Read The Tragedy of the Templars Online
Authors: Michael Haag
The Tragedy of the Templars (13 page)
Nowhere in Fulcher's account does Urban say that the object of the expedition is Jerusalem; rather, as the pope explains, âyour brethren who live in the East are in urgent need of your help' â the cause is the defence of Christians in the East and their Church. And the cause is also the defence of the West, for âif you permit [the Turks] to continue thus for a while with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them'.
Then Urban made his great appeal. Let the West go to the rescue of the East. The nobility should stop fighting one another and instead fight a righteous war. For those who died in battle there would be remission of sins:
        Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels and end with victory this war which should have been begun long ago. Let those who for a long time have been robbers now become knights. Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians. Let those who have been serving as mercenaries for small pay now obtain the eternal reward. Let those who have been wearing themselves out in both body and soul now work for a double honour.
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Urban's speech at Clermont, as conveyed by Fulcher of Chartres, was entirely in line with the realities of Muslim oppression in the East, the advancing Turkish threat and the dangers posed to the Christian world in those parts of the Mediterranean and Europe that had not fallen victim to Muslim aggression or had recently been liberated from alien rule. If Urban mentioned Jerusalem, Fulcher does not say so; instead the pope speaks of rescuing the Christians of the East and their Church, which effectively meant joining with the Byzantines in recovering their lands â certainly Asia Minor, invaded just twenty-five years earlier, and perhaps also Syria and Palestine, occupied by the Turks at the same time.
Fulcher's is the earliest of the four accounts we have of what happened at Clermont. He is thought to have trained as a priest, probably at Chartres, and during the crusade he would serve as personal chaplain to Baldwin of Boulogne, who established a crusader state centred on the Armenian city of Edessa (present-day Urfa in Turkey) and later became the first Frankish king of Jerusalem. Fulcher was the only chronicler actually to take part in the crusade and he wrote about it immediately afterwards, in 1100â01, although, as he followed Baldwin to Edessa, he was not at the siege of Jerusalem, or at Antioch or Ma'arra, where his accounts are secondhand. But he was at Clermont, where he presents Urban as a pragmatic strategist with a global grasp of the situation besetting Byzantium and the West.
The other three chroniclers â Baldric of Dol, Robert the Monk and Guibert de Nogent, all of them Benedictine monks â give strikingly different accounts of Clermont from that of Fulcher of Chartres. Baldric of Dol wrote his account soon after the First Crusade, but he was not a participant, although he does give the impression that he was at Clermont. His version is a theological rewriting of Urban's speech; its references to the Old and New Testaments underline the pope's call for a holy war of liberation, with Jerusalem itself as the very image of heaven.
        Let us bewail the most monstrous devastation of the Holy Land! This land we have deservedly called holy in which there is not even a footstep that the body or spirit of the Saviour did not render glorious and blessed which embraced the holy presence of the mother of God, and the meetings of the apostles, and drank up the blood of the martyrs shed there. How blessed are the stones which crowned you Stephen, the first martyr! How happy, O John the Baptist, the waters of the Jordan which served you in baptising the Saviour! The children of Israel, who were led out of Egypt; they have driven out the Jebusites and other inhabitants and have themselves inhabited earthly Jerusalem, the image of celestial Jerusalem. You should shudder at raising a violent hand against Christians; it is less wicked to brandish your sword against Saracens.
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According to Baldric of Dol, the multitude listening to Urban that day were swept with emotions of overwhelming power, with many bursting into tears and others seized with convulsive trembling.
Robert the Monk was not on the First Crusade, and although he is the one chronicler explicitly to claim that he was at Clermont, that is questionable. Certainly he was slow to produce his account, completing it only in 1106, eleven years after Pope Urban's speech, which Robert presents in the most lurid terms. Although Urban certainly spoke of the persecution of Christians in the East, the atrocities of which Robert accuses the Turks are not recorded in other versions of the speech.
        They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. Others they bind to a post and pierce with arrows. Others they compel to extend their necks and then, attacking them with naked swords, attempt to cut through the neck with a single blow. What shall I say of the abominable rape of the women? To speak of it is worse than to be silent.
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In Robert the Monk's version, as Urban delivered these words and called for a great army to march against the Turks, cries of âDeus le volt!' â âGod wills it!' â filled the air.
Guibert de Nogent, who was neither at Clermont nor went on the crusade, finished his account in 1108. His tone is apocalyptic, and he has the pope playing to the popular medieval drama of the Antichrist and the Last Days:
        With the end of the world already near, it is first necessary, according to the prophecy, that the Christian sway be renewed in those regions either through you, or others, whom it shall please God to send before the coming of Antichrist, so that the head of all evil, who is to occupy there the throne of the kingdom, shall find some support of the faith to fight against him.
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But it is most unlikely that Urban would have seen the issue in apocalyptic terms, nor is it likely that he would have stooped to lurid rabble-rousing. In fact, the best indication of what Urban said that late November day in a field outside Clermont comes in the form of a sober letter of instruction written a month later, at Christmas 1095, by the pope himself to a gathering of knights in Flanders:
        Your brotherhood, we believe, has long since learned from many accounts that a barbaric fury has deplorably afflicted and laid waste the churches of God in the regions of the East. More than this, blasphemous to say, it has even grasped in intolerable servitude its churches and the Holy City of Christ, glorified by his passion and resurrection. Grieving with pious concern at this calamity, we visited the regions of France and devoted ourselves largely to urging the princes of the land and their subjects to free the churches of the East. We solemnly enjoined upon them at the council of Clermont such an undertaking, as a preparation for the remission of all their sins.
