The Triumph of Christianity (25 page)

When Pope Urban II read this letter he was determined that it be answered in deeds. He arranged for a great gathering of clergy and laity in the French city of Clermont on November 27, 1095. Standing on a podium in the middle of a field, and surrounded by an immense crowd that included poor peasants as well as nobility and clergy, the pope gave one of the most effective speeches of all time. Blessed with an expressive and unusually powerful voice, he could be heard and understood at a great distance. Subsequently, copies of the speech (written and spoken in French) were circulated all across Europe.
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The pope began by graphically detailing the torture, rape, and murder of Christian pilgrims and the defilement of churches and holy places:

Many of God’s churches have been violated.... They have ruined the altars with filth and defilement. They have circumcised Christians and smeared the blood on the altars or poured it into baptismal fonts. It amused them to kill Christians by opening up their bellies and drawing out the end of their intestines, which they then tied to a stake. Then they flogged their victims and made them walk around and around the stake until their intestines had spilled out and they fell dead on the ground.... What shall I say about the abominable rape of women? On this subject it may be worse to speak than to remain silent.

At this point Pope Urban raised a second issue to which he already had devoted years of effort: the chronic warfare of medieval times. The pope had been attempting to achieve a “Truce of God” among the feudal nobility, many of whom seemed inclined to make war, even on their friends, just for the sake of a good fight. After all, it was what they trained to do every day since early childhood. Here was their chance! “Christian warriors, who continually and vainly seek pretexts for war, rejoice, for you have today found a true pretext.... If you are conquered, you will have the glory of dying in the very same place as Jesus Christ, and God will never forget that he found you in the holy battalions.... Soldiers of Hell, become soldiers of the living God!”

Now, shouts of “
Dieu li volt!
” (God wills it!) began to spread through the crowd and men began to cut up cloaks and other pieces of cloth to make crosses and to sew them on their shoulders and chests. Everyone agreed that next spring they would march to Jerusalem. And they did.

It has often been suggested that we should not trust the pope or the emperor on what was taking place in the Holy Land. Perhaps they were misinformed. Perhaps they were lying to arouse a military venture for reasons of their own. James Carroll has even suggested that the pope cynically used the Muslims as threatening outsiders in order to unite the European princes “against a common enemy.”
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But as Runciman pointed out, Europeans, especially the nobility, had trustworthy independent information on the brutalization of the Christian pilgrims—from their own relatives and friends who had managed to survive. Even had the pope and emperor been cynical propagandists, that would not alter the motivation of the crusaders, for that depended entirely on what the knights believed
.

Economic Aspects of the Crusades

H
AD THERE BEEN A
financial squeeze on the knightly class, about the last thing they would have done was march off on a Crusade to the Holy Land. As Peter Edbury explained, “Crusading was expensive, and the costs were borne by the crusaders themselves, their families, their lords and, increasingly from the end of the twelfth century, by taxes levied on the Church in the West.”
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Even the many crusader castles and the garrisons by which Christians held portions of the Holy Land for two centuries were not built or sustained by local exactions, but by funds sent from Europe. Indeed, the great wealth of the knightly crusading orders was not loot, but came from donations and legacies in Europe.
²⁸
All told, “large quantities of Western silver flowed into the crusader states.”
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The Crusades were possible only because this was not a period of economic decline, but one of
growth,
“which put more resources and money into the hands of the ruling elites of Western Europe.”
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Moreover it was not “surplus” sons who went. Because the “cost of crusading was truly enormous”
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only the heads of upper-class households could raise the money to go: it was kings, princes, counts, dukes, barons, and earls who enrolled, led, and paid the expenses for companies of knights and infantry.
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Even so, they raised the needed funds at a very great sacrifice. Many sold all or substantial amounts of their holdings, borrowed all they could from relatives, and impoverished themselves and their families in order to participate.
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As for making up their losses by looting and colonizing in the Holy Land, most of them had no such illusions—indeed, most of them had no plans to remain in the East once the fighting was done, and all but a small garrison did return home.

Why They Went

T
HE KNIGHTS OF
E
UROPE
sewed crosses on their breasts and marched East for two primary reasons, one of them generic, the other specific to crusading. The generic reason was their perceived need for penance. The specific reason was to liberate the Holy Land.

Just as it has today, the medieval church had many profound reservations about violence, and especially about killing. This created serious concerns among the knights and their confessors because war was chronic among the medieval nobility, and any knight who survived for very long was apt to have killed someone. Even when victims were evil men without any redeeming worth, their deaths were held to constitute sins,
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and in most instances the killer enjoyed no obvious moral superiority over the victim—sometimes quite the reverse. Consequently, knights were chronically in need of penance and their confessors imposed all manner of acts of atonement. Confessors sometimes required a pilgrimage to a famous shrine, and for particularly hideous sins, a journey all the way to the Holy Land.

