If we consider the First Crusade as a whole, taking an overarching view of its nature and impact, we are immediately confronted by one simple but utterly overwhelming fact: the expedition succeeded. Against all the odds, its primary goal – the recovery of Jerusalem – was achieved. This sounds like an obvious statement, but the full force and impact of this victory are actually quite difficult to appreciate.
The reasons for the crusade’s success are readily apparent. Historians have long appreciated the central significance of the profound religious and political fractures that afflicted Islam at the end of the eleventh century. Had the Muslims of the Near East united in the face of the First Crusade it could not possibly have prevailed. The combined forces of Damascus, Aleppo and Mosul would surely have crushed the Franks outside the walls of Antioch; facing the collective might of the Abbasid and Fatimid caliphates, the Latins could never have mounted the sacred walls of Jerusalem. In the years to come, hundreds of thousands of Franks sought to equal the achievements of these First Crusaders, but in the face of burgeoning Islamic solidarity, none prospered.1
However, other contributing factors have, to date, been underplayed. The expedition was not quite the ramshackle venture we once imagined. The Latins may not have maintained complex lines of supply on the road to the East, but their campaign does show clear evidence of strategic and logistical forethought. Bohemond took care to provision the gathering armies at Nicaea in 1097, and the crusaders pursued a productive policy of close co-operation with the Greeks. They also made careful preparations before attempting to push into Syria and overcome Antioch, building a network of alliances with indigenous Christians and creating a system of foraging centres. The expedition also benefited immensely from naval support while still at Antioch and then on the road south to Palestine – the arrival of a Genoese fleet at Jaffa in the summer of 1099 transformed the siege of Jerusalem. The precise degree of planning and co-ordination behind these fortuitous encounters is unclear, but Pope Urban II is known to have encouraged the maritime powers of northern Italy to collaborate with the crusaders.
Perhaps the greatest ‘miracle’ of the First Crusade is that its communal approach to leadership actually worked. Indeed, on the whole, it functioned with remarkable efficiency. The council of princes managed to direct the campaign through a multiplicity of difficulties and, facing severe military threats at Antioch, learned to rely upon Bohemond’s martial genius and his capacity for inspirational generalship. This command structure did falter in the face of intense personal rivalry, but, fractious as it was, the crusade was still driven on by the unifying vision of Jerusalem.
Intense spiritual conviction empowered the First Crusaders, lending them resolve in the face of extraordinary hardship. But once we attempt to gauge the exact quality and degree of their religious devotion we hit the real complexities arising from their success. Modern historical analysis can offer a rationalisation of their accomplishments, but for contemporaries living in the medieval age one thing alone explained the spectacular triumph of the First Crusade – God’s omnipotent will. Throughout Latin Europe the conquest of Jerusalem was seen as definitive proof that the crusading ideal did indeed enjoy divine sanction. The fame and renown of the crusaders’ exploits resounded across western Christendom and, almost immediately, the quills of history began to twitch, enshrining the expedition for future generations. Scores of writers – some eyewitnesses, others distant observers, but almost all drawn from an ecclesiastical background – sought to record its events, and the crusade became perhaps the most widely documented phenomenon of its era. Describing what they saw as a miracle, they naturally emphasised the pious devotion of their Frankish protagonists, believing that these crusaders must have burned with zeal for God to guide them to victory. Had the First Crusade failed, we can be sure that we would now know far less about its progress, and the image of its participants as devout soldiers of the faith might be less pronounced.2
Documentary evidence predating the conquest of Jerusalem, such as letters and charters, nonetheless confirms that most crusaders were primarily inspired to set out for the Holy Land by personal Christian devotion. The dramatic events of their campaign also indicate that they were imbued with robust and authentic spirituality. But a nuanced analysis of their reactions to events, such as the discovery of the Holy Lance at Antioch, suggests that their piety was not always ecstatic and overpowering. Tempered by the harsh realities of medieval warfare, the Latins fought in the name of Christ but were not immune to despair, depravity and dissolution. The First Crusaders were, for the most part, brutal warriors whose barbaric cruelty and innate avarice were barely contained by the ideals and ethos espoused by the papacy. Their struggle to reconquer Jerusalem was not primarily powered by any passionate allegiance to the Church, nor by a dutiful desire to defend Christendom. They suffered the horrors of the crusade to fulfil an intimate and ultimately self-serving need: to overcome their desperate fear of damnation and emerge, purified, at the gates of heaven.3
