God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Caernavon, Baldwin ordered his party to dismount and march on foot ‘in intention at least rehearsing what we thought we would experience when we went on our pilgrimage to Jerusalem’.³¹ Like Bishop Godfrey, Archbishop Baldwin gave his life to the crusade, dying at the siege of Acre in November 1190.

While the impact of the preaching of the Third Crusade was spectacular, it presumed prior acceptance of the message being promoted. Preaching provided ceremonial confirmation of pledges already agreed and created the conditions in which preparation, planning and recruitment could be achieved with the maximum public consent. Preaching rarely created a spontaneous response. By taking the cross the crucesignatus not only acquired exemptions from repayment of debts, paying the crusade tax and answering certain law suits but also gave a solemn promise to fulfil the vow, in theory enforceable through canon law. The high chances of death on crusade and the need to convert income into capital, commonly through sale or mortgage of property, required careful consideration and consultation not least with other family members. Conjugal rights also could not, in theory, be ignored nor the very real dangers to life, limb and possessions to which abandoned crusaders’ wives, widows and heiresses were liable. Numerous uplifting moral anecdotes, known as exempla, concerned the obtaining of family agreement before the irrevocable adoption of the cross. On a social as well as political level, the crusade sermon and the ritual of giving the cross constituted an act of recognition as much as inspiration.

Tricks of theatre and stagecraft were necessary if the ritual was to work as it should, ceremonially conveying a religious and political message of identity and mutual commitment. The rhetoric’s effect relied on the audience being primed by expectation, through prior advertisement, and a barrage of oratorical devices, from the lurid atrocity stories, to the metaphorical exploitation of the image of the cross, to powerful verbal refrains. The exempla, according to an Anglo-Norman preaching manual of a generation later, were designed to attract listeners’ attention and prevent boredom as well as inspiring contrition.³² The customary liturgical setting for the sermon was provided by the mass, with its concentration on the sufferings of Christ, the cross and repentance. Conveniently, in 1187–8 preaching coincided with the seasons of Christocentric festivals of Christmas and Easter, and the penitential period of Lent. Before the Second Crusade, Louis VII had announced his desire to go to the Holy Land at Christmas 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux preached at Vezelay at Easter 1146 and Conrad III took the cross at Christmas 1146, occasions not forced by events as in 1187–8.

If the timing and ceremonial setting were carefully chosen, so were the props. Congregations were accustomed to understand wordless messages, such as those conveyed by relics. When Philip II of France finally left on crusade in June 1190, he received the scrip and staff of a pilgrim at the royal abbey church of St Denis in front of an array of relics that encouraged all present to pray not just to the saints on show but also to the Virgin May and to Christ Himself ‘for the deliverance of the Holy Land’.³³ The transcendent was a potent presence. Fragments of the True Cross had proved popular since the First Crusade. Crucifixes, increasingly prominent in the rituals of the mass in the twelfth century, probably served as well, reflecting the centrality of the cross in Third Crusade propaganda. In Wales during Lent 1188, the preachers shared a cross that each handed to the next member of the team when it was their turn to speak.³⁴ More striking visual aids may have been employed, although testimony comes only from two Muslim observers. According to the well-informed Iraqi historian Ibn al-Athir (1160–1233), a picture was circulated in the west showing Christ being struck in the face by an Arab. Saladin’s friend and chief judge in his army, Baha’ al-Din Ibn Shaddad, recorded that Conrad of Montferrat, whose timely appearance had saved Tyre in July 1187, commissioned a large painting of Jerusalem showing a Muslim cavalryman trampling over the Holy Sepulchre on which his horse was urinating. ‘This picture he publicised overseas in the markets and assemblies, as the priests, bareheaded and dressed in sackcloth, paraded it, crying doom and destruction.’³⁵ Both Muslim writers strongly disapproved of such representational religious art, which may be why they mentioned these pictures. But Ibn Shaddad accurately commented that ‘images affect [Christians’] hearts, for they are essential to their religion’. If used, such large illustrated screens would have provided telling support for the preachers’ message to audiences already well versed in how to read sacred wall paintings and stained glass, although they may have been startled and impressed by the pictures’ immediacy and direct relevance.

