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

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The Summons to Jerusalem

The sermon preached by Pope Urban II outside the cathedral at Clermont in the Auvergne on Tuesday, 27 November 1095 has been seen as setting in train one of the most renowned sequence of events in the history of western Europe and Christianity. The story has resonated down the centuries; of how tens of thousands willingly uprooted themselves for the sake of liberating Jerusalem, a place of unimaginable physical remoteness yet ubiquitous immediate appeal; of how, suffering horrific losses and agonizing obstacles, they were painfully forged into an army that appeared to campaign as much in a war of the spirit as of the flesh; of how they surmounted seemingly fatal odds, of climate, terrain, local hostility and superior enemy numbers in repeated desperate battles and skirmishes; and of how, after three years on the road, the survivors stormed the Holy City, reclaiming it for Christendom, as one awed observer remarked, 460 years after its loss to Islam under the Emperor Heraclius. 1If the response to Urban’s appeal astonished all and shocked some, the outcome provided its own justification, creating a legend to feed the imaginations of western Europeans, to stir their emotions and haunt their nightmares.

The luminosity of the story of triumph over adversity in the cause of God, shining with epic, romance, adventure, excitement, glamour, heroism and the supernatural, casts shade as well as light. It suited promoters and apologists as well as the conquering heroes themselves, the proud Jerusalemites, to depict this holy war as a coherent narrative, of defined armies and a clear pattern of campaign. The story of the march to Jerusalem obscured much that failed to fit an acceptable and accepted literary and theological pattern, or challenged the embroidered reminiscences of the returned warriors of Christ. So far from a sudden clap of thunder or a leap in the dark, the devising and prosecution of what is now called the First Crusade, if unexpected, was not entirely unfamiliar, while much of the process remains unknown and unknowable.

The traditional version, largely derived from contemporary chronicles reflecting the experiences and perspectives of contingents and commentators in northern and southern France combined with a distinctive view from Lorraine, describes a series of armies leaving the west from the spring to the autumn of 1096 in explosive popular response to the inspirational and novel preaching of Urban II and his agents; their rendezvous was Constantinople, which all had reached by the end of May 1097. The earliest contingents, some associated with the charismatic preacher Peter the Hermit, often misleadingly known as the Peasants’ Crusades, after engaging in destructive attacks on Jewish communities in France and the Rhineland, continued to display indiscipline as they were picked off by enraged locals during separate marches across the Balkans, those who eventually reached Constantinople being massacred in their first serious military encounter with the Turks of western Asia Minor in the autumn of 1096. The armies of the so-called Princes’ Crusade, with more discipline, military skill, diplomatic contacts and money, fared better. Led by great nobles such as the dukes of Lower Lorraine and Normandy, the counts of Toulouse, Boulogne, Flanders, Blois and the brothers of the king of France and count of Apulia, accompanied by important churchmen, including a papal legate, and large numbers of knights, dependent and free, as well as footsoldiers, servants, camp-followers and subsidized pilgrims, these armies coalesced at the siege of Nicaea near the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus in June 1097.

With financial and military assistance from the Byzantine emperor, this skilled but disparate army fought its way across Anatolia before crashing into northern Syria in October 1097. During an extraordinary siege of Antioch (October 1097 to June 1098), when appalling material conditions and fear of military vulnerability caused many to desert, and a near-miraculous defeat of a Syrian relief force, the western army found sustenance to their morale in visions, relics and a growing belief in their providential status. In the wake of this advance, parts of Cilician Armenia, some ports on the north Syrian coast and the city of Edessa across the river Euphrates in northern Iraq fell under western control or effective influence. After internal bickering over precedence and land following the death of the papal legate (August 1098), most of the leaders joined the final, largely unopposed march south into Palestine in May 1099, reaching Jerusalem on 7 June. After a desperate siege in arid high summer, with the threat of an Egyptian relief army ever closer, the city was bloodily stormed on 15 July, its occupation confirmed by a startling victory over the Egyptians at Ascalon a month later. Leaving a garrison established in Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon, most of the troops, their vows well fulfilled, returned home, mainly by sea, their deeds exciting immediate, if unsuccessful, imitation, in particular by armies from Lombardy, Bavaria and France (1100–1102), and almost universal praise. Judged on any criteria, the achievement of the expedition to Jerusalem was stupendous. 2

By explaining these spectacular events in terms of divine will, contemporaries found neither need nor inclination to inquire too deeply into the gestation, purpose, timing or nature of Urban’s appeal. Still less were they able to produce a comprehensive view of all operations connected with the journey east. Although there was disagreement between local traditions over details (as in different provinces boasting one of their own as the first man over the walls of the Holy City), and at least one account, that of the Lorrainer Albert of Aachen (Aix), attributing the original inspiration of the whole enterprise to Peter the Hermit rather than the pope, the events themselves provided their own explanation and justification without causing anxiety over what occurred beyond the vision or hearing of the writer and his sources. Thus the direct and indirect accounts of eyewitnesses, many of which fed off each other, were partial and artificial, literary and didactic. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, is frank about his concerns, lest the deeds of the victors of 1099 be distorted by rumours spread by ‘misfits of war and cowardly deserters’. His openness may stand for all:

It is a matter of record that God’s army, although it bore the whip of the Lord for its transgressions, nevertheless triumphed over all paganism because of His loving kindness. But it seems too tiresome to write of each journey since some went through Sclavonia, others by Hungary, by Lombardy, or by the sea. So, we have taken care to write of the Count of Saint-Gilles, the bishop of Le Puy, and their army without bothering with the others. 3

As a result, although the most famous episode of its age and place, there is much about the First Crusade that is confused and irrecoverable. It is not only private motives that elude scrutiny. After the first five identifiable groups of Jew-persecuting crusaders had left the Rhineland by the beginning of June 1096, further attacks on Jewish communities occurred in June and July to the north, in Xanten, Geldern, Neuss, Wiehr and Wevelinghoren, hitherto untouched by the pogroms. Who precisely the perpetrators were, who led them and what happened to them is wholly obscure. When Peter the Hermit arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, he discovered a large army of Italians already there; again their provenance, leadership, organization and route have left no trace in the sources. When the princes’ army arrived in the environs of Antioch in October 1097, they discovered that two nearby ports on the coast of north Syria, St Symeon and Lattakiah, had already been captured by western fleets that included Genoese and angli (literally ‘English’). These may have acted in concert with crusade leaders or the Byzantine emperor, or not. For the next eighteen months, western shipping appeared regularly in Levantine waters without any clear account of their origins, such as another fleet of angli that reached St Symeon in March 1098, having put in at the Italian port of Lucca en route. These mariners, numerous other groups and thousands of individuals who joined the ‘great stirring’ ( motio valida ) have little or no history. 4To generalize about their expectations and experiences is inherently futile and possibly distorting. The picture of the First Crusade is far from clear, well delineated or fixed despite the fierce attention it has attracted over more than 900 years. Its story can only be tentative and incomplete, the stuff of legend indeed.