Crusading attracted men and women of all classes. The involvement of the masses in the First Crusade was attributed by a contemporary to disorder, to an epidemic of ergotism which was sweeping western Europe, and to economic distress. He described what appeared to be a passage of migration, with many of the poor travelling ‘weighed down by wives, children and all their domestic goods’. Pope Urban had not wanted unsuitable men and women of this sort to join a military expedition—he had, he wrote in 1097, ‘been stimulating the minds of knights’—but precisely because he had preached the crusade as a pilgrimage, a devotional activity open to all, he and his successors found it hard to prevent the unsuitable going, even after Innocent III had found a solution in crusade redemptions. In the end, the cost of taking part proved to be more effective than official discouragement. There seem to have been substantial numbers of the poor in the armies which marched overland to the East, but once expeditions started going by sea the poor were less able to meet the expenses of the passage. Although there were always some, creating problems for the leaders as we have seen, their numbers declined, while their self-generated crusades, in which, perhaps, they responded to their exclusion from expeditions which were anyway becoming more professional—the Children’s Crusade of 1212, the Popular Crusade of 1309, and the Shepherds’ Crusades of 1251 and 1320—never succeeded in breaking out of western Europe.
The masses were an important, if irregular, element and it is disappointing that hardly any evidence about the way they thought or felt survives. When we come to the more substantial crusaders, the merchants, craftsmen, and farmers, shafts of light break through at times. For instance, in December 1219 Barzella Merxadrus, a citizen of Bologna, drew up a will when he was very ill in the camp at Damietta in Egypt. He made his wife Guiletta his heir to any property or spoil that might have been apportioned to him and he tried to make sure that she could keep her place in the tent they had shared with other crusaders. But such insights are rare, and good evidence is to be found only for the feelings and perceptions of the landowning nobles and knights. The more prosperous among them were prominent enough to be mentioned frequently in the narrative accounts. They had social positions to maintain and therefore the costs of households on crusade to meet, and, since they had property to dispose of for cash, they generated charters which often contain priceless information on their states of mind.
Crusaders ‘took the cross’, which involved making a vow of a particular kind, often at emotional public gatherings under the influence of preachers whose business it was to whip their audiences up into a frenzy. It has been suggested that by the third quarter of the twelfth century the taking of the cross and the rite granting the pilgrimage symbols of purse and staff were being merged into a single ceremony. This may be so, but originally the rituals were distinct. King Louis VII of France went through two of them, separated in time and space, when he was preparing for the Second Crusade. He made his vow to crusade on 31 March 1146 at Vezelay, where a large gathering had assembled. Louis and the greater nobles took the cross at a semi-private ceremony, at which the king was given a cross sent by the pope. He joined the preacher, St Bernard of Clairvaux, for the public meeting and stood on a platform with him wearing his cross, obviously to encourage the audience. Such was the enthusiasm with which Bernard’s sermon was greeted that the packet of cloth crosses which had been prepared for distribution was used up and Bernard had to tear his monastic habit into strips to provide more. Then, over a year later on 11 June 1147 at St Denis, Louis received from the hands of the pope the symbols of pilgrimage, the purse and the oriflamme, the battle-standard of the French crown, given presumably in place of the staff.
These procedures were paralleled everywhere in the early decades of crusading. After nobles and knights had taken the cross, they would make private arrangements to receive the purse and staff, and perhaps also the blessing which appears in the later rites, from a local bishop, abbot, or prior. This second ceremony was sometimes associated with a financial arrangement with, or a donation for, the religious community concerned. For instance, on 22 May 1096 in the chapter house of Lerins, Fulk Doon of Chateaurenard donated quite a lot of property to the abbey. He was handed a napkin (in place of the pilgrim’s purse) and a staff by the abbot, who enjoined the crusade on him as a penance and also gave him a mule. Ceremonies of this type may have continued long after the two rites had been joined together: in 1248 John of Joinville received the symbols of pilgrimage, and apparently them alone, from the abbot of Cheminon.
Introducing the cross as a visible symbol of the vow of commitment, Urban associated the taking and wearing of it in a highly-charged way with Christ’s precepts, ‘Every one that hath left house or brethren or sisters or father or mother or wife or children or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold and shall possess life everlasting’ (Matthew 19: 29) and ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me’ (Matthew 16: 24 or Luke 14: 27). From Syria the crusade leaders wrote to him as ‘You who by your sermons made us all leave our lands and whatever was in them and ordered us to follow Christ by taking up our crosses’.
