CHAPTER ONE

‘Oh God, the Heathens are come into thine inheritance’

The Origins and Preaching of the Fourth Crusade, 1187—99

On hearing with what severe and terrible judgement the land of Jerusalem has been smitten by the divine hand ... we could not decide easily what to do or say: the psalmist laments: ‘Oh God, the heathens are come into thine inheritance.’ Saladin’s army came on those regions ... our side was overpowered, the Lord’s Cross was taken, the king was captured and almost everyone else was either killed by the sword or seized by hostile hands ... The bishops, and the Templars and Hospitallers were beheaded in Saladin’s sight ... those savage barbarians thirsted after Christian blood and used all their force to profane the holy places and banish the worship of God from the land. What a great cause for mourning this ought to be for us and the whole Christian people!¹

With these powerful and anguished words, Pope Gregory VIII lamented the defeat of the Christian army at the Battle of Hattin on 4 July 1187. Within three months of his victory the great Muslim leader, Saladin, had swept through the Frankish lands and achieved the climax of his jihad, with the capture of Jerusalem.

The loss of Christ’s city provoked grief and outrage in Europe. The rulers of the West, temporarily at least, put aside their customary disharmony and in October 1187 the papacy launched the Third Crusade to recover the Holy Land. Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany (1152—90), the most senior figure in Christendom, led a huge contingent of up to 100.000 men, but as he waded across a river in southern Asia Minor he suffered a fatal heart attack and died. The German force broke up and it was left to the armies of King Philip II Augustus of France (1180—1223) and Richard I of England (1189—99) to take the fight to the armies of Islam. In the West, these two men were bitter enemies and their relationship on the crusade hardly improved. In theory, Philip was Richard’s overlord, but in practice the English king’s energy and military skills meant that everyone recognised him as the dominant figure. The contemporary Muslim writer Beha ad-Din noted: ‘the news of his coming had a dread and frightening effect on the hearts of the Muslims ... He had much experience of fighting and was intrepid in battle, and yet he was, in their [the Franks’] eyes below the royal status of the king of France, although richer and more renowned for martial skill and courage.’²

The two kings arrived in the Levant during the early summer of 1191. Philip soon departed to deal with urgent political matters in northern France, but Richard remained in the East for another 18 months. His victories in battles at Arsuf and Jaffa did much to undermine Saladin’s reputation, but the crusaders were unable to make a serious attempt to retake Jerusalem itself. Richard did, however, do much to re-establish the Crusader States along the coastline (stretching from northern Syria to Jaffa in modern Israel) and to restore them as a viable political and economic entity. News of intrigues between Philip and Prince John eventually forced him to leave the eastern Mediterranean, but, as he sailed, a contemporary English crusader quoted him as saying: ‘O Holy Land I commend you to God. In his loving grace may He grant me such length of life that I may bring you help as He wills. I certainly hope some time in the future to bring you the aid that I intend.’³

Richard had gained a heroic reputation, but during his journey home he was captured by political rivals and spent 15 months in prison at the hands of the duke of Austria and then the emperor of Germany. King Philip exploited his absence to take large areas of Richard’s territories in northern France, which meant that once the English ruler was free, he was much preoccupied with re-establishing his authority. In these circumstances Richard could do little, in the mid-1190s, to fulfil his promise to help the Holy Land.⁴

Richard’s departure could have been disastrous for the Franks in the Levant, but to their great good fortune, just six months after the king sailed, Saladin died, worn out by decades of warfare. The unity of the Muslims in the Middle East was shattered and a series of factions emerged in Aleppo, Damascus and Cairo, each more concerned to form alliances to defeat the other than with fighting the Franks. The Christians were able to continue their recovery and Frederick Barbarossa’s son, Emperor Henry VI (1190—7), hoping to fulfil his father’s vows, launched a new crusade (known to historians as the German Crusade). This seemed to offer a real opportunity to exploit the Muslims’ disharmony, yet once again the Franks’ hopes were to be dashed. In the early winter of 1197 came news that the emperor had died of a fever at Messina in southern Italy. The German forces returned home and, with Henry’s son Frederick aged only two, the empire was thrown into a civil war between rival claimants for the imperial title. Pope Celestine III—by this time well into his nineties—tried to mediate, but with little success.

