God's War: A New History of the Crusades (65 page)

Recruitment for the Third Crusade was distinguished by the leadership of monarchs and their ability to secure their nobilities behind the enterprise to a degree surpassing even the Second Crusade. Secular governmental power in each kingdom – royal, comital and urban – reinforced or subsumed the ecclesiastical mechanisms for recruitment, most notably in the Angevin lands, especially in England. There, from an early stage, the relatively centralized royal administration took over all aspects of crusade planning and operation. The commitment of monarchs, while facilitating recruitment and material provision, extended the notion and traditions of good lordship to the enterprise, a visible expression of the moral dimension of rule that lay at the heart of consensual authority.
Lacking coercive force, twelfth-century kings relied on their subjects’ acceptance of the mutual benefits of their rule. Leadership of such an unequivocally praiseworthy and virtuous cause as the crusade enormously enhanced the scope for kings to display the transcendent aspects of their position and, thereby, demand the respect and support of their subjects. Practical limits remained. Frederick Barbarossa could use the crusade to demonstrate his pre-eminence in German politics and impose a national peace on political factions, represented by the negotiated exile of the dissident Henry the Lion. However, in return he was expected to subsidize his own crusade himself. Similarly, Philip II of France could command the almost universal support of the church and the regional counts of France in 1188 for the crusade as such, but he could not impose the Saladin Tithe. Suspicion of novel fiscal exactions proved stronger than political trust. An essential ingredient in establishing moral leadership was the public, personal obligation created by taking the cross. That was why the ceremonies at Gisors and Mainz were so important. They bound the royal
crucesignati
to the crusade in a contract with church and people that only action could fulfil or papal absolution untie. Henry II of England well understood the implications of such a commitment, which was one reason he had avoided it for twenty-five years.

The tangible result of royal participation was early demonstrated in Sicily. To William II’s rapid action in sending a fleet to the Holy Land in 1188 some attributed the survival of the remaining Christian outposts. Yet despite his display of formal grief and mourning on hearing of the catastrophe of Hattin, William did not take the cross. Although he may have discussed a joint enterprise with his brother-in-law Henry II, William seemed not to have organized his nobility for the crusade. By his death, in November 1189, no firm undertakings had been reached by the king or his nobles. In the ensuing power struggle, his eventual successor, his dwarfish illegitimate cousin Tancred of Lecce, recalled the Sicilian fleet from the Levant. The only residual Sicilian involvement in the crusade lay in William’s lavish, if perhaps fanciful, bequest to Henry II of grain, wine, money, gold plate and a hundred galleys equipped for two years. This may have represented what William imagined he would contribute to the crusade. In the event his legacy provided a source of conflict and an opportunity for extortion for Richard I when he arrived in Sicily in the autumn of 1190.
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The contrast between the Sicilian experience and that of Henry II’s Angevin lands was sharp.
Even if dissipated in the succession war of 1188–9, by the time of his own death in July 1189, Henry’s preparations had raised men and money. Perhaps more importantly, they had committed large sections of the nobility on both sides of the English Channel to the crusade through the collective action of taking the cross. His successor Richard was one of them. Continued Angevin royal and noble interest assured sustained dedication to the crusade. Without the king’s lead, the movement would have lost cohesion and drive, as happened in Sicily.

The depth of Angevin engagement was impressive.