Some men responded hysterically, branding crosses on their bodies, but the sight of the ordinary cloth crosses must have been striking enough. An early twelfth-century sculpture from the priory of Belval in Lorraine shows a crusader wearing on his chest a cross made from 5 cm wide strips of cloth; the cross looks as though it measured 15 by 15 cm. Contingents soon came to distinguish themselves by the style or colour of the crosses they wore—this practice seems to have been introduced in the late 1140s for the Wendish crusaders, who wore a badge of a cross superimposed on a ball—and, as we have already seen, at a planning meeting for the Third Crusade it was decided that the French participants would wear red crosses, the English white ones, and the Flemish green.
Crusaders were expected to wear their crosses on their clothing at all times until they came home with their vows fulfilled: in 1123 the bishops at the First Lateran Council referred to those ‘who had taken their crosses off’ without departing. It should, therefore, have been possible to tell who was a crusader and it was important to do so. The leaders of the First Crusade were convinced that there was a reservoir of additional manpower in the West which could be deployed if only the Church would force laggards to fulfil their vows. Demands of this sort were made throughout the history of the crusading movement and attempts were periodically made to establish just how large the reservoir of ‘false crusaders’ was. But it was a lot easier to rail against those who had had second thoughts than to make them do what they had promised.
Another reason why it was important to know who had taken the cross was that crusaders enjoyed special rights. At first there was confusion, even among the higher clergy, about at least one of the privileges granted them by the Council of Clermont, the commitment by the Church to protect their families and properties while they were away. Hugh II of Le Puiset, who had taken the cross for the crusade of 1107, felt threatened by a castle thrown up on a farm in his viscounty by Count Rotrou of Mortagne, who had, incidentally, been on the First Crusade. Hugh’s bishop, Ivo of Chartres, although one of the greatest canonists of the age, passed the matter over to a secular court. Violence ensued and Hugh appealed to the pope who reallocated the case. Ivo pointed out that churchmen could not agree what to do, because ‘this law of the Church protecting the goods of knights going to Jerusalem was new. They did not know whether the protection applied only to the crusaders’ possessions, or also to their fortifications.’
By the thirteenth century, however, the privileges had become clearly defined, giving crusaders an advantage in law, because so many of them had legal implications. Besides the indulgence, about which more below, and protection, they included a delay in the performance of feudal service or in judicial proceedings until return, or alternatively a speedy settlement of a court case before departure; a moratorium on the repayment of debt or the payment of interest; exemption from tolls and taxes; freedom for a cleric to enjoy a benefice in absentia and for a knight to sell or pledge fiefs or inalienable property to raise money; release from excommunication; licence to have dealings with excommunicates and freedom from the consequences of interdict; the ability to use the crusade vow as a substitute for another not yet fulfilled; and the right to have a personal confessor with wide powers of absolution.
Crusaders obviously had a high profile. No one has yet made a study of the effects on their social standing of engaging in such a prestigious activity, but there can be little doubt that the title Jerosolimitanus adopted by them gained them honour in their neighbourhoods and even internationally. When Bohemond of Taranto toured France in 1106, in a triumph which culminated in his marriage to the king of France’s daughter in Chartres cathedral, many French nobles wanted him to be godfather to their children. He lectured about his adventures to large audiences and his experiences as a prisoner of the Muslims became incorporated in the Miracula of St Leonard, whose shrine he ostentatiously visited. Two or three generations after the First Crusade families were still proud of ancestors who had fought in it.
A much less welcome consequence of taking the cross was often obloquy. No group of people in the central Middle Ages brought down on their heads such venomous criticism as did crusaders. The reason was that failure in God’s own war fought at his bidding could not possibly be attributed to him, but only, as it had been in the Old Testament, to the unworthiness of the instruments at his disposal, in this case the soldiers of Christ.
Because it was ideologically necessary to blame them for every failure, crusaders were subjected to torrents of abuse from reactions at home to the disasters of 1101 onwards.
But whether a crusade was a success or a failure, every crusader risked death, injury, or financial ruin, and apprehension shrouded the charters issued before departure like a cloud. In 1096 Stephen of Blois gave a wood to the abbey of Marmoutier ‘so that God, at the intercession of St Martin and his monks, might pardon me for whatever I have done wrong and lead me on the journey out of my homeland and bring me back healthy and safe, and watch over my wife Adela and our children’. He and many others found comfort in the thought that intercessory prayers were being said for them back home. According, it must be admitted, to the intercessors themselves, Ranulf of Chester, returning in 1220 from Damietta in a ship tossed and nearly wrecked by a storm, remained unmoved until midnight, when he suddenly became active because at that time ‘my monks and other religious, whom my ancestors and I have established in various places, arise to chant divine service and remember me in their prayers’.