On 8 January 1198 Celestine died, and later that same day the cardinal-bishops and bishops of the Catholic Church in Rome made an inspired choice as his replacement. They elected Lothario of Segni as Pope Innocent III, the man who would become the most powerful, dynamic and revered pontiff of the medieval period. Innocent provided the vision and drive that the papacy had lacked for generations. His pontificate saw crusades against Muslims in Spain and the Holy Land, against heretics, renegade Catholics, Orthodox Christians, as well as the pagan people of the Baltic. He permitted the foundation of the Franciscan and Dominican friars; excommunicated kings and princes; and revitalised the administration of the papal court, enabling the authority of Rome to reach ever more widely across Catholic Europe.⁵

Elected pope at the age of 37, Innocent was one of the youngest men ever to ascend the throne of St Peter. He was born in 1160 or 1161 into a landowning family at Segni, about 30 miles south-east of Rome, and his early education was at the Benedictine abbey of St Andrea al Celio in Rome itself. In the early 1180s he travelled north to Paris University: the intellectual hub of medieval Europe and the most admired centre of theological study. Here Innocent received the best education available in his age and formed many of the spiritual and philosophical ideas that would shape his conception of the papacy. He bolstered this theological background with a legal training and for three years (1186-9) studied at the law school of Bologna—again the most prestigious institution of its sort in the West. Around this time the papacy became increasingly legalistic in its procedures, and Innocent’s intellectual capabilities, allied with his deep spirituality and personal presence, were perfectly tailored to the needs of the Curia.⁶

Written sources indicate that the pope was of average height and good-looking. A mosaic portrait from about 1200 is the most contemporaneous image that we have and it shows a man with large eyes, a longish nose and a moustache. A fresco from the church of San Speco, Subiaco, depicts him in full papal dignity, complete with the ceremonial mitre, pallium (a length of material draped around the neck that symbolised high ecclesiastical office) and mantle (see plate section). Innocent was known for his skills as a writer and as a persuasive public speaker: his ability to compose and deliver sermons was exceptional. He had a sharp sense of humour, too: the envoy of one of his most bitter political opponents sought an audience and was greeted with the comment: ‘Even the devil would have to be given a hearing—if he could repent.’⁷

A great corpus of papal letters provides some insight into Innocent’s mind. Over-familiar as we are today with endless layers of paperwork, one might expect the papacy to have been a cradle of bureaucratic complexity, but prior to the thirteenth century this was not always so While earlier popes had preserved copies of some important documents, it was not until the time of Innocent III that a systematic archive was kept. Of the thousands of letters sent out from, and received by, the papal secretariat, the most significant were copied into specially bound volumes (known as registers), arranged by pontifical year, dating from the date of coronation (not election), which in Innocent’s case was 22 February. It is true that some of these letters were redrafted before being placed in the register; that many were probably written by secretaries, rather than the pope himself; and that much of year three and all of year four of the record (1200—2) have been lost. Nonetheless, it remains an invaluable body of material, which enables us to follow Innocent’s planning of the crusade and his reactions to its progress.⁸

Innocent provided a massive injection of spiritual vigour into the leadership of the Catholic Church and very quickly revealed his agenda for the papacy and his aims as the pastor of Catholic Europe. He saw an intimate link between the moral reform of (what he regarded as) a sinful society and a successful crusade to the Holy Land. The latter would free God’s city from the infidel and this in itself would be a sign of divine approval for the spiritual regeneration of His people. Evangelical preachers were to urge churchmen and laymen alike to mend their ways and earn God’s favour again.

Innocent’s passion to free the holy city became the dominant and consuming issue of his pontificate. A contemporary account of his life recorded that ‘In the midst of all his work, he quite fervently longed for the relief and recovery of the Holy Land and anxiously mulled over how he could achieve this more effectively.’⁹

In 1197 Saladin’s successors disregarded their differences to confront the German Crusade and the following spring the Germans withdrew, leaving the Franks feeling particularly vulnerable. In response to this situation the settlers dispatched the bishop of Lydda to the West to convey an appeal for help. In late June 1198 Innocent wrote of the need for the Christian faithful to assist the Holy Land, and on 15 August he issued his first call for a new crusade.¹⁰ The tone was far more intense than Pope Gregory VIII’s document of 1187 and clearly reflects Innocent’s ardent desire to defeat the infidel. More than 800 years later, the fervour of his appeal still reaches out from his letter:

Following the pitiable collapse of the territory of Jerusalem, following the lamentable massacre of the Christian people, following the deplorable invasion of that land on which the feet of Christ stood and where God, our King, had deigned before the beginning of time, to work out salvation in the midst of the Earth, following the ignominious alienation from our possession of the vivifying Cross ... the Apostolic See, alarmed over the ill-fortune of such calamity, grieved. It cried out and wailed to such a degree that due to incessant crying out, its throat was made hoarse, and from incessant weeping its eyes almost failed ... Still the Apostolic See cries out, and like a trumpet it raises its voice, eager to arouse the Christian peoples to fight Christ’s battle and to avenge the injury done to the Crucified One ... The Sepulchre of the Lord, which the Prophet foretold would be glorious, has been profaned by the impious and made inglorious.¹¹

After this dramatic exposition on the condition of the Holy Land and his own personal grief, Innocent turned his attention to the political realities of 1198. He wrote of the rulers of western Europe giving themselves over to luxurious embraces and wealthy living, and railed against their ceaseless in-fighting. Innocent then introduced a common rhetorical device into his appeal, pretending to quote a Muslim who insulted the Christians thus:

Where is your God, who can deliver neither Himself nor you from our hands? Behold! We now have profaned your holy places. Behold! We now have extended our hand to the objects of your desire, and in the initial assault we have violently overrun and hold, against your will, those places in which you pretend your superstition began. Already we have weakened and shattered the lances of the Gauls, we have frustrated the efforts of the English; we have now, for a second time, held in check the might of the Germans; we have tamed the proud Spaniards. And although you took steps to rouse up all your powers against us, you have, thus far, scarcely made progress in any way. Where then is your God?¹²

In reality, such a speech was unlikely, but the words served Innocent’s purpose perfectly. The description of recent military setbacks was true and the insults to each western crusading nation, along with the fundamental questioning of God’s power, were intended to shame the audience into action, to inspire them to regain lost honour and to avenge the insults to their own name and that of Christianity itself He challenged his audience to respond: ‘Therefore, take up, O sons, the spirit of fortitude; receive the shield of faith and the helmet of salvation. Trust not in numbers, but rather in the power of God ... come to the aid of Him through whom you exist, live and have being.’¹³

Innocent urged Christ’s warriors to set out with the right frame of mind, unclouded by sins such as vanity, greed or pride. He criticised the arrogance of some earlier crusaders and attacked the moral degeneracy of those living in the Levant whose behaviour had allegedly descended into drunkenness and gluttony.

The pope then turned to practicalities: he directed the expedition to set out in March 1199. Nobles and cities alike were to provide appropriate numbers of men ’to defend the land of the Lord’s birth’ for at least two years. The emphasis on cities providing crusaders reflected the rising importance of urban centres in western Europe at the end of the twelfth century. Agricultural life remained dominant, but a growth in trade, learning and population was a stimulus to the slow rise of towns and cities, each proud to secure its own civic identity and, where possible, independence from central control. From Innocent’s perspective their wealth and status meant they could offer valuable support for the expedition.

Innocent’s concern for the crusade was also made plain in his appointment of two senior churchmen to act as his representatives (or legates) in the recruitment and direction of the army. Once under way, both the Second (1145—9) and Third (1189—92) Crusades had experienced only limited influence from papal legates, and Innocent planned to take a much closer interest in his own campaign. One legate (Peter Capuano) was to travel to England and France to make peace between Richard and Philip, and another (Soffredo) was to seek Venetian support for the enterprise. He also directed other churchmen to preach and support the crusade. Many people in western Europe had criticised the Church—with its obvious prosperity—for not providing sufficient assistance in earlier crusades, but Innocent commanded, under pain of suspension of office, that the clergy should outfit and finance knights for the expedition as well. Finally, he identified local churchmen to lead the recruitment in each particular area.¹⁴

This passionate and uncompromising appeal was sent out to the kingdoms of France, England, Hungary and Sicily. As Innocent himself was aware, however, its timing was not propitious. Neither Germany nor Spain could be approached: the former was gripped by civil war and the latter was fully occupied in the reconquest of Iberia from the Muslims. Furthermore, England and France were still locked in conflict. Because, ultimately, the Fourth Crusade was led by nobles rather than kings, it might appear that Innocent had chosen to ignore monarchs as he gathered support for the expedition. After all, as pope, might he not find it easier to direct nobles, rather than kings? Furthermore, it was the pride and enmity of Richard and Philip that had, in part, caused the Third Crusade to fail to recover Jerusalem. Yet Innocent recognised that the combined resources, prestige and experience of the two kings would be invaluable to the Christian cause. Richard and Philip represented his best opportunities to muster a strong army and he realised that the two men (or, indeed, just one of them) would not take the cross again unless peace was firmly established between them.