Here Urban repeats the information he has received of Seljuk destruction and abuse in the East, and this time he mentions Jerusalem as an instance, but the aim of the expedition remains the same, âto free the churches of the East'.
This assessment is confirmed by Peter Frankopan in
The First Crusade: The Call from the East
, where he writes:
        By the time of Urban's speech at Clermont, the Turks had demolished the provincial and military administration of Anatolia that had stood intact for centuries and captured some of the most important towns of early Christianity: places like Ephesus, home of St John the Evangelist, Nicaea, the location of the famous early church council, and Antioch, the original see of St Peter himself, were all lost to the Turks in the years before the Crusade. Little wonder, then, that the Pope pleaded for the salvation of the church in the East in his speech and letters in the mid-1090s. [. . .] The knights who set out in high expectation in 1096 were reacting to a developing crisis on the other side of the Mediterranean. Military collapse, civil war and attempted coups had brought the Byzantine Empire to the edge. It was to the west that Alexios I Komenneos was forced to turn, and his appeal to Pope Urban II became the catalyst for all that followed.
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The First Crusade
C
HRISTIANITY WAS FOUNDED
on a pacifist ideal, and strong voices within the Church continued to be raised against the use of violence in any circumstances. But the use of force against a deadly enemy and in the service of Christ had already been justified in the fifth century by no less a figure than St Augustine of Hippo, who in
The City of God
described the necessity of repelling the pagan barbarian invasion of Italy, writing that âit is the injustice of the opposing side that lays on the wise man the duty of waging wars'.
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Similarly Christians saw Urban's call to rescue the Christians of the East from Turkish violence and oppression as an entirely just war.
When Urban finished his speech at Clermont, Adhemar, the bishop of Le Puy, immediately knelt before the papal throne and begged permission to join the expedition. This apparently spontaneous gesture was probably prearranged, as Urban had stayed at Le Puy in August. Urban then commanded all those marching to the rescue of the East to obey Adhemar as his representative on the expedition and its spiritual leader. Urban also directed those who took the vow to sew cloth crosses on their shoulders as a symbol of their decision to follow Christ, who had said, âIf any man wishes to come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.'
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Taking the cross was Urban's innovation; never before had laymen adopted a distinctive emblem for their clothing, and the symbolism made a deep impression. By means of these crosses Urban broadcast the cause, for as one person sewed the cross on his clothes, so it was seen by others, and the idea caught fire. The effect was described in the
Gesta Francorum
, that is
The Deeds of the Franks
, written in 1100â01 by an unknown soldier in the service of Bohemond, one of the leaders of the crusade:
        And when this speech had already begun to be noised abroad, little by little, through all the regions and countries of Gaul, the Franks, upon hearing such reports, forthwith caused crosses to be sewed on their right shoulders, saying that they followed with one accord the footsteps of Christ, by which they had been redeemed from the hand of hell.
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But only much later did this piece of red cloth in the form of a cross,
crux
in Latin, give a name to the great venture to the East. The term âcrusade' is a late one; it came into use only in the thirteenth century, after the Holy Land was lost and the crusades were over. The people we now call crusaders were known by various names, such as knights of Christ, and they saw themselves as taking a pilgrimage, except that pilgrims were normally forbidden to carry arms. The word âpilgrim' originally meant a stranger or a traveller, and for Christians life itself was seen as a pilgrimage in an estranged world far from their homeland in heaven. This âtaking of the cross' eventually gave the name crusade to these journeys â
croisade
in French,
crociata
in Italian,
Kreuzzug
in German, and
cruzada
in Spanish and Portuguese. But although the word âcrusade' would not come into use until after the crusades were over, the cross when worn as a symbol had a powerful effect. âThe cross was the first army insignia that was common to a whole army and gave external expression to its unity; it was the first step in the direction of a uniform.'
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The first great secular lord to join the expedition was Count Raymond of Toulouse, who led the knights of Provence, and others soon joined. Robert, the duke of Normandy, who was the son of William the Conqueror, led the knights of northern France; Bohemond, prince of Taranto, led the Norman knights of southern Italy, among them his nephew Tancred; and Godfrey of Bouillon led the knights of Lorraine. Subject in theory to Adhemar, who represented the pope, these barons became the secular leaders of the campaign, and together with their followers, family and friends, they brought to the expedition many of the most enterprising, experienced and formidable fighting men of Europe.
The way was long, but not as long as it had been for the Turks on their migration from Central Asia to the Middle East. Not only did France and the rest of Europe lie closer to Palestine, but Europe shared a cultural and religious background with the inhabitants of the Middle East, the majority of whom were still Christians, and for centuries a steady stream of Western pilgrims had kept the relationship alive. The Turks were aliens; the crusaders were not.
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Although Pope Urban had asked his bishops to preach the crusade, the most effective preaching was done by humble evangelicals who inflamed the poor of France and Germany with their version of the pope's message. A populist wave of enthusiasm for going to the rescue of the East had been building independently, fed by reports from returning pilgrims and by itinerant preachers. In fact, part of Urban's thinking in rousing the Church to a crusade would have been the desire to channel popular energy along constructive lines. Outstanding among these populist preachers was Peter the Hermit. He went about barefoot, and his clothes were filthy, but he had the power to move men. As Guibert de Nogent, who knew him personally, wrote, âWhatever he said or did, it seemed like something half-divine.'
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