As already noted, pilgrimages to Jerusalem were remarkably common for several centuries before the First Crusade. Thousands went every year, often in large groups. For example, in 1026 a group of seven hundred persons from Normandy made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and along the way they were joined by many other groups of Western pilgrims.
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A major reason pilgrimages were so common was because the knights of Europe were both very violent and very religious. Thus, when Count Thierry of Trier murdered his archbishop in 1059, his confessor demanded that he undertake a pilgrimage, and he went.
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Perhaps the most notorious pilgrim was Fulk III, Count of Anjou (972–1040), who was required to make four pilgrimages to the Holy Land, the first as penance for having his wife burned to death in her wedding dress, allegedly for having had sex with a goatherd. All things considered, four pilgrimages may have been far too few, given that Fulk was a “plunderer, murderer, robber, and swearer of false oaths, a truly terrifying character of fiendish cruelty.... Whenever he had the slightest difference with a neighbor he rushed upon his lands, ravaging, pillaging, raping and killing; nothing could stop him.”
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Nevertheless, when confronted by his confessor Fulk “responded with extravagant expressions of devotion.”
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Thus the call to crusade was not a call to do something novel—no doubt many knights had long been considering a pilgrimage. Indeed, the pope himself had assured them that crusading would wash away all their sins and, at the same time, they could rescue the Holy Land, including Christ’s tomb, from further damage and sacrilege at the hands of the enemies of God. It was an altogether noble and holy mission, and the knights treated it as such. The Burgundian Stephen I of Neublans put it this way: “Considering how many are my sins and the love, clemency and mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, because when he was rich he became poor for our sake, I have determined to repay him in some measure for everything he has given me freely, although I am unworthy. And so I have decided to go to Jerusalem, where God was seen as man and spoke with men and to adore the place where his feet trod.”
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Had the crusaders not been motivated by religion, but by land and loot, the knights of Europe would have responded earlier, in 1063, when Pope Alexander II proposed a crusade to drive the infidel Muslims out of Spain. Unlike the Holy Land, Moorish Spain was extremely wealthy, possessed an abundance of fertile lands, and was close at hand. But hardly anyone responded to the pope’s summons. Yet only about thirty years later, thousands of crusaders set out for the dry, impoverished wastes of faraway Palestine. What was different? Spain was not the Holy Land! Christ had not walked the streets of Toledo, nor was he crucified in Seville.

So finally, on June 7, 1099, and against all odds, the crusaders arrived at Jerusalem. Of the original forces numbering perhaps a hundred and thirty thousand, disease, privation, misadventure, desertion, and fighting had so reduced their ranks that the crusaders now numbered only about fifteen thousand, although Muslim historians placed their numbers at three hundred thousand.
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Those who reached Jerusalem were starving—having long since eaten their horses. Nevertheless, following a brief siege, on July 15, 1099, the badly outnumbered crusaders burst into the city. Thus, after about 460 years of Muslim rule, Jerusalem was again in Christian hands, although it was nearly destroyed and depopulated in the process.

The Crusader Kingdoms

W
ITH
J
ERUSALEM IN THEIR
possession, and having defeated a large Egyptian army sent to turn them out, the crusaders had to decide what to do to preserve their victory. Their solution was to create four kingdoms—independent states along the Mediterranean Coast (see map 13.1). These were the County of Edessa, named for its major city; the Princedom of Antioch, which surrounded the city of Antioch in what is now southern Turkey; the County of Tripoli, just south of the Princedom and named for the Lebanese coastal city of that name; and the Kingdom of Jerusalem, an enclave on the coast of Palestine roughly equivalent to modern Israel.
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Unlike the other three kingdoms, Edessa was landlocked. When the main body of crusaders marched south in 1098 to attack Antioch, Baldwin of Boulogne led a smaller force east to Edessa and managed to convince Thoros, the ruler of the city (who was a Greek Orthodox Christian), to adopt him as his son and heir! When Thoros was assassinated by angry subjects, Baldwin took over. Edessa was the first crusader state (founded in 1098) and the first to be retaken by Islam (1149).

Map 13.1

Crusaders captured the city of Antioch in 1098 after a long siege during which the knights ran so short of supplies that they ate many of their horses. Almost immediately after the crusaders had taken the city, a new Muslim army appeared and laid siege to the knights. Against staggering odds, Bohemond of Taranto led his troops out from the city and somehow defeated the Muslims—subsequent accounts claim that an army of saints had miraculously appeared to help the knights. Following this victory, Bohemond named himself prince. The area remained an independent state until 1119 when it was joined to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. In 1268 Antioch fell to an army led by Baybars, Sultan of Egypt, whose troops killed every Christian they could find (see below).

The County of Tripoli was the last of the four crusader states to be established—in 1102. It came into being when Count Raymond IV of Toulouse, one of the leaders of the First Crusade, laid siege to the port city of Tripoli. When Raymond died suddenly in 1105, he left his infant son as heir so when the knights finally took the city the County became a vassal state of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It was captured by Mameluke forces in 1289.

By far the most important and powerful of the crusader states was the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which was also known at Outremer, the French word for “overseas” (
outre-mer
). Initially that term applied to all the crusader states, but it came to refer primarily to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. Like the other states, Outremer was never a European colony, it being fully independent. Godfrey of Bouillon, who led the capture of Jerusalem, was installed as the first ruler, with the title Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. Godfrey was chosen not only for his integrity, but also for his military talent, which was just as well since no sooner was he in command than he was confronted by a very large Egyptian army intent on recapturing Jerusalem. Rather than shelter his outnumbered forces behind the walls of the city, Godfrey marched them out for a night attack that found the Egyptians sleeping and defeated them with a great loss of life.