In view of his record as a crusading hero, Richard was probably the man most worth pursuing. Since the king’s release from captivity in February 1194 he had spent years trying to recover the northern French lands lost to Philip during his incarceration. Recent military engagements had given Richard considerable momentum in this quest and at a battle at Gisors in northern France in late September 1198 King Philip was unseated from his horse and pitched into the nearby river. ’I hear that he was forced to drink from the river’ was Richard’s satisfied report of the engagement.¹⁵ As well as being a great warrior, Richard was a well-educated individual and an astute politician. His personality was a volatile mixture of a music-loving and quick-witted man of arms and a sharp-tempered, brutal pragmatist: in the course of the papal legate’s efforts to convince him to crusade, it was the latter aspect of this mercurial character that he would display to greatest effect.

In December 1198, Peter Capuano reached northern Europe. The source for the meeting between Richard and Peter is the History of William Marshal, a vernacular history composed in the 1220s and based on the memories of one of northern Europe’s leading noblemen.¹⁶ In spite of this time gap, William vividly recalled the legate’s appearance: his complexion was likened to the yellow of a stork’s foot and his efforts at humility were grossly overplayed for his northern European audience, because both the king and the marshal found the man’s obsequiousness nauseating. The legate’s message was hardly any more palatable, as he tried to remind Richard that his continued hostility to Philip harmed the Christian presence in the Holy Land. Richard is known to have had a truly vile temper (on one occasion, unable to defeat one of his knights in a mock fight, he completely lost his composure and ordered the man never to appear before him again), and on this occasion he unleashed an epic performance. Just when, he asked Peter, had Philip taken the lands at issue in the first instance? The answer was in the aftermath of the crusade. While Richard had been risking his life on behalf of Christendom, Philip had (as the Lionheart saw it) slunk back to Europe, unable to tolerate the rigours of the campaign, and had treacherously stolen his lands: ‘If it had not been for his malice, forcing me to return, I would have been able to recover the whole of Outremer. Then, when I was in prison, he conspired to keep me there so that he could steal my lands.’ Richard demanded that all of these territories should be returned; only then would he make peace. Peter’s platitudinous response was this: ‘Ah, sire, how true it is that no one can have everything that he wants.’ Again he made the case for the needs of the Holy Land and insisted upon peace between England and France. Richard grumpily offered a five-year truce which would enable Philip to retain the castles, but not the surrounding lands, that he held. This was the best deal he was prepared to make.

Perhaps, at this point, Peter might have sensed that the royal blood pressure had already reached an unhealthy level and he should have left while the mood was merely tense. Unfortunately he pressed onwards and made a further stipulation: the release of ‘one of the men Richard hated most in all the world’, Bishop Philip Beauvais—recently taken captive by the English ruler. This cousin of the French king was the man responsible for encouraging Richard’s jailers to treat him harshly and was known as a warlike individual, often seen in full armour at the head of a contingent of fighting men. Peter claimed it was wrong to detain a person who was both anointed and consecrated. This was a demand too far; the king roared:

By my head, he is deconsecrated for he is a false Christian. It was not as a bishop that he was captured, but as a knight, fighting and fully armed, a laced helmet on his head. Sir Hypocrite! What a fool you are! If you had not been an envoy I would send you back with something to show the pope which he would not forget! Never did the pope raise a finger to help me when I was in prison and wanted his help to be free. And now he asks me to set free a robber and an incendiary who has never done me anything but harm. Get out of here, Sir Traitor; liar, trickster, corrupt dealer in churches, and never let me see you again!

As the legate retreated before this torrent of rage, Richard threatened to have him castrated. Peter fled, preferring to preserve the clerical dignity intact. Richard himself, said to be as angry as a wounded boar, stormed off to his bedchamber, slammed the shutters closed and refused to speak to a soul.¹⁷

