Armies of Heaven (5 page)

Within three years of Manzikert, at Rome the newly elected Pope Gregory VII began crafting a response to the Greek crisis, one that would establish precedents for Urban II's later call to crusade. In a series of letters written in 1074, Gregory outlined plans for an expedition to the East aimed at saving Constantinople. The pope himself would raise the armies and act as their leader and general. These Christians, Gregory explained, “have
been laid low by the pagans with unheard of destruction and slaughtered daily like cattle.” Elsewhere he wrote of Muslims killing Christians with a “pitiable savagery” and a “tyrannical violence” outside the walls of Constantinople. Gregory's armies would bring this reign of terror to an end, and after saving Byzantium, he all but boasted, his troops would march to Jerusalem and liberate the Holy Sepulcher. It was an audacious plan, its ambitions comparable to the dreams of Urban II in 1095 (and perhaps those of Peter the Hermit, too). If successful, the pope would transform the world: He would not only rescue Byzantium but also settle differences between Latin and Greek Christians and at the same time guide other sects—Syrian and Armenian Christians—back into the Catholic fold.
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Unknown to Gregory, his imperial rival Henry IV was toying with similar ideas. Or at least one his counselors, Bishop Benzo of Alba, was doing so. Under Benzo's plan, Henry would first conquer Rome. With the papacy brought to heel, he could then go to Constantinople, there to claim the Eastern Empire from the increasingly feeble Byzantine rulers. Finally, as ruler of the Eastern and Western worlds, he would march to Jerusalem, where, it seems, the Muslims would offer him no opposition. “An awestruck Babylon will come into Zion,
wishing to lick the dust of his feet
. Then shall be fulfilled what is written
: And his sepulcher will be made glorious!
O, Caesar, why do you wonder at these things?”
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None of these plans, in the 1070s and 1080s, would come to fruition. Reports of Byzantium's imminent downfall proved to be exaggerated. The Turks' expansion toward Constantinople slowed after the victory at Manzikert—they would not get there until 1453—and the Greeks got back to politics as usual, with backstabbings, palace coups, and confinement in monasteries of formerly prominent leaders.

Yet the Turks remained a persistent threat. They had successfully claimed much of Asia Minor, taking Nicea as one of their capitals in 1078. The Emperor Alexius Comnenus (1081–1118) enjoyed some initial military success against them, but he was unable to achieve anything like a secure victory. For this reason, in the late 1080s the emperor turned west for assistance. He first solicited help from Count Robert of Flanders, who visited Constantinople while returning from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem around 1089. Robert agreed to provide aid, and the following year he sent five hundred mercenaries to fight for Byzantium.

About five years later, Alexius sent a delegation to speak before Urban II, asking for help in organizing a military response to the Turks. The delegates made a formal plea before a church council held in Piacenza in 1095, and it was probably at that point that Urban began seriously to contemplate calling for a military expedition to the East.
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War with Germany, conflict in France, a rival pope, and Christians in the East under siege: Remarkably, the crusade could solve all of these problems. If the initial rallying cry were successful, it would unite behind Urban II a significant portion of Christian Europe. At the very least, the creation of such an army would represent a real propaganda coup against Henry IV and his servant Clement III. If the crusade succeeded and Jerusalem fell, then even the most skeptical observer would have to admit that God was on Urban's side. Clement III would lose his support. Henry IV's stature would diminish. And Philip I would have to start taking papal excommunications more seriously. Finally, a grateful Byzantium would owe its survival to Rome and would undoubtedly offer appropriate submission in matters political and spiritual. After less than half a century, the schism would come to an end. The advantages of the crusade, in retrospect, seem obvious.
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There was only one problem, and Urban II was educated enough to recognize it: The plan was insane. A military expedition from Europe would have to attract sufficient manpower, travel all the way to Jerusalem, consistently turn back armies along the way—armies that had already proved too powerful and skilled for the Greek Empire and its well-paid mercenaries—save Constantinople, and in the end take possession of Jerusalem, a city that had been under Muslim rule for over four hundred years. It was impossible. The most Urban could hope for was some sort of muted success. Western Christians at his behest might fight alongside the Greeks and create some sort of alliance that could eventually lead to the accomplishment of some of Rome's larger goals: a new spirit of détente with Constantinople and perhaps an eventual attack on Jerusalem. But from an immediate and practical standpoint, Urban was setting himself up for failure.