A full array of persuasive artifice was displayed on Archbishop Baldwin’s Lenten tour of Wales from 2 March to 23 April 1188 as described by one of its leading members, the royal clerk Gerald of Wales, prolific chronicler, ethnographer, polemicist and frustrated careerist, whose Journey through Wales, drafted within months of the event, served the dual function of historical account and immediate crusade propaganda.³⁶ As with many crusade preaching campaigns, Baldwin’s mission combined ecclesiastical and secular politics with its religious purpose. By celebrating mass in each of the Welsh cathedrals, Baldwin was asserting the authority of Canterbury over an independent-minded and occasionally recalcitrant provincial church. Involving the Welsh princes in the crusade restricted their capacity to cause trouble in the event of the king of England’s absence as well as publicly binding them into the English royal polity. When Owain Cyfeiliog ‘alone of all the Welsh princes’ failed to present himself to take the cross he was excommunicated. The meticulous organization reflected these multiple purposes. Magnates and bishops were visited in turn, and, given the frequency with which local leaders met the archbishop’s party on entering their territory, almost certainly by pre-arrangement. Gryffydd ap Cynan of Gwynedd even apologized for being late. The preaching of the cross formed a central part of the wider plan. Once they were crucesignati, the Welsh princes were obliged to support Henry II’s crusade, a role of potential subservience that the Scottish nobility studiously and successfully avoided.

In his characteristically self-regarding style, Gerald frankly admitted the careful stage-management and theatrical manipulation of the preaching and cross-taking ceremonies. He recalled the role he played at New Radnor on 4 March after the archbishop’s opening sermon of the tour:

I myself who have written these words, was the first to stand up. I threw myself at the holy man’s feet and devoutly took the sign of the cross. It was the urgent admonition given some time before by the King which inspired me to give this example to the others, and the persuasion and oft-repeated promises of the archbishop and the Chief Justiciar [Ranulf Glanvill, himself a crucesignatus], who never tired of repeating the King’s words… In doing so I gave strong encouragement to the others and an added incentive to what they had just been told.

Gerald later confessed that the king had added the douceur of promising to pay his crusade expenses.³⁷ The essential manoeuvre was to set an example, to show the rest of the congregation what to do, as Adhemar of Le Puy had done at Clermont in 1095. Directing crowd psychology was important. Gerald’s taking the cross was thus premeditated, not at all dependent on the quality of Baldwin’s sermon, an experience that was unlikely to have been unusual in 1188 even if the part played by the greatest in the land was.

Although local interpreters were employed, what was actually preached may have mattered less than how and by whom it was spoken. The language of third-party descriptions of crusade sermons in 1187–8 across Europe stressed the formality of proceedings, rather like the Latin liturgy itself. Gerald’s personal testimony confirms this. His greatest popular success at Haverfordwest on 23 March provoked over 200 to adopt the cross, yet he preached in Latin and French, which many of his audience could not understand. The force of delivery apparently counted for more than the detailed content of the speech. After Archbishop Baldwin’s address had flopped, Gerald, on being handed the portable cross as a prop, roused his audience to surge forward to take the cross in three carefully contrived rhetorical climaxes. A resentful wife of one of those who took the cross by being caught up in this crowd enthusiasm later allegedly complained of Gerald’s bewitching ‘soft words’ and ‘simple looks’ without which her husband and the rest ‘would have got clear off, as far as the preaching of the others was concerned’.³⁸

However incomprehensible the actual words, the ceremonial religious context underlined the message. On one level, as indicated in Gregory VIII’s Audita Tremendi, preaching the cross was a general call to repent. For Baldwin’s team, as for Henry of Albano and Godfrey of Wurzburg in Germany, this penitential purpose matched the season of Lent. The archbishop’s sermon at Chester on Easter Day, 17 April, marked the climax of the Welsh part of his tour. Other festival days with special appropriateness were also set aside by preachers of the Third Crusade to reinforce the ubiquitous symbolism and cult of Jerusalem and the cross: 14 September, Holy Cross Day, or ‘Laetare Jerusalem’ Sunday, chosen by Henry of Albano for Frederick Barbarossa’s ‘court of Christ’ and by Philip II for his Paris assembly in March 1188.³⁹ Crusade sermons were often placed immediately after the celebration of mass, whose elements of confession and penance feature prominently in