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The inner circle of recruits was drawn from the political and administrative elite; representatives of the higher clergy, led by Archbishop Baldwin and Justiciar Glanvill’s nephew, Hubert Walter bishop of Salisbury; powerful nobles such as the earls of Leicester and Ferrers, Nigel of Mowbray and Richard of Clare; former sheriffs, such as Roger Glanvill; ministers, such as Roger’s brother, the Justiciar Ranulf, whose sacking in 1189 allowed him to fulfil his vow; royal friends, agents, household officials and government bureaucrats, a number of whom, including Gerald of Wales and the future Justiciar Geoffrey FitzPeter, had their vows absolved unfulfilled. Compared with France or Germany the list of great magnates is short, a reflection of the political structure of the Angevin regime but also a matter of chance; a number of English earldoms had lapsed; others were held by minors. The core of the Angevin recruitment centred on the king’s court. Beyond the immediate circle of royal patronage or acquaintance, the characteristic
crucesignati
were local aristocrats, knights and gentry, many with close links to the higher nobility. Fifty-nine
crucesignati
named in the government financial records as exempt from a levy to pay for defence against the Welsh were men of substance from across the whole kingdom, from Sussex to Yorkshire, Wiltshire to Suffolk. For convenience, such knights tended to travel in groups based on tenurial, political, geographic or family association. The collective enthusiasm of taking the cross could persist in action. According to one Yorkshire observer, the massacres of Jews during Lent 1190 at King’s Lynn, Stamford and York were led by bands of young crusaders acting together. No less than the followers of the great, local networks survived from recruitment to campaign. At the siege of Acre in 1191, the royal judge and chronicler Roger, the parson of Howden near the Humber in the East Riding of Yorkshire, found a group of fellow countrymen from the region of his parish: John of Hessle, Richard and
Berengar of Legsby, the parson of Croxby, Robert the Huntsman of Pontefract.

Urban as well as rural associations lent structure to recruitment in England as in the rest of western Europe. Ships from London formed a distinct part of the large north European fleet that assembled at Dartmouth in May 1189, taking Silves in Portugal from the Moors that September. The next year at least one ship carrying eighty Londoners followed. These were led by figures from the city’s merchant oligarchy, such as Geoffrey the Goldsmith and William FitzOsbert, nicknamed Longbeard, as well as members of the chapter and clergy of St Paul’s cathedral. A further source of unity lay in the adoption by these citizens of Thomas Becket, a fellow Londoner, as their patron saint, an illustration of how crusading fed off wider streams of contemporary spirituality. The leading role of beneficed secular clergy among the Londoners was mirrored elsewhere. According to some sources, even monks caught crusade fever, in contradiction of their vows: ‘a great number went from the cloister to camp, threw off their cowls, donned mail shirts, and became knights of Christ in a new sense, replacing alms with arms’.
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While clerics, beyond their important morale-building religious duties, could expect to act as scribes, accountants, secretaries even quartermasters, the bulk of recruitment was aimed at those, like the 3,000 Welsh recruits described by Gerald of Wales, ‘highly skilled in the use of the spear and the arrow, most experienced in military matters and only too keen to attack the enemies of our faith at the first opportunity’.
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The appeal was not restricted to warriors; many
crucesignati
were artisans: blacksmiths, skinners, tanners, cobblers, tailors, millers, butchers, vintners, potters and bakers, who could, in theory at least, usefully ply their trades on crusade. They were probably joined by genuine non-combatants, pilgrims, but their numbers may not have been overwhelming, especially given the emphasis on professional troops in an attempt to avoid the mistakes of the Second Crusade, where non-combatants had allegedly compromised military efficiency. A final group of recruits were women. The ordinances for the crusade restricted female recruitment to old washerwomen, who doubled as delousers for the troops, ‘as good as apes for picking fleas’.
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However, these provisions were ignored. Women fought at Acre, to the admiration of western
sources and the fascinated horror of Arabic ones. In a list of forty-seven Cornish recruits there were at least four
crucesignatae
.