With the collapse of this particular diplomatic effort, peace between Philip and Richard seemed more unlikely than ever and the crusade even further from reality. Then, on 26 March 1199, as he besieged the small castle of Chalus-Chabrol, south of Limoges, Richard was hit by a crossbow bolt in the shoulder. One source recorded that the king himself tried to remove it, but it snapped off and left the barb in his flesh. Night had fallen and in the flickering torchlight a surgeon tried to dig out the metal, but he only succeeded in butchering Richard even more. Over the next few days, as his wound began to blacken and as gangrene set in, the king feared the worst. He summoned his mother, the indomitable Eleanor of Aquitaine, now aged 77, and she hastened to his side. Richard also made provision for his succession. With no legitimate children of his own (he probably had one bastard son), he named his brother John as his heir. Some reports indicate that he engaged in carnal pleasures too, indulging heavily in the ‘joys of Venus’, before his strength finally ebbed away. On his deathbed Richard ordered that his heart should be placed in Rouen cathedral, the centre of his Norman lands; his brains and entrails should be given to the abbey of Charroux in Poitou, his spiritual homeland; and his body should be taken to the abbey of Fontevrault, to join that of his father. Nothing was to be sent to England, the land of his birth and the place where he had spent barely six months of his reign.

Richard pardoned the crossbowman who had fired the fatal bolt, confessed his sins and received extreme unction. He passed away in the early evening of 6 April 1199. In spite of the dying king’s wishes, his associates failed to share his chivalric attitude towards the royal killer and the unfortunate crossbowman was flayed alive and then hanged.¹⁸

King John needed to establish himself in power, while Philip of France had to adjust to the fact that his most formidable opponent had gone, a situation that left him free to contemplate making further inroads into English territory. From Pope Innocent’s perspective, in spite of the poor relations between Rome and the English crown, Richard’s death meant the end of the greatest crusading warrior of the age, a man who struck fear into the hearts of the Muslims and a monarch who could have been a potent figurehead in the effort to reclaim Jerusalem. Innocent’s first and preferred vision for the new crusade had, therefore, proven stillborn.

Philip of France was a very different sort of man from Richard the Lionheart. Eight years younger than his arch-rival, he had come to the throne in 1180 aged only 15. After a difficult decade imposing his authority in France, Philip had taken the cross to fight in the Third Crusade. He was not a particularly enthusiastic warrior and brought a smaller force of knights than Richard to the Levant, yet he played some role in the successful capture of Acre in 1191. After only three months in the East, however, Philip chose to return home. To many—particularly Richard’s propagandists—this was a sign of cowardice and Philip was heavily criticised. Over time he matured into a clever, thoughtful ruler who did much to enhance the economic and administrative structures of the French crown. He was responsible for developing the city of Paris and it was early in his reign that the first college of the University of Paris—the finest university of the medieval period—was founded. Philip also undertook to extend the walls of the city: the existing structure protected just 25 acres; he enclosed 675. He ordered the streets to be paved for the first time and decreed that the abattoirs should be situated downriver from the city. Commercial life flourished: the market at Les Halles was enlarged and important French nobles began to recognise the prestige of Paris and saw that it was important to have a presence there, rather than remaining on their rural estates.

As a man, Philip was said to be earnest, pious, highly strung and fond of wine, food and women. In some ways he hosted a rather austere court, with legislation against swearing (a 20-sous gift to the poor for blasphemy, or a dip in the River Seine for those who refused to pay), and he displayed little interest in the patronage of music or literature. The king was described as a tall, fresh-faced man, balding by his mid-thirties and becoming ruddy with drink. It was his personal life that was to bring him the greatest difficulty, however, one consequence of which—poor relations with Pope Innocent—undoubtedly contributed towards his failure to take part in the Fourth Crusade. Philip’s first marriage took place when he was aged 15 and his bride, Isabella of Hainault, was 10. Seven years later, in 1187, a son, Louis (later King Louis VIII, 1223—6), was born, but Isabella died in childbirth in 1190. After the Third Crusade, Philip decided to marry again and settled upon Princess Ingeborg of Denmark. She offered a large dowry and a good strategic alliance against the German Empire. Eighteen-year-old Ingeborg was said to be ‘a lady of remarkable beauty’, yet during the wedding ceremony on 14 August 1193 the king is reported to have gone deathly pale and started to tremble. He sent his wife away and refused to sleep with her.

There is no clear explanation for this turn of events but, in any case, Philip soon chose another woman, Agnes of Méran, as his preferred partner. Some blamed Agnes for bewitching Philip so that he turned against Ingeborg, which may suggest an existing liaison with Agnes. He soon sought a divorce. The French bishops agreed and nullified the marriage, leaving Philip free to wed Agnes in 1196. Ingeborg resisted and claimed the new marriage to be adulterous, bigamous and incestuous (Agnes and Philip were distantly related); the papacy agreed and urged the king to take his wife back. Philip steadfastly refused, and Ingeborg spent much of the next 20 years as a shadowy figure, confined to prisons, convents and generally out of public view. In 1203 she wrote an anguished letter to Innocent: ‘no one dares visit me, no priest is allowed to comfort my soul. I am deprived of medical aid necessary for my health. I no longer have enough clothes and those that I have are not worthy of a queen ... I am shut in a house and forbidden to go out.’

