Most First Crusaders joined the expedition to Jerusalem at emotionally charged gatherings, where, having been whipped up into a frenzy by a rousing sermon on the virtues of the crusading ideal, they made a public commitment to the cause. This involved two ritual elements: the giving of a solemn vow to see the pilgrimage to the East through to the end by visiting the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem; and the adoption of a physical representation of the cross – a symbol which was just then becoming a popular totem of Christian devotion – to be carried on their person until the return journey to the West had been completed. By these two steps, the Church sought to capture and solidify the explosive force of the crusading message, using the binding, legal force of the vow and the instantly recognisable, visual symbol of the cross to ensure that the initial spontaneous enthusiasm actually resulted in participation. One contemporary later described Urban at Clermont declaring that:
Everyone who has decided to make this holy pilgrimage and has made a promise to God and has vowed that he will pour himself out to him as a living, holy and pleasing sacrifice must bear the sign of the Lord’s cross on his front or breast. Anyone who after fulfilling his vow wishes to return must put the sign on his back between his shoulder blades.22
The crusaders certainly seem to have felt that these rites set them apart from the rest of society, their insignia proclaiming to all that they bore the status and obligations of armed pilgrims, and the burden of duty conferred by them later proved to have the power both to compel and inspire. But, for all their binding force, these rituals seem, at least in 1095–6, to have been relatively informal. There was probably no exact or established formula of words for the vow taken, nor does there seem to have been a universally recognised method for acquiring or wearing the cross. Most crosses seem to have been provided by the clergy, but Bohemond furnished his followers with theirs by cutting up his own cloak, while Godfrey of Bouillon’s chaplain, Abbot Baldwin, dispensed with a cloth badge entirely, having his cross branded into the flesh of his forehead, a practice which was apparently quite widespread. Like so many features of crusade recruitment and practice, the rituals associated with taking the cross developed organically.23
Initial motives
It was once fashionable to suggest that the First Crusaders were primarily inspired to take the cross by greed, that the crusade was a grand adventure, offering the aspirant knights of Europe an opportunity to amass untold fortunes of treasure and territory. It is true that, even at Clermont, Pope Urban II appears to have been aware that his audience might be attracted to the crusading cause by avaricious impulses. The decree describing the expedition that was recorded in the canons of the council stated: ‘Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the Church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.’24
It has also been suggested that the appetite for materialistic gain was amplified by the wretched standard of living enjoyed by most Latins at the end of the eleventh century. A severe drought had afflicted much of France in the years before 1096, leading to a series of poor harvests and the resultant spread of famine. Then, while the crusade was actually being preached, the region was hit by outbreaks of ergotism, a rather grim disease caused by eating bread made from mouldy rye. The theory is that, faced by these horrors, the Latin West responded with rapturous enthusiasm to the image of the Levant as ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’. The evidence provided by one contemporary observer certainly supports this idea, because he wrote that ‘it was easy to persuade the western Franks to leave their farms. For Gaul had been afflicted for some years, sometimes by civil war, sometimes by famine, sometimes by an excessive death rate. Finally a plague . . . had terrified the people to the point at which they despaired of life.’ Another contemporary conceded that it was difficult to be sure that all crusaders were driven by pure motives:
Different people give different reasons for this journey. Some say that in all pilgrims the desire has been aroused by God and the Lord Jesus Christ. Others maintain that the French lords and most of the people have begun this journey for frivolous reasons and that it was because of this that setbacks befell so many pilgrims . . . and for that reason they cannot succeed.25
Of all the theories assigning acquisitive motives to the First Crusaders, the most enduring and influential has been the idea that the expedition was almost exclusively populated by land-hungry younger sons, deprived of inheritable territory at home in the West by the law of primogeniture, and thus desperately eager to establish new lordships in the East. This image is, however, profoundly misleading.26
Some crusaders might fit this paradigm, at least to a degree – Bohemond of Taranto, for example, was certainly alive to the possibility that the journey to Jerusalem might furnish opportunities for the conquest of territory – but they were very much in a minority. For every crusader like Bohemond, there were countless more who, like Stephen of Blois and Robert of Flanders, already enjoyed secure possession of adequate, even expansive lordships. Some crusaders did, of course, at least entertain the possibility that they might end up settling in the Holy Land. In spite of his own immense Provençal power-base, Raymond of Toulouse seems to have had his eye on Levantine relocation and travelled east in the company of his third wife, Elvira.27
The reality was that most crusaders were inspired by a complex combination of motives; many must have harboured hopes that in the course of this devotional pilgrimage they might reap some personal gain. But perhaps the most significant insight into the medieval mentality offered by the First Crusade is the unequivocal demonstration that authentic Christian devotion and a heartfelt desire for material wealth were not mutually exclusive impulses in the eleventh century. We now know that greed cannot have been the dominant motive among the First Crusaders, not least because, as recent research has shown, for most participants the expedition promised to be utterly terrifying and cripplingly expensive.