Stephen of Blois’s anxiety about the security of the family he was going to leave behind was echoed in many charters, in spite of the role of protector the Church had assumed. It has often been written that Pope Urban had hoped to canalize the bellicosity of the armsbearers away from western Europe and that in this respect the crusade was an instrument of domestic peace. But everyone must have known that the absence of leading magnates from the scene would have the opposite effect and this may be why the preaching of the crusade was accompanied by a renewal of peace decrees in church councils. Flanders suffered while Count Robert was absent on the First Crusade. When Guy of Rochefort came riding back into his castellany in 1102 he was met with a catalogue of complaints; while he had been away ‘scarcely anyone could be brought to justice’. In 1128 Baldwin of Vern d’Anjou came to a very detailed arrangement with his brother Rual ‘concerning his land and all his possessions and his wife with their only daughter’. Rual promised always to deal faithfully with the two women, never to try to take away property to which they had a right, and to aid them against anyone who injured them ‘even to making war himself’. The agreement, which demonstrates clearly the threat posed by a younger, and probably unmarried, brother to a crusader’s wife and daughter and the need to take steps to counter it, was witnessed by ten men and was guaranteed by Baldwin’s immediate lord.
The fact is that even in the thirteenth century and in England, where the crown had taken over the protection of a crusader’s property, the experiences of kin, particularly women, left behind for several years to manage estates and bring up families, surrounded by rapacious neighbours and litigious relations, could be horrific, and judicial records reveal a depressing inventory of the injuries of every sort to which they were exposed. William Trussel’s wife was murdered six weeks after he had left on crusade in 1190 and her body was thrown into a marl pit. Peter Duffield’s wife was strangled while he was on the Fifth Crusade, and Ralph Hodeng came home to find his daughter and heiress married to one of his peasants. It is not surprising that crusaders felt safer taking measures of their own. For instance, in 1120 Geoffrey of Le Louet put his wife into the care of the nuns of Le Ronceray d’Angers for a fee; he promised a supplement to the sum as an entry gift should she wish to become a nun herself. At the same time Fulk of Le Plessis-Mace arranged for the nuns to look after his daughter. If he should not return, they were to allow her to marry or become a nun ‘according to her will and that of her brothers and other friends’. If she should decide not to enter the community he promised the nuns one of his nieces as an oblate and he guaranteed her entry gift. Touching arrangements were negotiated by a recruit to the Second Crusade, Hugh Rufus of Champallement, who had a very sick or disabled brother called Guy. Hugh made a grant of property to the monks of Corbigny, from the rents of which Guy was to be provided with a pension in cash and kind, payable at fixed times in the year. The monks would bury him in their cemetery should he die.
Just as vital to the interests of crusaders were the arrangements they had to make for the administration of their properties in what were bound to be long absences: at the time of the First Crusade there seems to have been already talk of a three-year campaign and in 1120 Fulk of Le Plessis-Mace was allowing for the fact that he might be away for a similar period. Members of the family or neighbours or vassals could be made responsible for management. From the family it could be the eldest son, or a younger one, or a brother, for instance the first crusader Gerald of Landerron’s brother Auger, prior of St Pierre de La Reole, in whose care Gerald left his castles and sons. Auger promised to ‘rear the sons until the time that he himself would make them knights’. It was also quite common for wives or mothers to take over these responsibilities, but sometimes it seems that there was no one in a family considered capable of the charge. In 1101 Guy of Bre handed custody of his land and daughter to a neighbour, Oliver of Lastours, whose father and uncle had been on the expedition of 1096-9. Oliver later married her. Among other early crusaders, Geoffrey of Issoudun left his castle in the hands of one of his vassals and Hugh of Gallardon entrusted his castle and daughter to his knights. From the late twelfth century English crusaders were appointing attorneys to look after their interests.
Crusaders knew that they were involving themselves in something that was going to be very costly, and we have already seen how expensive crusading was. There is very little evidence for the first crusaders coming home wealthy after the crippling expenses and severities of the campaign, although they certainly brought back relics and showered European churches with them. Guy of Rochefort was said to have came back in 1102 ‘in glory and abundance’, whatever that might mean. A knight called Grimald, passing by Cluny, became a confrater, made a will in the abbey’s favour and presented it with an ounce of gold. Hadvide of Chiny, who had crusaded with her husband Dodo of Cons-la-Grandville, gave St Hubert-en-Ardenne a complete set of vestments in precious cloth and a chalice made from nine ounces of gold and adorned with jewels. But these are the only known references to riches possibly gained on the earliest expeditions and it is not likely that there are many more to be found, given the expenses of the return journey and the impracticability of carrying quantities of bullion or precious material over such long distances.
