Armies of Heaven (7 page)

 

 

 

 

T
wo calls to crusade spread across Europe, one in the north and one in the south. The northern crusade was Peter the Hermit's, a violent, apocalyptic, somewhat acephalous movement rooted in an expectation of the end times and of an imminent battle with Antichrist, likely to occur in Jerusalem. In the south Urban II's crusade was a more tightly organized affair. It depended on the participation of the princes and the recruitment of men from their households and from among their immediate entourage of knights. Like Peter the Hermit's crusade, Urban II's emphasized the need to liberate Jerusalem, and whatever his exact words, the message tapped into similar prophetic emotions and expectations.

But Peter and the pope were not the only ones who gave shape to the crusade idea. Other preachers, pilgrims, prophets, zealots, and crackpots delivered sermons infused with their own particular apocalyptic and feral sensibilities. Urban II may have preached a sermon at Clermont that stressed the need to create peace and the opportunity to attain salvation, but these themes would not be the dominant ones of the crusade. The expedition would not happen in the name of a papal indulgence. It would be a campaign aimed at the transformation of the entire world, and perhaps of heaven and hell, too.

As for the pope, his recruitment campaign did not end at Clermont. He continued to preach, stopping at monasteries, pilgrimage sites, and cathedrals. A month after Clermont, in December 1095, he celebrated a memorable Christmas at Limoges. As at Clermont, a large crowd gathered to hear him preach. It filled the entire city such that if one looked down on it from above, the buildings would have appeared to be islands surrounded by seas of faces.

The masses had come to celebrate Christmas, to witness the dedication of the two recently rebuilt churches, and to experience the pageantry of the papal court. The congregants may also have heard rumors of the pope's plans for Jerusalem. At Limoges that day, they certainly heard him preach about the Holy Land in tones similar to the ones used at Clermont. “The special cause of his visit was this: that the church of Christ and the Christian people in the East were suffering greatly under the heavy persecution from the Saracen nation and its spreading wickedness.” Urban II declared that it was now the duty of the Frankish people to liberate Christians on the other side of the world, “to go to the East and drive that heinous people away from Christ's inheritance.” Like the Council of Clermont, all of the events were highly choreographed and intended to inspire. What we cannot say is whether the gathering at Limoges, or any of the subsequent ones, actually worked.
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Consider the best documented of these rallies: the pope's visit about six weeks later to Anjou, where in February 1096 he recruited Count Fulk for the expedition. Fulk was an obvious candidate. As a wealthy, influential, and cultured lord, credited with writing a short history of his county, he would have brought real clout to any military campaign. More to the point, his family had strong connections to the Holy Land. One of his predecessors, Count Fulk Nerra, had made three separate pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Closer to home, Fulk Nerra had dedicated the church of Beaulieu in honor of the Holy Sepulcher and was buried there in 1040.

The pope worked aggressively to recruit the new Count Fulk. As Fulk himself described the courtship, “Around the time of Lent, Pope Urban II came to Angers and admonished our people that they ought to go to
Jerusalem to fight against the gentiles, for they had occupied that city and all the lands right up to Constantinople.” The pope lavished great signs of favor on Fulk and his followers. To the count he offered a golden flower, “which I, in order to remember this event and because of the pope's love, have passed on as a sign of praise for me and my heirs.” It is possibly the earliest recorded instance of a papal practice common in the later Middle Ages—distributing golden roses of remarkable craftsmanship to deserving Christian princes. [Plate 2]

 

Urban II's preaching itinerary in 1095–1096 and the capitals of crusade leaders

Fulk liked the flower, but it left him unmoved. While some of his retainers took up the cross, the count preferred to stay at home and look after his own people, struggling with the consequences of a protracted famine.
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There is little evidence that Urban was any more successful as a recruiter anywhere else. After Clermont he drew crowds but did not necessarily win hearts. His biggest success remained the wealthy and respected Count Raymond of Saint-Gilles, whom he had convinced to take the cross before the Council of Clermont. Raymond's decision, in turn, depended less on papal razzle-dazzle and eloquence and more on back-room negotiations with the pope and Bishop Adhémar of le Puy. What these two churchmen promised Raymond in exchange for his service we cannot say, but he seems to have left home thinking that he would be the leader of the crusade and perhaps eventually the king of Jerusalem, too.

Most of the men and women who took the cross, however, never heard Urban II preach a word, for the very simple reason that they lived north of the Loire and hence outside the papal itinerary. So why did they bother going?

In the case of the princes, we can sometimes re-create their social circumstances enough to speculate as to the motives behind their decisions. But it is not so easy to say why the great mass of ordinary people decided to join the crusade. They left no writings and exist only as shadowy background players in the major historical narratives. By reconstructing the social world around them, however, we can begin to see (if not hear) the preachers and prophets who inspired them. Only a consideration of all these groups—princes, prophets, and ordinary people—can allow us to recognize the full range of beliefs and passions that together inspired Christians across Europe in 1096 to turn their gaze toward Jerusalem.