Five years earlier, in May 1198, Innocent had written to the king to condemn his actions and to threaten ecclesiastical sanctions against France. An interdict, or ban on public prayer, was proclaimed, but Philip resisted it strongly. In fact he lambasted the clergy who obeyed it, saying that they had no heed for the souls of the poor who were deprived of spiritual consolation. Philip made several promises that he would set Agnes aside and bring Ingeborg to his bed, but invariably broke his word. In the autumn of 1201, however, Agnes died and a way forward could be seen. Ingeborg was treated marginally better, although it was not until 1213 that she was restored to court; Philip, meanwhile, sought comfort in the arms of a prostitute from Arras. In short, the tensions caused by the king’s personal life, combined with the enduring conflict with England, meant that the second of Pope Innocent’s original choices to lead a new crusade would not, and could not, countenance taking the cross.¹⁹

If the rulers of Europe were unable to fight for the Holy Land, the responsibility fell to the senior nobility. This was less significant than it may seem: the First Crusade had triumphed without the involvement of kings—it was made up of counts and dukes, and of substantial contingents of knights and foot-soldiers.

When a man took the cross and had the clothing on his shoulder marked with Christ’s sign, what was required of him in emotional, physical and financial terms? What questions did the crusaders ask themselves and what effect did their decisions have upon their families?

On the eve of the Fourth Crusade, exactly 100 years had passed since the capture of Jerusalem (July 1099) by the armies of the First Crusade. There was, therefore, a large body of knowledge accumulated from the journeys of previous generations, passed down through families and told and retold in the courts, taverns, squares and households of Europe. Innocent’s crusaders would not be stepping into the unknown in the way that the knights of 1095 had done. Whether an insight into crusading was a positive stimulus to take the cross might, to modern eyes at least, be open to debate. Even in as tough an age as the twelfth century, crusading was a particularly stark and brutal experience that would stretch physical and mental capabilities to extremes.

First of all there was the journey itself. From northern France to the Holy Land was almost 2,500 miles, a distance that had to be covered on horseback or. in part, by sea; or, most likely when one’s horse died of starvation, on foot. While many of the nobility were accustomed to moving around the courts of Europe, few foot-soldiers of peasant stock had ever left the area close to their villages. For nobles and lesser men alike, the crusade represented easily the greatest adventure of their lives.

From the end of the twelfth century seaborne crusading expeditions became more common because they were deemed faster and safer than the land march. Most of the holy warriors had travelled by river because, given the dismal condition of many medieval roads, it afforded a highly effective method of communication. The experience of the deep, open sea was, however, an entirely different matter. Fifty years after the Fourth Crusade, Jean of Joinville, a knight on the first crusade of King (St) Louis IX of France, eloquently expressed the fears of the landlubber when he described the prayers and hymn-singing of his fellow-crusaders:

We saw nothing but sea and sky around us, while each day the wind carried us farther and farther from the land in which we were born. I give you these details so that you may appreciate the temerity of the man who dares, with other people’s property in his possession, or in a state of mortal sin himself, to place himself in such a precarious position. For what can a voyager tell, when he goes to sleep at night, whether he may be lying at the bottom of the sea the next morning?²⁰

The duration of a crusade was another issue for those considering taking part in the holy war. Pope Innocent asked for a two-year commitment, although many previous campaigns, such as the First Crusade, had lasted longer. Aside from royal or noble households, this was before the age of the professional soldier and conscription (although emergency levies might be implemented in times of crisis). Knights were accustomed to the idea of rendering a period of service to their lord, but this tended to be fixed at 40 days per year: the Lord Almighty, however, required a far lengthier commitment. While crusading was, in theory, a strictly voluntary exercise, there is little doubt that if a noble decided to take the cross, then barring old age or physical impediment, his household knights were duty bound to share their master’s enthusiasm.²¹