On the other hand, the survivors and their families had pledges to redeem and debts to repay, and a pressing need for cash led some men, and sometimes their relations, to try to lessen the damage by resorting to whatever measures were available to them. When Fulk I of Matheflon came back from the East in 1100 he tried to exact a toll on a bridge he had built and to levy another on pigs, and he shrewdly turned to his advantage an old dispute with the nuns of Le Ronceray d’Angers. Early in the eleventh century the village of Seiches-sur-le-Loir had been given to the nuns by Countess Hildegarde of Anjou. The castle of Matheflon had then been built in the parish and within its enceinte a wooden church had been constructed. But the population had grown and Fulk and Le Ronceray had agreed to replace the church in stone. The church had been built and Fulk had agreed to surrender his share of the tithes and to fund a priest, although he was given a substantial sum for this. He had not kept his side of the bargain, however, and he had held on to the tithes, so that he and the nunnery were at odds up to the time he left on the First Crusade. While he was away his son Hugh came to recognize that the nuns had a case and made over the tithes for another, larger sum, which he agreed to return if Fulk refused to accept what he had done. When Fulk got back he wanted, or pretended to want, to nullify the agreement, but he was persuaded to endorse it for an even larger amount.
Fulk’s share of the tithes of Seiches had cost the nuns dear, which may be why they took a strong line in a related case. This involved a man called Geoffrey Le Râle, who had sold the tithes of the mill of Seiches to Le Ronceray when raising money for his crusade. On his return he decided to sell the mill itself, presumably to settle his debts, but he wanted the tithes to be sold with it—they would obviously enhance its value—and he was furious with the abbess of Le Ronceray when she refused to be party to the sale. He seized the mill, but he was hauled into the abbess’s court, where he pleaded guilty and was fined.
Crusading was so unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive that the more one considers crusaders the more astonishing their motivation becomes. What did they think they were doing? And why did catastrophes, which might be expected to induce cynicism, indifference, and despair, only heighten their enthusiasm? What was in their minds?
Over the last sixty years the theology of Christian violence has been intensively studied, and the ways it contributed, at an intellectual level, to ideas of Christian holy war in general and to crusading thought in particular, have become reasonably clear. The reactions of men and women to the call to crusade are beginning to be explained as responses to the popularization of that ideology, presented to them by preachers in ways which related to their day-to-day religious concerns. But even in terms of the history of theories of Christian violence crusading was a startling development. The First Crusade was the culminating surge towards the Holy Land of a cult of the Holy Sepulchre which had regularly spawned mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem throughout the eleventh century, but it was not only much the largest of these pilgrimages; it also differed from the others in being at the same time a war. Two Provençal brothers, Geoffrey and Guy of Signes, took the cross ‘on the one hand for the grace of the pilgrimage and on the other, under the protection of God, to wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive, and killed with barbaric fury’. And in the Limousin Aimery Brunus ‘was mindful of my sins and desired to go to fight the Muslims with the Christian people, and to visit the Sepulchre of the Lord which is in Jerusalem’.
Making a pilgrimage is a penitential, devotional act, requiring a frame of mind which is traditionally at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of a warrior. The intentions of eleventh- century pilgrims from the arms-bearing classes, who could certainly travel with splendour and panache, had been generally purely peaceful. The crusaders, on the other hand, intended war to be an integral part of their penitential exercise. It was officially described as an expression of their love for their Christian brothers and sisters and for their God, and commitment to it was considered to be a ‘true oblation’, a sacrificial surrender of self. In spite of its often flamboyant trappings, crusading was as much a devotional as a military activity, and the notion of a devotional war suggests a form of war-service which can be compared to saying a prayer.
In preaching the First Crusade, therefore, Pope Urban had made a revolutionary appeal. The notion that making war could be penitential seems to have evolved in the 1070s and 1080s out of a dialogue between Pope Gregory VII and a circle of reform theorists which had gathered around his supporter Mathilda of Tuscany. Urban took the idea, which was without precedent, and made it intellectually justifiable by associating warfare with pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The writer of the Monte Cassino Chronicle, probably a curial official who had accompanied the pope on his journey to France, described his initiative as a pastoral move, giving armsbearers the chance of contributing to their own salvation by undertaking an act of severe penance which did not entail the abandonment of their profession of arms or the humiliating loss of status involved in pilgrimaging without weapons, equipment, and horses. And a commentary on the crusade as something deliberately created so that nobles and knights could function as soldiers not just beneficially but devotionally, is to be found in Guibert of Nogent’s famous statement, to which reference has already been made: ‘God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in its wake . . . might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain in some measure God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with the liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.’
Men definitely responded to this. In the Limousin, Brunet of Treuil had intended to enter the priory of Aureil, but now he changed his mind; he must have seen in the crusade a way of satisfying his desire for a more positive life while remaining in the world. He persuaded the priory to use the rent from his entry-gift to buy him armour and a young relative was found to take his place in the community. A similar case may have been that of Odo Bevin from near Chateaudun, who had been involved in a lengthy dispute with the abbey of Marmoutier over property. Odo fell ill and informed the local prior that he wanted to enter the community and that he would renounce his claims on the property as his entry gift. But when the prior returned from Marmoutier he found that Odo had recovered and was now saying that he preferred to go to Jerusalem. In southern Italy, the Norman knight Tancred had been troubled by the contradictions for a Christian in the life he led. His mind had been ‘divided, uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world’. He recovered his spirits ‘after the call to arms in the service of Christ, [which] . . . inflamed him beyond belief’.
