade pamphlets. In 1188–9, he spent much time at the king’s side. In the spring of 1189, Peter witnessed a private encounter between King Henry and the abbot of Bonneval in which the abbot lamented the delays in sending any troops to the Holy Land despite the practical difficulties – essentially the problems of kingship in a wicked world – Henry self-pityingly outlined. The abbot’s criticism merely echoed more public denunciations of backsliding and internecine political squabbling, for example, by the legate Henry of Albano.²⁵ The effectiveness of such personal approaches on Henry cannot easily be assessed, as he died shortly afterwards, in July 1189.

News of Hattin and the loss of Jerusalem had overcome Henry’s quarter-century equivocation over the Holy Land and his innate dislike of being told his military duty by the church. During the visit to the west of Heraclius of Jerusalem in 1185, Henry privately expostulated, ‘these clerks can incite us boldly to arms and danger since they themselves will receive no blows in the struggle, nor will they undertake any burdens which they can avoid’.²⁶ Many had failed to answer the increasingly urgent appeals from Jerusalem for aid in the 1180s, so Henry was probably not alone in harbouring such doubts. Ralph Niger, a well-connected close observer of these events in northern France and a critic of Outremer before 1187, doubted the spiritual benefit of an armed crusade without a prior, commensurate spiritual transformation amongst western crusaders.²⁷ However, such objections became untenable in the face of both the news from Outremer and the subsequent propaganda campaign.

Successful recruitment depended on secular support. William II of Sicily had set the tone for his people by adopting a hair shirt and shutting himself away for four days, as well as commissioning a fleet to provide immediate aid for Outremer.²⁸ Inevitably, papal letters and legates were directed at royal courts, where their reception determined the scale of the response. In Denmark, there were some significant naval contributions, possibly concentrated in the ports of southern Jutland nearest to the Frisians with whom many of them sailed. However, without Canute VI taking the cross, noble commitment was modest, one source identifying only fifteen crusaders ‘whose hearts God specially touched’.²⁹ The five nobles who actually embarked were all close associates of the king, and so presumably enjoyed his approval. Similarly, across the border in Norway, the leader of the small Norwegian force, Ulf of Lauvnes, was a royal favourite, but the lack of King Sverre’s participation restricted aristocratic engagement. The picture appeared the same in Scotland, where William the Lion avoided entanglement in an operation led by his overbearing southern neighbour. As a consequence, only a handful of Scottish royal courtiers and officials took the cross, led by Robert of Quincy, himself of Anglo-Norman ancestry.³⁰

In none of these northern European countries was preaching widespread, partly because its function was primarily to confirm existing enthusiasms rather than to stir up enthusiasm from scratch. In Germany, France and England the extensive preaching campaigns followed demonstrations of overt royal commitment, on the pattern of Louis VII and Bernard of Clairvaux in 1146. The main preaching agents were not only close to the monarch but were actively engaged in the wider organization of the enterprise. Bishop Godfrey of Wurzburg, a count in his own right (of Helfenstein), followed his preaching efforts in early 1188 with a central role in diplomatic preparations and later in the conduct of the eastern expedition which he accompanied, to die at Antioch in July 1190. In England Archbishop Baldwin led the preaching, not, as it proved, for any particular oratorical skill but as the embodiment of both secular and ecclesiastical authority. Like Godfrey of Wurzburg, Baldwin was committed to undertake the crusade. One of his companions recalled soon after how, on 10 April 1188, in a steep and difficult valley near