The most pressing emotion for the crusaders—as the majority of soldiers throughout history have experienced—was a fear of death or captivity. The mortality rates for earlier expeditions were truly terrible, with losses from illness and starvation compounding those inflicted by enemy forces. Even with the limited amount of information at out disposal we have hard evidence of death rates at around 35 per cent on the First Crusade and up to 50 per cent on the German crossing of Asia Minor during the Second Crusade.²²Figures for the medieval period obviously lack the precision of modern records, and sources tend to concentrate on the nobility, rather than the ordinary men, although in the case of the latter one may suppose even heavier casualties, given their inferior armour and weaker diet, as well as their minimal value as captives. It is sobering that the authorities who sanctioned the crusades were willing to tolerate such appalling levels of mortality. For a crusader, fear of death was muted by the promise of martyrdom: a guaranteed place in paradise. The brutality of medieval warfare would have been familiar in the West, but the hardships of a crusade—the distance, the climate, the unknown enemy and problems of food supply—would have held additional terrors.

The stories of survivors from previous crusades must have brought this home to those who prepared to take the cross in 1199 and 1200. Fulcher of Chartres’s account of the First Crusade, written around 1106 described the fear in the Christian camp during the Battle of Dorylaeum (in Asia Minor) on 1 July 1097: ‘We were all huddled together like sheep in a fold, trembling and frightened, surrounded on all sides by enemies so that we could not turn in any direction.’²³ Another chronicler recorded: ‘the Turks burst into the camp in strength, striking with arrows from their horn bows, killing pilgrim foot-soldiers ... sparing no one on the grounds of age’.²⁴

Raymond of Aguilers was chaplain to Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse, during the First Crusade and his account of a battle at the siege of Antioch (1098) conveys a little of the confusion of battle:

The boldness of the enemy grew ... our men, relying on their favourable and lofty location, fought against the enemy and at the first attack overthrew them; but, forgetful of the threatening battle and intent upon plunder, they [in turn] were most vilely put to flight. For more than one hundred men were suffocated in the gate of the city, and even more horses. Then the Turks who had entered the fortress wanted to go down into the city ... The battle was waged with such force from morning to evening that nothing like it was ever heard of. A certain frightful and as yet unknown calamity befell us, for amidst the hail of arrows and rocks and the constant charge of javelins, and the deaths of so many, our men became unconscious. If you ask for the end of this fight, it was night.²⁵

Almost 50 years later the French contingent on the Second Crusade suffered even more grievously when their forces were slaughtered by the Turks in southern Asia Minor: Odo of Deuil, a participant in the expedition, described the feelings in the camp as survivors slowly straggled back to their comrades and regathered: ‘There was no sleep that night, during which each man either waited for one of his friends who never came, or joyously, and with no regard for material loss, welcomed one who had been despoiled.’²⁶

Alongside the risk of death was the danger of captivity. Ordinary soldiers might be butchered on the battlefield, or else sold in the slave markets of Aleppo, Damascus or Cairo and often condemned to a life of arduous labour. Men of greater standing, if recognised as such, were imprisoned and then, eventually, ransomed. Conditions for prisoners were inevitably poor. Ibn Wasil, an early thirteenth-century Muslim writer, described the prison at Ba‘albek as a pit with no windows: ‘there was no difference between night and day in there’. Ironically, Ba’albek is the same town where the western hostages John McCarthy, Brian Keenan, Terry Waite and Frank Reed were incarcerated during the Lebanese civil war in the 1980s. Another prison is described at the castle of Beth Guvrin where a captive was kept in solitary confinement for a year until the trapdoor was opened and a second prisoner lowered into the cell. In spite of these grim conditions, survival was possible: in the 1160s the ruler of Aleppo freed German prisoners taken captive on the Second Crusade back in 1147—8.

Sometimes, however, important prisoners were not ransomed, as was the case of the unfortunate Gervase of Bazoches, seized by the Damascenes in 1101. King Baldwin I of Jerusalem resisted paying for him and Gervase’s captors urged him to convert to Islam or face death. A contemporary describes Gervase’s fate: ‘Splendidly obdurate, he rejected such criminal behaviour, and was horrified even to hear such a suggestion. This praiseworthy man was immediately seized, tied to a tree in the middle of a field and was torn by arrows from all sides. The crown was then sawn from his head, and the rest was made into the form of a cup, as though to hold drinks for the ruler of Damascus, by whose orders these acts had been done, to frighten our men.’²⁷