The prospect of such a massive journey into the unknown – Jerusalem was more than 3,000 kilometres away and most crusaders would never before have travelled more than 100 kilometres from home – left many almost paralysed with fear. The acute anxiety expressed by Stephen of Blois when making a donation to a local abbey just prior to his departure for the East was reflective of the emotions felt by many crusaders: ‘[May God] 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.’ Many who answered Urban’s call to arms fully expected to die in the venture, and they tried to brace themselves to enter the scouring fire of holy war. Most also had to face virtual penury just to afford the exorbitant cost of crusading. Recent estimates suggest that, in order for the average knight to meet the costs of the coming campaign in terms of equipment, supplies, horse and servants, he would have had to raise five times his annual income. Many families endured major financial sacrifices to enable their kin to afford to crusade. Most tellingly of all, we know with the benefit of hindsight that only a handful of crusaders actually stayed in the Levant after the expedition, and among the returning majority none came home laden down with riches.28
If pure greed did not propel the crusaders, should we then assume that, above all, Christian piety inspired tens of thousands to risk their lives and livelihoods? This vexed question, fraught with difficulty and blighted by unsubstantiated impression, has occupied generations of historians, but some real progress has been made in recent years. Nevertheless, the severe limitations of the available evidence mean that we are still able to attempt only an approximate reconstruction of the motives and intentions of one particular class of crusader: the lay aristocracy. Alone in all medieval society, this upper echelon – the knightly elite – left a discernible imprint on the fabric of history during the process of taking the cross and preparing for the campaign, offering us fleeting, but instructive, insights into their state of mind. Of other social groups, in particular the poor, tens of thousands of whom are known to have joined the crusade, no authentic, first-hand trace survives. They appear in the written record, if at all, as shadowy imaginings, their ideas, aspirations and beliefs recreated by the pens of contemporary aristocratic observers. So on this most taxing question of motivation we must make do with what we can and consider the nobility.
Even here we should acknowledge that our evidence has been at least partially filtered. Our primary resources are the legal documents, or charters, drawn up by aristocratic crusaders to settle their affairs prior to departure for the Levant. It is rather ironic that, in this sphere of evidence, administrative efficiency is actually the enemy of historical exactitude. Charters drawn up, for example, under the rigorous standards of twelfth-century English governance tend to be precise, well-ordered documents and thus intensely formulaic and often quite boring. Luckily for us, those originating amid the relative disorder of late-eleventh-century French record keeping, just when the First Crusade was launched, tend to be far more invigorating. Roving, even rambling affairs, they frequently digress from the minutiae of financial exchange and legal rights to record a bewildering array of incidental information, including personal histories and human emotions, current affairs and infamous scandals, the strange and miraculous – all appear in a captivating kaleidoscopic slice of medieval experience. Crucially, they appear to offer a direct window into the minds of aristocratic crusaders. But even with this treasure trove of material, we must exercise some caution, because most nobles were actually illiterate and, since the majority of extant charters relate to transactions with monasteries, almost all surviving documents of this type were, in fact, physically written by monks. We cannot, therefore, discount the possibility that the revelatory lens of charter evidence has been subtly coloured by clerical hands, tainted by monks’ intensely Christian outlook and fanatical obsession with spiritual devotion.29
The mindset of the lay aristocracy