So radical was the notion of a devotional war that it is surprising that there seem to have been no protests from senior churchmen. If the First Crusade had failed, there would surely have been criticism of the association of war with pilgrimage, but its triumph confirmed for participants and observers alike that it really was a manifestation of God’s will. ‘The Lord has certainly revived his miracles of old’, wrote Pope Paschal II. One of the most striking features of the letters from crusaders and the eyewitness narratives is the growing feeling of astonishment that prevailed in the army which crossed into Syria in 1097 and proceeded to Antioch and eventually to Jerusalem, with the heavens glittering with coincidental but actual pyrotechnics—comets, auroras, shooting stars—and the nights disturbed by visitations: Christ, the saints, and ghosts of crusading dead who returned to assure the living of the validity of relics or the certainty of heavenly rewards. The crusaders became convinced that the only explanation for their victorious progress was that God’s hand was intervening to help them physically and that God did approve of holy war’s association with penance and pilgrimage. The eyewitness reporters of the crusade came to use of it phrases which until then had been usually applied only to the monastic profession—the knighthood of Christ, the way of the cross, the heavenly Jerusalem, spiritual warfare—and most of these were taken up and refined by commentators, who dwelt on the crusade’s penitential character and stressed the unique way its course had demonstrated divine approval. The weakness of more conventional theology in the face of all the euphoria is demonstrated in a letter written by Sigebert of Gembloux in 1103. Always an opponent of radical reform, Sigebert attacked the idea of penitential war expressed in a letter from Pope Paschal II to Robert of Flanders. Although he quoted Paschal’s letter, which referred specifically to Robert’s return from the liberation of Jerusalem, Sigebert did not once mention the crusade.
In the preaching of war as a devotion in 1096 and in the response of so many of the faithful to it, western Europe took an unexpected turning and the crusaders a step into the dark. In Chapter 2 it has been shown that they did so because they were convinced that the effort and suffering would do them good. Their exertions could also benefit their relations: in 1100 Herbert of Thouars, who went to the bishop of Poitiers to receive the ‘dress of pilgrimage’, wanted an assurance that the rigours of the coming expedition would assist his father’s soul. The Council of Clermont and Pope Urban had summarized the benefits this penitential act would bring in the indulgence. As we have seen, Urban seems to have intended this to be an authoritative statement that the penance the crusaders were going to undertake was likely to be so severe that it would be fully satisfactory, paying back to God not only the debts of punishment owed on account of their recent sins, for which penances had not yet been performed, but also any residue left over from earlier penances which had not been satisfactory enough.
One has the impression, however, that in the aftermath of the First Crusade the crusading idea became dormant in a large part of western Europe after all the efforts associated with the liberation of Jerusalem, to be revived forty-four years later in the recruiting drive for the Second Crusade. Crusades to the East were preached, as we have seen, in 1106-7, 1120, 1128, and 1139, and to Spain in 1114, 1118, and 1122, but a regular and consistent response to these appeals was to be found only in Flanders and in a belt of territory running from northern Poitou through Anjou to the Chartrain, southern Normandy, and the Île-de-France. It was in those two regions that the traditions must have been kept alive. Elsewhere, recruitment was isolated and sporadic, or non-existent. The Limousin, where there had been a very large response to the preaching of the First Crusade, seems to have produced no crusader between 1102 and 1146. It is not as though interest in the Holy Sepulchre had evaporated—the region provides us with the names of many pilgrims to Jerusalem in the early twelfth century—but it looks as though the old eleventh-century tradition of peaceful pilgrimaging had reasserted itself. The same was true of Champagne, another centre of recruitment for the First Crusade. Not a single crusader can be found between 1102 and 1146, but there was enthusiasm for pilgrimages to Jerusalem. Among the many pilgrims of high status was Count Hugh of Troyes, who spent four years in Jerusalem from 1104-8, and went again in 1114 and in 1125, when he became a Templar. During the same period no crusader has been identified from Provence, which again had responded generously in 1096, although there were many pilgrims to Jerusalem, especially from among the greater lords of the district of Marseilles.
A similar picture is to be found if one turns from the geography of recruitment to families. Early crusaders tended to be concentrated in certain kin groups, and this might lead one to suppose that family traditions of commitment to the movement were established in the expeditions of 1096 and 1101; certainly many of those who were taking the cross for the Second Crusade were following, or were intending to follow, in the footsteps of fathers and grandfathers. But in many of the families in which there had been concentrations of crusaders in 1096 there was little or no further recruitment until 1146. The Bernards of Bré in the Limousin sent four men on the First Crusade and another four on the Second, but apparently none in between. Of the descendants of Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy, several were prominent in the First Crusade and seven individuals dominated the Second, but only one appears to have crusaded between 1102 and 1146. In these kin-groups it looks as though the zeal of 1096 was only regenerated in 1146.