And things got off to a bad start. If the pope believed in signs—and he most likely did—the prospects for success would have looked bleak once the Council of Clermont, where he would proclaim the crusade,
had begun. For just before the opening ceremonies, Bishop Durand of Clermont, the host for the gathering of “107 bishops and an even greater number of abbots,” unexpectedly died. He had been healthy enough to welcome Urban II to his city, but then he passed away the day before the council began.

The news must have cast a pall over the gathering. One of the abbots in attendance, named Baudry—who would later write a history of the crusade—left Clermont thinking that the main thing people would remember about it was not Urban II's sermon but rather the sight of Durand's body, blanching before the eyes of all the assembled dignitaries. Baudry wrote two epitaphs for Durand, saying that the council served as a kind of triumph for the newly deceased bishop, a man who had created in his city a veritable golden age after a time of mud.
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Even so, ten days later, on November 27, 1095, with due solemnity and determination, in an open field near the church where Durand, the host, had been freshly laid to rest, Pope Urban II announced his plan to remake Christendom.

Unfortunately, we don't know what he said. No one kept a copy. A few years after the fact, several historians composed versions of the speech, but none of them made any particular claim to accuracy. One of them, a participant at the Council of Clermont, blandly observed, “The apostolic lord gave his sermon in these words—or in others like them.” Another writer, not an eyewitness, said his sermon captured the pope's intentions, not his language. That is inevitable, he further explained, since most of those in attendance forgot what the pope said. We have, then, only echoes of the first call to crusade. We can only speak about what Urban II likely said and not what he actually proposed.
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Setting aside the details, we can say that the sermon largely concerned Jerusalem. The very name “Jerusalem” inspired passion and poetic flights of fancy. Urban II understood the word's power and would have wanted to exploit it. All of the crusader chroniclers expressed that theme as well. Jerusalem was the center of the earth—“the navel of the world, a land fertile beyond all others, like another paradise of delights.” It was “a desirable
place, an incomparable place,” the city where Christ had suffered, died, and been resurrected, and a place where the ground had since drunk up the blood of martyrs. In a culture that placed extraordinary value on relics—including objects touched by saints and the actual bodies of saints—the entire city of Jerusalem was a holy artifact. It radiated spiritual energy. A traveler to Jerusalem could not take a step without touching a spot made sacred through contact with the Savior's body or His mother's or else their shadows. More than a relic, the earthly Jerusalem was “the image of the heavenly Jerusalem. This city is the form of that city for which we long.” Just as the bread and wine consecrated by a priest contained deeper heavenly realities, disguised by otherwise drab earthly forms, so did the physical city of Jerusalem connect to deeper, hidden truths.
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As an image of the heavenly city, Jerusalem was also a byword for peace. If the “r” changed to an “s,” the name would become “Jesusalem,” or “peaceful salvation.” And that name, counterintuitively, points to a crucial aspect of the crusade and of Urban II's message at Clermont: the need for peace. It was, by 1095, a long-standing plea and aspiration among churchmen. For a century they had been trying to impose on warriors a code of conduct, known variously as “the Peace” or “the Truce of God,” to compel them to limit their aggressive impulses. The unarmed—monks, clerics, and women—were to be kept safe from bloodshed at all times, and for four days out of the week, Thursday through Sunday, no one was to strike a blow against anyone at all.

