Christopher Tyerman - God's War - A New History of the Crusades

Yet such wars were hardly religious, even if some thought them just or holy. The Greeks wished to secure the eastern marches of Asia Minor; Nicephoras was perfectly willing to allow Muslim Aleppo to become a client, self-governing city. Al-Mansur posed as a holy warrior, yet he hired Christian mercenaries and his attack on the famous shrine of St James at Compostela in Galicia in 997 was only made possible by Christian nobles who acted as guides. 36This essentially secular pattern continued into the eleventh century, especially in Spain, where Christian adventurers rifled through the debris left by the collapse of the Cordoba caliphate from the 1030s, often in alliance with, or in the service of, Muslim princelings.

From the perspective of the western church, conflict with Islam was ipso facto meritorious in a religious context. Whatever the reality of ambitious Italian trading cities, Norman bandits, Spanish lords or even Greek princes, churchmen, in particular successive popes, conceptualized the conflict, fitting it into a wider picture of cosmic significance and individual grace. Whereas in the ninth century, Christendom appeared genuinely threatened, the frontier skirmishing of the eleventh century was of a very different order, yet the rhetoric was conversely gaudier. This was of considerable importance as the attitude to wars against the infidel in the earlier eleventh century coloured the whole approach of Urban II. The motives for holy war were always ever only partly practical, those directed against Muslims often being only tangentially related to any military necessity in defence of Christendom. What counted for successive popes was the place of these wars in Christian history and the opportunity they afforded for a revival of religious enthusiasm, devotion and piety, essentially concerns internal to the church and Christian society.

This is not to say that religion played no part in these wars. Pisan raids on Palermo in Sicily (1063) and al-Mahdiya in north Africa (1087) were consciously placed in the context of Christian service. The Norman invaders of Sicily after 1060, supported by papal encouragement and banner, were regarded by some as champions of the Faith. Their troops took Communion before battle; their efforts were sustained by visions of saints; and one Italian chronicler (who died in 1085, so avoiding the hindsight of the First Crusade that infected others) had the Norman leader Robert Guiscard declare his wish to free Christians from Muslim rule and to ‘avenge the injury done to God’. 37

Pilgrimage and war marched closely together. The Pisan al-Mahdiya campaign in 1087 included a pilgrimage to Rome. Frenchmen were habitués of the pilgrimage to Compostela as well as the reconquista . A grant of indulgences by Pope Alexander II has been variously interpreted, if genuine, as applying either to war or pilgrimage or both. 38Gregory VII’s enigmatic reference to the Holy Sepulchre in 1074 hinted at a fusion of ideas, unsurprising in a pope so concerned with the ramifications of confession and penance as well as war. Partly no doubt as a consequence of an increase in pilgrimages, especially to Jerusalem, attested by Muslim as well as western observers and itself a result of the increase in Byzantine power in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean under Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer (d. 1025), there was a distinct frisson of outrage at the arbitrary destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre by the unstable Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim, in 1009. Whether or not Pope Sergius IV (1009–12) encouraged the creation of a Christian relief fleet with a promise of indulgences, news of the outrage rang across the west. In a grim foreshadowing of the anti-Semitism of later Jerusalem holy warriors, a Burgundian chronicler, Ralph Glaber (d. 1046), recorded how Jewish communities in France were perversely blamed for inciting al-Hakim and were violently persecuted in consequence. 39Elsewhere, chroniclers saw those fighting wars of profit in Spain or in the Venetian defence of Bari against Muslims in 1003 as inspired by faith, as indeed may have been the participants themselves. In 1015–16, Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) openly approved a Pisan and Genoese raid on Muslim pirate bases in Sardinia. The Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes (d. 1034) not only recorded the Jewish libel over the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, adding gory details of atrocities against eastern Christians, but frequently mentioned campaigns against the Moors in Spain and, in describing a supposed Muslim attack on Narbonne c. 1018, told of the Christian defenders receiving Communion before battle. Adam, who referred to his warlike lay uncles with pride, revealed a world in which religiosity and violence were as close as his lay and clerical relatives. 40

From 1060, the reformed papacy applied their theories of justified war with even greater vigour and legal precision to campaigns against the infidel than they did to those against their Christian enemies. In Sicily, the ethos of holy war was carefully nurtured, extending to the eccentric but politically convenient expedient of appointing the military commander, Count Roger, Robert Guiscard’s equally bellicose younger brother, as papal legate, the pope’s representative in running the church in the newly conquered island. Although it appears that many holy war aspects of the reconquest of Muslim Spain resulted from the First Crusade rather than the other way round, the Iberian peninsula attracted interest from popes and French knights and fitted neatly and centrally into the increasingly grandiose concepts of world destiny being peddled not just by papal apologists but by monastic reformers as well. Glaber, a Cluniac Benedictine whose order had a long and close interest both in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and in promoting pilgrimage, peppered his chronicle with accounts of pilgrimages to Jerusalem (which he feared had become abused as a fashionable accessory for those seeking prestige not penitence); Christian warfare against the Moors in Spain and, on one occasion, the Slavs beyond the Elbe; and the Peace and Truce of God movement. Glaber was in no doubt of the efficacy of all of them; even monks who broke their vows and in extremis took up arms, were seen as gaining salvation. 41In this context, papal approval and grants of specific spiritual privileges to warriors against infidels would have occasioned little surprise. It is likely that Alexander II offered a lifting of all penances and remission of sins to campaigners in Spain in 1064. Gregory VII advertised ‘eternal reward’ for recruits against the infidel (and others) in 1074. In 1089, Urban II himself urged the colonization of the devastated frontier city of Tarragona on the Spanish coast south of Barcelona as a penitential act. The rebuilding of the city was described in military terms, as providing a wall of Christianity against the Muslims; those joining the enterprise could substitute it for any planned penitential pilgrimage, including that to Jerusalem, later specified as ‘indulgence of your sins’. 42

Theories and practices of morally just and spiritually meritorious warfare had developed unevenly in response to changing political circumstances, religious outlook and social behaviour. Many clung to older concepts of sin and spiritual war. Some feigned or genuinely felt shock at the unapologetic and unequivocal combination of war and penance proposed by Urban II in 1095. Yet the pre-history of the First Crusade was long and illustrious. Holy war against infidels who, by the late eleventh century, appeared if not in retreat then at least to be subject to attack on equal terms, provided one means of morally legitimate expression for a military aristocracy whose social authority and robust culture served to highlight their spiritual vulnerability. The detritus of legal justifications, scriptural, Patristic and classical, thrown into relief by actual experience in the Carolingian period and by romanticized echoes of it enshrined in vernacular chansons de geste , supplied material from which fresh theories of holy war could be constructed. The catalyst was as much the perspectives and interests of the reformed papacy as the external threats presented by Islam: together they set the stage for Urban II. Yet much of what was proclaimed as new by the call to arms in 1095 represented old wine in new bottles; the winepress from which it came was grimed with use and age.