Even bearing this caveat in mind, the evidence for the aristocratic response to the crusading message strongly suggests that spiritual concerns dominated the minds of the Latin nobility as they took the cross. To understand why this was so, we must first reconstruct the devotional landscape in which they lived. On this plane of medieval society, laymen were intimately connected to the monastic profession. With the Church and regional clergy still in relative disarray, eleventh-century nobles were reluctant to turn to their parish priests or even local bishops for spiritual guidance. Instead, they looked for succour from monastic institutions like Cluny, champions of devotional purity on the cutting edge of Christian ideology. When Pope Urban II launched the First Crusade, all across the Latin West his target audience, the knightly aristocracy, was engaged in a symbiotic union with monasteries. Every knight who joined the expedition to Jerusalem probably enjoyed some form of monastic association, be it through patronage and the donation of wealth or through the presence of a familial member who had entered a religious house. Monastic institutions shaped the nobility’s conception of the Christian cosmos: knights were effectively conditioned to view, interpret and interact with the spiritual world around them through terms of reference and rituals defined by monks.30
The most powerful feature of this programming was an acute awareness of the danger of sin and an associated terror at the prospect of damnation. All medieval society was preoccupied with the pursuit of purity, but the knightly aristocracy, forced by the nature of its profession into daily contact with contaminants such as violence and personal wealth, seems to have been particularly prone to harbour an obsession with spiritual infection and the afterlife. The constant inner struggle it faced was evoked by the early-twelfth-century biographer and confidant of Tancred of Hauteville:
Frequently [Tancred] burned with anxiety because the warfare he engaged in as a knight seemed contrary to the Lord’s commands. The Lord, in fact, ordered him to offer the cheek that had been struck together with his other cheek to the striker; but secular knighthood did not spare the blood of relatives. The Lord urged him to give his tunic and his cloak as well to the man who would take them away; the needs of war impelled him to take from a man already despoiled of both whatever remained to him. And so, if ever that wise man could give himself up to repose, these contradictions deprived him of courage.31
Tancred and knights like him across Europe were trapped – their secular obligations made sin inevitable, but monks cautioned them that their transgressions would, in the afterlife, trigger the most gruesome torments. On closer examination, we might, in fact, expect Tancred and his contemporaries to have been rather confused about the exact consequences of their sins because, around 1095, they were not actually being offered a particularly clear or concise vision of what would happen to their souls after death. Nascent Christian theology bombarded them with a complex jumble of images and ideals, a bewildering mosaic of ritual, custom and belief that, to a modern observer, can appear convoluted and even contradictory, but from which three dominant, interwoven strands emerge.
First, the Church maintained that the Day of the Last Judgement was fast approaching – it had of course been ‘approaching’ since the earliest Christian era – when good would finally be separated from evil through the ‘weighing’ of every human soul. Alongside this single apocalyptic event, Latins were also inculcated with a second strand of belief: that they would personally face some form of judgement immediately upon death and that any taint of sin would earn them punishment. Third was an overwhelming belief in the efficacy of alms-giving.
One of the main salvific remedies proffered by the Church to counter the threat of judgement and damnation was the giving of alms, which might be loosely defined as the donation of financial resources to religious communities, often in the form of title to land or rights to its revenue. These transient, material possessions could not, the Church argued, be taken into the afterlife, but might be used to ease the path towards the true Christian ‘inheritance’, the kingdom of heaven. Like pilgrimage, alms-giving might be undertaken as an appointed penance or be a voluntary propitiary down-payment. In quantifying the purificational impact of such endowments, the Church was careful to avoid any direct assertion that Christians might crudely buy their way to salvation, preferring instead to suggest that donors might, in God’s eyes, become enshrouded in an aura of merit. Nevertheless, most laymen imagined a direct link between donation and salvation. The benefaction of monastic communities like that of Cluny was deemed particularly efficacious, because its monks, engaged day and night in almost constant prayer, transformed every Cluniac monastery into an overflowing super-generator of redemptive energy. Alms-giving to such an institution allowed one to tap into this powerhouse of salvation, because every lay donor name was included in the monastery’s prayers. Most religious houses were associated with a particular saint or saints, and lay donation was also believed to earn the favour of these Holy Dead, ensuring an easier passage through the rigours of temporal existence.