It seems likely that to many armsbearers in the early twelfth century the First Crusade had been a once-and-for-all effort and the chance to undertake a penance of this unique, and uniquely rewarding, kind would never occur again. After 1102 they turned back to their traditional devotional activities. Research may reveal a similar picture between 1149 and 1187, and it is possible that the history of crusading as an established institution only begins with the Third Crusade.
At any rate the situation between 1102 and 1146 explains why St Bernard presented the Second Crusade as a special opportunity for salvation open to those who took the cross: ‘[God] puts himself into a position of necessity, or pretends to be in one, while all the time he wants to help you in your need. He wants to be thought of as the debtor, so that he can award to those fighting for him wages: the remission of their sins and everlasting glory. It is because of this that I have called you a blessed generation, you who have been caught up in a time so rich in remission and are found living in this year so pleasing to the Lord, truly a year of jubilee.’ Bernard’s oratorical treatment of the indulgence was magnificent: ‘Take the sign of the cross and you will obtain in equal measure remission of all the sins you have confessed with a contrite heart. The cloth [of the cloth cross] does not fetch much if it is sold; if it is worn on a faithful shoulder it is certain to be worth the kingdom of God.’ But he was proposing a precocious interpretation, the acceptance of which was delayed by the caution with which the papacy treated a new penitential theology in which truly satisfactory penances were considered to be impossibilities. It was only to be adopted definitively by Pope Innocent III fifty years later. With Innocent the indulgence became no longer a statement about the rewards of satisfactory penance, but a guarantee of the act of grace, mercy, and love by which God consented to treat a penance as though it was satisfactory. It may not be going too far to suggest that the indulgence really came into its own in the thirteenth century, when it was formulated in a way people could understand, although there was still some confusion about it and St Thomas Aquinas had to answer worries about exactly when it became operative.
But from the first, feeling locked into a world of sin from which they could not escape, men and women understood well enough that the crusade offered them a chance of starting afresh. The charters of endowment issued by them tended to be expressed in terms of penitence and humility. So, only even more so, were the expressions of self-abasement with which lords renounced property or rights held back by them from churchmen or extorted by them by force. As pilgrims, of course, they were reluctant to leave behind men and women, and particularly religious communities, with grudges or complaints against them. In 1101 Odo I of Burgundy, followed by an entourage of his greatest vassals, ‘entered the chapter of St Bénigne de Dijon and, with the monks sitting round the room and many members of their household standing by, I corrected the injuries which I had been accustomed to inflict until now. I recognized my fault and, having sought mercy, I asked that I should be absolved. And if I should happen to return (from the crusade) I promised amendment in future.’ He seems to have arranged another melodramatic ceremony at Gevrey- Chambertin when he renounced claims he had unjustly imposed on the Cluniac monks there.
Preparations for a crusade were always shrouded in an atmosphere of penitence. At the time of the Second Crusade it was rumoured that King Louis VII of France had taken the cross either in sorrow for the loss of life incurred when a church was burnt down during his assault on Vitry in 1144, or to make amends for his refusal to accept a new archbishop of Bourges. King Conrad III of Germany was persuaded to join after a sermon from St Bernard reminded him that he would be subject to divine judgement. Philip of Gloucester apparently made the vow after an illness which had interrupted a vendetta in which he was engaged, and Humbert of Beaujeu after he had been warned in visions to reform his behaviour. Penitential language reached a peak when western Christendom was in a state of shock over the loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. The tone was set by the papal letter Audita tremendi, which proclaimed the Third Crusade: ‘It is incumbent upon all of us to consider and to choose to amend our sins by voluntary chastisement and to turn to the Lord our God with penance and works of piety; and we should first amend in ourselves what we have done wrong and then turn our attention to the treachery and malice of the enemy.’ The letter went on to describe the crusade as an ‘opportunity for repentance and doing good’; and, following its lead, the crusade was preached everywhere in penitential terms. It is no surprise to find that sixty years later a crusader’s desire to leave no one behind with a grudge moved King Louis IX of France to establish friar-enquêteurs to collect and judge on complaints about royal officials and his companion John of Joinville to summon his feudal court to allow the airing of any grievances his vassals might have against him.
By that time, however, another element was prominent.