Although Europe in 1095 was on the verge of a sudden and unprecedented economic expansion, in the eleventh century conditions were fairly straitened. The Franks' homeland—to quote one crusade sermon—was too narrow, surrounded on all sides by either sea or mountain, overburdened with people, and barely able to produce enough food to feed the farmers who grew it. The Holy Land, on the other hand, was flowing with milk and honey, or at least it had been at the time of Moses and the Exodus. Most Christian preachers would have understood this promise of abundance allegorically, but anyone who had heard stories about the incredible wealth of Constantinople (and of the Islamic kingdoms beyond it) might have been inclined to read God's words to the Israelites literally. For these reasons, we cannot entirely dismiss greed or simple worldly ambition from the list of possible reasons for joining the crusade.
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The crusade leader whose motives have always seemed the most worldly was a giant—indeed, one of the tallest men in the world. His name was Mark, but at an early age his father, Robert Guiscard, or Robert “the Cunning,” had taken to calling him “Bohemond,” drawn apparently from a folktale about a giant. Robert Guiscard had come to Italy from Normandy as a simple mercenary, but by 1059 he had established himself as duke of Puglia and Calabria. For reasons of politics and marriage, Robert had named Bohemond's younger half-brother Roger Borsa as heir to his Italian lands, but Bohemond still seemed destined for great things. Robert Guiscard was engaged through the first half of the 1080s in a series of wars against Byzantium, causing the Greeks' western frontier to collapse at the same time that the Seljuk Turks were making inroads from the east. It was these Greek lands, if not the Greek empire itself, that Bohemond seemed fated to rule.

By the time of the crusade, however, fame and fortune had passed Bohemond by. Guiscard's Greek holdings were lost back to Constantinople shortly after his death in 1085. By 1096 Bohemond was merely a second-tier lord in southern Italy helping his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, lay siege to the city of Amalfi. At some point during the fight, however, probably around July 1, 1096, Bohemond heard rumor of an army of pilgrims marching to the Holy Land to fight Muslims. His curiosity piqued, Bohemond made further
inquiries. These pilgrims were, as reported, well armed. But each of them wore a cross on his right shoulder as a symbol of faith and of his higher calling, and they shouted as their war cry “God wills it! God wills it!”

The news ignited Bohemond's imagination. In Jerusalem he saw at last a goal worthy of his prodigious and frustrated ambitions. Perhaps it offered him the chance to make untold fortunes or else to establish a new principality outside of Italy, a country that had not been kind to him. Maybe, as Greek princess Anna Comnena suspected, Bohemond saw in the campaign an opportunity to renew his father's war against Byzantium and perhaps to place himself on the throne of Constantinople. Whatever the case, he called his armies together and announced his intention to take the cross. Not content to do so by himself, he tore off his own costly and oversized garment and had it cut into crosses for his men on the spot. The gesture proved spectacularly effective. Manically enthusiastic warriors surged forward, hoping to grab a “cross of Bohemond” for themselves, and then by the hundreds they abandoned Amalfi and the surer money of Roger of Sicily for the uncertain prospects of Syria, Palestine, and Jerusalem.
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Bohemond's case was probably unique. He had nothing to lose by going to Jerusalem. The princes and wealthy knights who took the cross, by contrast, were abandoning their homes and their estates, and by doing so, they were putting at risk their wealth, their property, the safety of their families—in short, everything upon which their social status depended. Anyone who decided to travel to Jerusalem because of practical considerations almost certainly did so to escape troubles at home rather than to find tangible rewards in the Holy Land.

Robert, Duke of Normandy, is a case in point. By virtue of office and inheritance, he controlled one of the wealthiest, best-governed principalities in Europe. As the son of William the Conqueror, he also had acquired significant military experience. (Robert is depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry sitting beside his father and preparing to draw his sword to fight at the Battle of Hastings.) Yet despite this impressive pedigree, Robert's hold on the ducal throne in the 1090s was tenuous. Ever since the death of his celebrated father in 1087, he had been at war with his younger brother, King William II of England. His youngest brother, Henry, rootless but ruthless and ambitious, represented another serious threat to Robert's
authority. By 1096, after nearly a decade of interminable conflict, Robert's barons were beginning to desert him for his rivals.

 

In the midst of this ongoing crisis, he heard rumors of the march on Jerusalem, relayed by emissaries of Pope Urban II. At least one of them, Abbot Jarento of the monastery of Saint-Bénigne in Dijon, offered to broker a peace between the duke and his brother William, without which Robert never would have dared leave his home. Nor could he have afforded to: Under the terms of the treaty, Robert ceded to William temporary control of the duchy in exchange for 10,000 marks of silver. It was still a risky
maneuver for Robert. There was no guarantee William would ever give up Normandy on his brother's return—if Robert did return. The thought must have occurred to Robert. He had only to remember that his grandfather, also named Robert, had abandoned Normandy at a time of similar upheaval to travel to Jerusalem and then died on the way back. He was originally buried in Nicea, though his remains had since been transferred to southern Italy. The crusade did at least offer Robert an immediate monetary payoff and the chance to escape a nearly impossible situation at home. If he did make it back alive, the prestige of the journey might add just enough luster to his name so that he could regain his duchy and even strengthen his hold against his calculating and formidable brothers.
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