An illustrative example is that of the southern French noble Gaston IV of Béarn. A fidelis beati Petri who had campaigned against the Moors of Iberia in 1087, he took the cross in 1096 and joined Raymond of Toulouse’s crusading contingent. Earlier, in 1091, Gaston decided to donate some property to the Cluniac house of St Foi, Morlaas in Gascony. At the same time he confirmed the gifts made by his father years earlier. The charter recording this transaction states that Gaston acted for the benefit of his own soul and those of his wife and children, and in the hope that ‘God may help us in this world in all our needs, and in the future grant us eternal life’.
In some ways, the rather fragmentary devotional framework which encapsulated the concepts of apocalyptic threat, immediate judgement and propitiary alms-giving might seem to beg more questions than it answered. What, for example, was supposed to happen to a soul between death and the advent of the Last Judgement? Was it possible to attain immediately the delights of heaven or to be eternally condemned to the torments of hell, or were all souls awaiting the Apocalypse in some form of limbo? Could alms-giving or pilgrimage actually cleanse the soul of sin or did it simply cancel out the earthly or heavenly punishment due for transgression?
In later centuries Latin theologians tackled these concerns with varying degrees of success, but for the knights who encountered the crusading message in 1095 the prevailing matrix of belief remained only partially realised or reconciled. For all this, it lost nothing of its power to compel or control. Eleventh-century society seems simply to have filled in the gaps left by this emergent construct, giving rise to devotional customs that actually served to intensify the binding force of the Latin faith. Uncertainty about the afterlife stimulated a popular belief in an embryonic version of purgatory, a shadowy ‘middle place’ between heaven and hell. It was assumed that, unless one was so utterly dissolute as to earn immediate damnation, this halfway house would be the first destination of all laymen upon death – so powerful and enveloping was the contamination of sin, it was deemed inevitable that every normal human would need to endure at least a period of purification in the hereafter. What is worse, with the souls of the dead mired in an indeterminate purgatorial sentence, Latin nobles not only had their own souls to worry about – they had to answer for the fate of their dead relatives as well. Knights like Tancred, shouldering this heavy burden of responsibility, sought to salve their anxious conscience.
By the end of the eleventh century, social convention and devotional custom dictated that, alongside other penitential acts like pilgrimage, the lay aristocracy should, for the betterment of their own souls and their ancestors’ spiritual wellbeing, maintain networks of monastic patronage and donation. The developing theory of purgatory also lent permanent force to any act of endowment. Monasteries frequently appended what amounted to insurance policies to the contracts made with lay donors. Known technically as malediction clauses, these threatened dire spiritual consequences and pronounced elaborate curses upon any noble who chose to renounce his own property transactions or interfere in those of his ancestors. Had Gaston of Béarn chosen, in 1091, to reclaim rather than confirm his father’s grants to St Foi, he would have anticipated not only a personal punishment, but the infliction on his ancestor of unspeakable torments in limbo.32
The knightly aristocracy targeted by Pope Urban II’s crusading appeal in 1095 was thus locked into an enduring and overpowering system of monastic patronage. These men were not simply savage brutes, bent on vendetta and violence, they were also, in medieval terms, devout Christians engaged in a constant but seemingly hopeless battle against transgression. Through the intimate devotional interface enjoyed with religious communities they were conditioned to view monastic life as the quintessence of spiritual perfection, but, bound to the duties of knighthood, that cloistered road to salvation was closed to them. The vow required of participants in the crusade seemed to mirror that made by postulant monks, suggesting that the expedition to Jerusalem had now opened up a new path to the kingdom of heaven. Indeed, one contemporary was prompted to observe:
God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their 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 some measure of God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.33
The thrilling allure of this new opportunity, coupled with the reassuringly traditional penitential context of Urban’s proposed armed pilgrimage, rendered the crusade almost irresistible. Tancred’s reaction, like that of thousands of his fellow knights, was apparently electric:
After the judgement of Pope Urban granted remission of all their sins to all Christians going out to fight the gentiles [non-Christians], then at last, as if previously asleep, [Tancred’s] vigour was aroused, his powers grew, his eyes opened, his courage was born. For before . . . his mind was divided, uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world.34
His biographer employs heavily romanticised imagery, almost encouraging us to imagine Tancred reborn as a superhero at the moment he took the cross, but the central message of the text – that spiritual devotion was the driving force behind crusade recruitment – is echoed by a wealth of charter evidence detailing aristocratic preparations for the expedition to Jerusalem.