He arrived most nobly of all, for his galley came painted below the waterline and above with escutcheons of his arms: or a cross paty gules. He had at least 300 oarsmen in his galley, each with a shield on which were his arms; and to each shield was attached a pennon on which were his arms beaten in gold. And as he approached it seemed as though his galley flew as the oarsmen drove it forward, and it seemed as if lightning was falling from the skies at the sound made by the pennons and cymbals, drums, and Saracen horns.
So John of Joinville described the arrival in Egypt, bedecked with the trappings of chivalry, of John of Ibelin, count of Jaffa. The popes had tried to discourage pomp and luxury—the letters proclaiming the Second and Third Crusades had contained strict sumptuary clauses—but the growth of chivalry, in which a Christianity more secular than ecclesiastical was interpenetrated by martial and aristocratic elements, naturally strengthened tendencies such as the desire for honour and renown which had been present in crusading from the first. From at least the time of the Fourth Crusade crusading was a chivalrous adventure, the highest function of chivalric knighthood, and its more enthusiastic practitioners were paragons of chivalry. At the very time crusading was becoming a normal feature of the European scene, it was being coloured by secular ideals, and the balance within it between devotional war and knightly enterprise was altering.
It may be, of course, that it had always been more earth- bound than the sources reveal. Most of the narratives of the First, Second, and Third Crusades were written by churchmen, and it was only in the thirteenth century, when the crusade cycle, the Chevalier du Cygne with its association of crusading with magic, had entered the canon of chivalric literature, that the knights—Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Robert of Cléry, Conon of Béthune, Thibaut of Champagne, John of Joinville—found a distinctive voice in narrative and verse. But three factors could have contributed to a strengthening of chivalric elements. The first was a practice associated with the movement, the temporary service of armsbearers in the East, not as crusaders but as secular knights. The tradition of giving up time to help defend the holy places or Christian outposts began with Galdemar Carpenel of Dargoire and William V of Montpellier in 1099, reached a peak in the career of Geoffrey of Sergines in the later thirteenth century and was still being expressed in service with the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes in the sixteenth century. It was already being described in precociously chivalric terms from at least the 1120s, when the sojourn of Charles the Good of Flanders in the Holy Land for a few years after 1102 was portrayed in almost fourteenth-century language as prouesse in the service of God. After he had been belted as a knight, Charles went to Jerusalem ‘and there, bearing arms against the pagan enemies of our faith . . . fought vigorously for Christ the Lord and . . . consecrated to him the first fruits of his labours and deeds.’
The second was the increasing part lordship seems to have been playing as an influence upon recruitment. In Chapter 3 the subtle and complex relationship between motivation and the different ties of association has been described. Of course lordship had always been a significant motivating force, but a feature of the responses to the earliest crusade appeals was that they were concentrated as much, if not more, in certain families in circles of vassals. At the time of the First Crusade clusterings of crusaders were to be found in noble, castellan, and knightly families in the Limousin, Flanders, Lorraine, Provence, the Île-de-France, Normandy, and Burgundy.
Outstanding examples were the comital house of Burgundy and the castellan family of Montlhéry in the Île-de-France. Of the five sons of Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy, three were crusaders and a fourth, as Pope Calixtus II, preached the crusade of 1120-4. A grandson and granddaughter also took part. Three members of the house of Montlhéry were involved in the First Crusade, together with the members of an astonishing array of related families, of which Chaumont-en-Vexin sent four crusaders, St Valéry three, Broyes, Le Bourcq of Rethel, and Le Puiset two each, and Courtenay and Pont-Echanfray one each. Indeed the two generations of this clan active at that time produced twenty-three crusaders and settlers, all closely related, of whom six became major figures in the Latin East; we can picture a chain of enthusiasm stretching across northern France, and beyond, for more distantly related were three crusaders from the family of the counts of Boulogne, including Godfrey of Bouillon in Lorraine, and eight from the family of Hauteville in southern Italy.
The commitment of families to the crusade is demonstrated in their response to the issue of costs. When it came to raising cash these families shared a burden that resulted from the alienation of their lands. It can be shown that many of them adopted sensible policies, disposing of properties, such as churches and tithes, over which their rights were being increasingly questioned as the reform movement gathered pace. This suggests that there must have been many conferences of the kin summoned to decide whether assets could be saved and, if not, what type of property should be offered for pledge or sale. A record of one such family conference surfaces in a Breton document. The crusader Thibaut of Ploasme informed his brother William that if he was not helped financially he would have to sell his inheritance. William did not want Thibaut’s portion of the estate to be lost, so he raised money by selling part of his share of a mill which was, in fact, already pledged. Other early family arrangements are complicated enough to suggest that similar discussions had taken place. Hugh of Chaumont-sur-Loire, the lord of Amboise, pledged his lordship to his cousin Robert of Rochecorbon in 1096, but in addition was given a substantial cash sum by his maternal uncle. The South Italian Norman Tancred was subsidized by his guardian and so did not have to sell his inheritance. Savaric of Vergy bought his nephew’s fief and then pledged it to raise the money to pay him. Before Fantin and his son Geoffrey departed from Thouars, Fantin left some land to his wife and to Geoffrey, who then sold his share of it to his mother.