The success of the First Crusade had other, far-reaching effects. In 1095 Pope Urban II had conceived of the expedition as a one-off. But the conquest of Jerusalem seemed to confirm God’s support for the notion of sanctified violence and the efficacy of crusading became widely accepted in the Latin West. The victories in the East established Frankish settlements that needed consolidation and defence, and with the papacy keen to manipulate what it saw as a powerful new weapon and the laity intent upon replicating the First Crusaders’ achievements, it is little surprise that more crusades followed. Over the next century a crusading ‘movement’ gradually emerged, transforming European history. The practice of war was reshaped by the conflict on the Levantine frontier, both in terms of ideology and technology. Patterns of trade and economy altered to accommodate the settlement of the eastern Mediterranean. And the balance of political power shifted as both the Church and temporal rulers sought to harness the devastating force of the crusades. For two hundred years Latin armies set out to defend the Holy Land. None succeeded in re-creating the ‘glories’ of the First Crusade, but through failure and disillusionment, the fire of holy war was sustained by the memory of that expedition.4
The First Crusade’s impact upon the relationship between western Christendom and Islam proved the most insidious and destructive. At Clermont, Urban sought to mobilise the armies of the West by creating a grossly distorted image of the Islamic world. Latins were encouraged to believe that Muslims were sadistic, sub-human savages – their natural enemy. In the campaign that followed, the Franks prosecuted an appallingly vicious war against Islam, peppered with unspeakable horrors such as the sack of Antioch and the massacre at Jerusalem. This was extreme violence, even by medieval standards, but we should not imagine that there was a distinct, stark contrast between the degree of brutality meted out by the crusaders in the Levant and the nature of internecine warfare that prevailed in Europe.5
The truth is that the papacy’s dehumanisation of Islam did not exert an unwavering hold over the minds of the Franks. Even during the course of the expedition to Jerusalem, they demonstrated a more malleable attitude towards Muslims, engaging in extensivenegotiations with the Fatimids of Egypt, pursuing limited alliances with Muslim rulers of northern Syria like Omar of Azaz and happily formulating a series of admittedly exploitative truces with the emirs of southern Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. The evidence of this contact is intermittent, and to an extent our Latin sources seem keen to present the crusade as an intense and unbending religious conflict.
In reality, contact may have been continuing on a completely different level. Raymond of Aguilers’ assertion that the Latin priest and visionary Evremar went to the Muslim city of Tripoli to rest and recuperate during the latter stages of the siege of Antioch suggests that cross-cultural interaction may actually have been far more common than we know. Arabic sources certainly indicate that the Muslims of the Near East were willing to adopt a pragmatic approach to their dealings with the crusaders, just as they had with the Christian Greeks for generations.6
Between 1096 and 1099 the forces of the Latin West and Islam fought each other as enemies. But neither side appears to have truly viewed the other as an ‘alien’ species for whom they had an inbuilt, genetically encoded hatred. The crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem obviously did nothing to promote inter-religious harmony, but within a decade the Frankish settlements in the East had begun to be gradually incorporated into the political fabric of the Levant. Trade and commerce blossomed, and diplomacy took its place alongside conflict. In 1108, and again in 1115, the Latins even campaigned alongside Muslim allies.7
Only when the memory of the First Crusade was appropriated and refashioned in western Europe did the atmosphere of Latin–Muslim antipathy solidify. Unrelenting papal propaganda advanced the ideals of religious intolerance in the course of the twelfth century, and soon those earliest crusaders were being celebrated as much for their brutal attacks on Islamic foes as for the dramatic recapture of Jerusalem. In the Levant, a series of ambitious Muslim warlords, culminating in the mighty Sultan Saladin, seized upon the crimes of the First Crusaders. Demanding revenge, they re-ignited the fires of jihad, and under the cover of this ideal set out to unify Islam under their despotic rule. By 1300, the memory of the crusade as a war engendered by fanatical hatred had become embedded in the collective consciousness of western and eastern society. The lines of religious discord hardened; Christendom and Islam had been set on the path to enduring conflict.