Preparing the soul and body
Having taken the cross in emotional and often spontaneous rituals, most First Crusaders received the traditional symbols of the pilgrim – the staff and purse – at a secondary ceremony, held days, weeks or even months after the initial public commitment to the cause.35 For the lay aristocracy, this presentation often took place within the confines of their local monastery and coincided with the finalisation of a whole swathe of spiritual and functional preparations, the details of which are now enshrined in charter records. This evidence reveals that most prospective crusader knights shared three concerns: fear of the coming campaign; a desire to depart on this sacred expedition with a clear conscience and in a penitent frame of mind; and a practical need to raise large sums of money with which to fund their exploits. Many turned to the established custom of devotional donation to resolve all three problems in one. The year 1096 saw a huge burst of activity, as hundreds of nobles sought to put their affairs in order, settling outstanding disputes with religious communities and disposing of an array of property in return for hard cash or equipment.
The Church stood to gain a great deal from this wave of penitent desperation, and most found it to be an extremely profitable year. But, in the months following the council of Clermont, so many knights looked to sell or mortgage property for money that the market eventually suffered from a glut of land and a shortage of hard coinage to pay for it. Religious houses swept up estates for a fraction of their actual value, but still struggled to free up sufficient financial resources to meet the demand for transactions. At one point, the bishop of Liège was apparently forced to strip the jewels from every reliquary in his cathedral and all those in nearby churches to raise 1,300 silver marks and three gold marks, the mortgage price of Duke Godfrey’s castle at Bouillon. No ecclesiastic could afford to mortgage Robert of Normandy’s entire duchy, so he turned to his brother, William Rufus, who duly raised 10,000 silver marks in return for rights to Normandy and all its revenues for five years.
Raymond of Toulouse was one crusader who made careful preparations for the expedition to Jerusalem. To secure the favourable intercession of the Virgin Mary he made a large donation to the cathedral of Le Puy, in return for which a candle was burned in front of her statue for the remainder of his natural life. Raymond explained that he had made this gift ‘for the redemption of my crimes and those of my parents and for the honour and love of St Gilles, whom I have frequently offended by many kinds of injuries’. He also took care to clear the decks with the abbey of St Gilles, resolving a longstanding dispute over territory in their favour.
Godfrey of Bouillon likewise sought to settle his affairs. He sold or mortgaged every scrap of disposable property he could muster to the bishops of Verdun and Liège, raising valuable cash for himself and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne, and ending bitter quarrels with both pontiffs. One document noted that the brothers had been ‘seized by the hope of an eternal inheritance and by love, prepared to go to fight for God in Jerusalem and sold and relinquished all their possessions’. They certainly continued to enjoy familial support while on crusade, for in 1098 their mother, Countess Ida of Boulogne, endowed a local monastery ‘for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem’. Godfrey did, however, leave a door open for his return to the West, maintaining an option to redeem the mortgage on the castle of Bouillon and taking care to ask his overlord, Henry IV of Germany, for permission to leave for Jerusalem.
When juxtaposed with this rich mosaic of evidence for pious motivation, the once-fashionable myth that the crusaders were self-serving, disinherited, land-hungry younger sons must be discarded. Crusading was indeed an activity that could bring spiritual and material rewards, but it was in the first instance both intimidating and extremely costly. Devotion inspired Europe to crusade, and on the road to Jerusalem the First Crusaders proved time and again that their most powerful weapon was a shared sense of purpose and an indestructible spiritual resolution.36