One can identify elements which may help to explain why some kin-groups were predisposed to respond strongly to the appeal to crusade, among them family traditions of pilgrimage to Jerusalem, attachment to Cluniac monasticism and the reformed papacy, and the veneration of certain saints. Female members of these kin, moreover, appear to have carried the message to the families into which they married. Of four sisters in the comital house of Burgundy, three were the wives of first crusaders and the fourth was the mother of one. Although there were probably independent traditions in the Le Puiset clan, its matriarch was one of four Montlhery sisters, all of whom were the wives or mothers of crusaders; so were both her daughters.
By the thirteenth century, however, the chief motivating force seems to have been lordship. Families were of course still very important, and traditions of commitment, passing down from generation to generation, pressed hard on those qualified to take the cross, but in the age when feudal bonds were at their strongest it was now patronage and clientage, often operating at a regional level, which had an even more potent influence. This seems to have affected the picture of Christ presented in the propaganda, which was always responsive to the social values of the audiences it addressed. Where Christ had been commonly described as a father who had lost his patrimony and was calling on his sons to recover it, there was now more often the portrait of a king or lord demanding service from his subjects. The image of Christ as lord is, as we shall see, already to be found in a song dating from the Second Crusade, but it was dominant by 1200.
The Lord really has been afflicted by the loss of his patrimony. He wishes to test his friends and to see whether his vassals are faithful. If anyone holds a fief of a liege-lord and deserts him when he is attacked and loses his inheritance, that vassal should rightly be deprived of his fief. You hold your body, your soul, and everything you have from the highest emperor; today he has had you summoned to hurry to his aid in battle and, although you are not bound to him by feudal law, he offers you so many and such great rewards, that is to say the remission of all your sins, however much penalty and punishment is due, and eternal life as well, that you ought to hurry to him of your own free will.
The third factor was the popularity of crusading in other theatres of war. Enthusiastic crusaders were often prepared to serve on several fronts: Leopold VI of Austria crusaded in Spain and Languedoc, besides fighting in the Third and Fifth Crusades and taking the cross for the Fourth; the French knight Peter Pillart was recruited for both of Louis IX’s crusades to the East and for Charles of Anjou’s crusade into southern Italy. And by the fourteenth century a feature of the attitude of noblemen to crusading was that the precise location of the combat they were going to engage in was of secondary importance. What mattered was fighting the enemies of Christ, and at times ‘they even displayed an odd nonchalance about where they would fight, and against whom’. For obvious reasons, the alternative theatres did not all share the traditions of penitential pilgrimage associated with Jerusalem, although in the early thirteenth century there was an attempt by the leader of Baltic crusading to create a cult of Our Lady at Riga and the myth that her dower land, paralleling Christ’s patrimony, was centred on Livonia. In the course of time there was a shift in the goal of crusading from the liberation or defence of Jerusalem (or aid to the Holy Land) to the defence of Christendom in general. Campaigning on behalf of the Christian Republic, as Christendom was often called, was taking on more and more the character of war in defence of a state rather than war as a devotion. In the fourteenth century, service of God through the demonstration of prouesse, almost divorced from the idea of penance, characterized the attitude of crusaders who were engaged in campaigns in North Africa or Europe.
It may well be that the cause célèbre of the crisis of crusading after 1291, the downfall of the Templars, which is described in Chapter 9, contributed to the partial secularization of the movement. The series of charges against them opened with articles relating to their alleged denial of Christ as God, the crucifixion, and the cross. They were accused of spitting on a crucifix at their reception into the order, of trampling it underfoot, and of urinating on it. In any Christian society these charges would have been horrific, but they also suggested a particularly violent challenge to crusading theory and traditions, to which the authority of Christ and the image of the cross were central. The charges were publicized widely by the French government and the public was presented with the appalling picture of a prestigious order, which claimed to embody in regular religious form the ideals of the crusade, blasphemously denying its central tenets. It is impossible to gauge the damage these accusations did to the movement, but they must have done some.
As crusading became institutionalized and a conventional option for knights in the thirteenth century it was anyway bound to become less radical. The more secular ideals of chivalry contributed by diluting, if only slightly, the revolutionary ideal proclaimed in 1095. The concept of war as a penance and a devotion lingered, of course, and was still being expressed, although in an increasingly decorative way, by the Knights Hospitallers on Malta in the eighteenth century. But it had given way to the more conventional image of military service for God. The idea of a penitential war, one of the most radical expressions of European thought, was too uncomfortable to secure for itself a permanent place in the theology and practice of Christian violence.