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Although England is possibly the best-documented region of Europe for the preparations for the Third Crusade, the pattern revealed there is matched elsewhere, for example in Normandy. If royal authority and money were less pervasive in Capetian France or Hohenstaufen Germany, the role played by the monarchs was just as important. In France, Philip II taking the cross at Gisors in January 1188 provided the cue for almost all the higher nobility of his kingdom to follow suit, their decisions eased as both Philip’s Angevin rivals, Henry II and Richard of Poitou, later Richard I, had also signed up. In addition to the counts of Flanders, Blois, Perche, Champagne, Dreux, Clermont, Beaumont, Soissons, Bar and Nevers, who took the cross with the king, other
crucesignati
included the duke of Burgundy and the count of Sancerre. The only significant magnate not to take the cross was Count Raymond V of Toulouse. (Despite his close family ties with the county of Tripoli, Raymond, whose father had died suddenly and some said suspiciously in Palestine during the Second Crusade, was old – dying in 1194 after ruling for forty-six years – and beset by rivalries with Richard of Poitou and the problem of heresy in his dominions.) Lords such as the counts of Flanders, Burgundy and Champagne were effectively autonomous princes. At Gisors this was recognized when it was agreed that followers of Philip II should wear red crosses; those of Henry II, white; and those of the count of Flanders, green.
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Recruitment followed regional power. All across France from Hainault to Poitou, Normandy to the Dauphiné lords and knights took the cross and began making provisions for departure. Although narrative sources emphasize the role of Richard I and his Anglo-French followers, charter evidence indicates that the contribution from the rest of France may have outstripped it. Whole regions lost their lords. Across the frontier in Limburg, the absence of Duke Henry III and his two sons removed any check to civil unrest and local violence.
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The same story was told in the German lands stretching from Flanders to Austria, the Baltic to the Alps. The lead was given by Frederick Barbarossa: ‘by his own example he inspired all the young men to fight for Christ’.
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The urgency and thoroughness of his preparations stimulated recruitment, which, as in 1146–7, constituted the active
dimension of the establishment of a general peace under which disputes were settled or postponed, as crusade privileges not only advantaged the
crucesignati
but obliged non-crusaders to respect their rights and property. By May 1189, when the great German army mustered at Regensburg on the Danube, Frederick and his second son, Frederick duke of Swabia, had been joined by seven bishops, an abbot, the duke of Dalmatia, the count of Holland and over twenty counts and margraves from all corners of the
Reich
, from the Low Countries, to Swabia, from Bavaria to Saxony. At much the same time, other German
crucesignati
left by sea, including the counts of Guelders and Altenburg and the landgrave of Thuringia, who was accompanied by a large military household. In the land army, with the magnates marched ‘the dreaded and orderly array of
ministeriales
and chosen knights’.
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Ministeriales
were a particularly German social group, technically unfree but materially and culturally indistinguishable from free knights. The first to take the cross in Alsace from the local bishop of Strassburg had been ‘a certain powerful and active knight called Siegfried, one of count Albert of Dagsburg’s
ministeriales
’.
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Such bonds lent further unity to the army. As in England, urban crusaders played a prominent role. Citizens from Metz accompanied the land army. Eleven ships from Bremen and four from Cologne joined the expeditionary fleets in 1189, which attracted support from Denmark and Frisia as well as the Rhineland, the Low Countries and England. The Cologne flotilla apparently carried as many as 1,500 men and supplies for three years.
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These patterns of recruitment across Europe are striking for two reasons; their scale and their cause. The emotions of those who took the cross mixed devotion, anger, adventure, peer-group pressure, escapism, and the insistence of social superiors and employers. The success in mobilizing such huge armies from such a large area testifies to the coherence of the appeal as much as to the efficiency of organization. That organization depended heavily on the leaders, especially the kings. Subsequent disappointments and failures should not colour perceptions of the impulses that raised these massive armies in the first place. One overwhelming emotion for any
crucesignatus
, notable for the prominence it held in crusade sermons, was fear; fear of pain, hardship, alien surroundings, physical torment and likely death. Leopold V duke of Austria sailed from Venice in the autumn of 1190. After wintering in Zara in the Adriatic, he arrived at Acre the following spring. His personal
following was modest. A contemporary German chronicler of the Third Crusade named ten chief companions. Of these, nine died, the tenth only surviving after illness.
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The preachers and propagandists knew what they were talking about. To become a
crucesignatus
was to invite the torments of the cross.