The renewed proclamation of this code was the opening decree at Clermont. The goal was to create peace for its own sake, to be sure, but this peace also related to the crusade. Peace was, in fact, the precondition for a war in Jerusalem. For only peace at home would allow large armies to abandon their families and properties, leaving everything they valued unprotected for months and even years, all in the name of fighting abroad for the survival and expansion of Christendom but with no tangible benefit for themselves.
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The creation of peace did not come easily. Simply stated, knights wanted to fight—with one another, with peasants, with all and sundry. It was their calling, part of the job description. Quiet amity, even with a promise of salvation attached, could not compete with the pleasure of
war. Urban II realized as much. That's why the call to peace in 1095 came with a proviso: Knights could continue to fight and loot and plunder so long as they did so against a foreign, unbelieving enemy. In that case, not only would their violence be tolerated, as it had been from time to time in the past in so-called just wars, but it also would be positively laudable. In previous wars, to kill an adversary was, at best, a morally neutral act, an unfortunate necessity created by political circumstance. To kill a Muslim, by contrast, increased a warrior's store of virtue, giving him some security as he contemplated the fearsome stakes of Judgment Day. This novel (if not entirely unprecedented) proposal surely formed one of the key elements behind the crusade's popularity, its specific terms constituting the one authentic sentence about the crusade that survives from the Council of Clermont:
Whoever might set forth to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, can substitute that journey for all penance
.
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This is a fairly guarded promise and a deceptively complicated one as well. The process of applying it to crusade warriors would have required a small army of well-educated clerics and confessors. What is most striking about this crusade indulgence is what it is not. It is not, for example, a guarantee that anyone who fights for Jerusalem will have his sins forgiven. It is not even a promise of martyrdom—that anyone who dies while fighting for Jerusalem will receive an immediate welcome into heaven. It instead establishes a sort of procedure allowing knights, under the right circumstances, to exchange the performance of their job (making war) for the forgiveness of sins already confessed. That is, a military expedition to Jerusalem would function essentially like a common devotional rite: the penitential pilgrimage. Pilgrims, too, like crusaders, could confess their sins and then, in exchange for a journey to a holy site, receive an indulgence for those sins.

The addition of warfare into the mix made the crusade an inspired, galvanizing idea. Urban's audience loved it, bursting out with shouts of “God wills it! God wills it!” At such an apparently miraculous show of unity, the pope raised his eyes up to heaven as if to offer silent, humble thanks.
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The lure of Jerusalem and the chance to obtain forgiveness for sins were two of the key components behind the crusade's appeal. For many historians, they are sufficient by themselves. I am more skeptical. The indulgence, as just described, was deliberately cautious. If warriors found
it exciting and inspiring, that was only because they willfully misunderstood the indulgence's terms—they believed themselves eligible for more forgiveness than Urban II had in fact promised. The argument that the indulgence and pilgrimage alone explain the crusade's popularity also presumes that eleventh-century knights lived in continual terror of the afterlife, overcome with awe at the sacramental authority of the church. There is some truth to this caricature. But it remains a caricature.

Our best evidence that knights felt burdened by an unbearable weight of sin comes not from knights but from monks—that is, from men who had devoted their lives to the idea of expunging their own sins. It is inevitable that they would project similar ideals onto the warriors whom they saw setting out to perform God's work. Not every warrior, including those who had embraced the crusade, would have felt so timorous. The French could take as an example their own king, Philip. Fearless in the face of damnation, he preferred to live as an excommunicate condemned to hell rather than give up his bigamous marriage.

To make the idea of a penitential war compelling, to give this message teeth, Urban II would have needed to do more than frighten knights with stories of hellfire or to entice them with promises of heaven. He needed to sell the crusade as a heroic battle, a grand adventure comparable to the deeds being celebrated in the new epic poetry, or
chansons de geste
, of the eleventh century, as a great war against a worthy, fearsome adversary: Muslims, or as they were more commonly known in eleventh-century Europe, “Saracens.”
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