Even if a crusader managed to avoid death or imprisonment, for most participants the expedition was an unbelievably gruelling experience. The most likely causes of hardship were lack of food and water. Only limited supplies could be carried with the armies and, once they moved out of friendly territories, it might prove impossible to secure provisions from a scared or hostile local population. As the writer of the Gesta Francorum understood from first-hand knowledge, the warriors of the First Crusade were forced to go to extreme lengths to survive: ‘Our men were so terribly afflicted by thirst that they bled their horses and asses and drank the blood; others let down belts and clothes into a sewer and squeezed the liquid into their mouths; others passed water into one another’s cupped hands and drank; others dug up damp earth and lay down on their backs, piling the earth upon their chests because they were so dry with thirst.’²⁸ At the siege of Jerusalem in July 1099 the same author wrote: ‘we suffered so badly from thirst that we sewed up the skins of oxen and buffaloes, and we used to carry water in them for the distance of nearly six miles. We drank water from these vessels, although it stank, and what with foul water and barley bread we suffered great distress every day, for the Saracens used to lie in wait for our men by every spring and pool, where they killed them and cut them to pieces.’²⁹ Earlier in the crusade an eight-month siege at Antioch in northern Syria tested men’s endurance to the limits: ‘So terrible was the famine that men boiled and ate the leaves of figs, vines, thistles and all kinds of trees. Others stewed the dried skins of horses, camels, asses, oxen or buffaloes, which they ate.’³⁰ Unsurprisingly, these arduous conditions caused many thousands of men to desert. By the time of the Third Crusade, however, better organisation and stricter discipline meant that fewer fled the campaign, although the problem of food and water supply remained a potential hazard for all medieval armies.

Closely associated with such deprivation was, of course, illness and disease. The army of the First Crusade was ravaged by an outbreak of (probably) typhoid in late 1098 and participants in the Third Crusade were endlessly riven by a variety of debilitating illnesses. A particularly dreadful plague hit the camp besieging Acre in 1190-1 and thousands perished, both rich and poor alike. The author of the Itinerarium Peregrinorum et Gesta Regis Ricardi, an account of the Third Crusade, commented:

a recital of the enormous number of all those who died in the army in that short time would seem beyond belief. The total of the magnates alone, according to one writer, can be set out as follows, but that writer declared that it was impossible to discover the losses amongst the masses. In the army died: six archbishops and the patriarch of Jerusalem, twelve bishops, forty counts, 500 great nobles as well as a great crowd of priests, clergy and people whose number cannot be known.³¹

Emergency medical care was, unsurprisingly, minimal. The Knights Hospitaller had field hospitals for the battles in the Holy Land, but the chances of dying from injury or infection of wounds remained considerable.

Because of the punishing physical demands of warfare and the conventions of medieval society, most crusaders were male. But some women also hoped to benefit from the offer of spiritual reward. Orderic Vitalis, writing in Normandy in the early twelfth century, reported: ‘wives, lamenting, longed passionately to leave their children and all their riches behind to follow their husbands’.³² Although some women are known to have taken the cross, usually these were ladies of high birth, such as Queen Eleanor of France (best known today as Eleanor of Aquitaine, later the wife of Henry II of England). Unfortunately, she became embroiled in one of the great scandals of the medieval period when allegations of an affair with her uncle, Prince Raymond of Antioch, did much to confirm the prejudices of many churchmen that women could only bring trouble to a crusading army through their natural inclination to provoke the vices of lust and envy. Ordinary women might be present on a crusade as pilgrims, accompanying the expedition, or else they took on lowly, menial roles, such as washerwomen or—in spite of the spiritual character of a crusade—as prostitutes. The majority of crusaders’ wives chose to stay at home, however, where their presence was arguably more valuable as the guardian of family lands and of the next generation of the nobility.³³

Some women might actually encourage men to take the cross. As a chronicler of the Third Crusade wrote: ‘Brides urged their husbands and mothers incited their sons to go, their only sorrow being that they were not able to set out with them because of the weakness of their sex.’³⁴ On the other hand, women might also prevent men from going on crusade. Gerald of Wales had recruited a knight for the same expedition, only for the man’s wife to ‘put a sudden stop to his noble intentions by playing upon his weakness and exercising her womanly charms’.³⁵

Given the strong possibility that a crusader would die, the emotional pressure on those taking the cross must have been intense. In theory, a married man had to get his wife’s agreement before he became a crusader. Whether this stricture had any real effect is hard to tell: a man swept up by the enthusiasm of a sermon, or feeling pressured by peers or family traditions, may have had scant regard for the views of his spouse. In a few cases, however, it must have hampered recruitment because, in order to maximise support for his crusade—and contrary to canon law—in a letter of 1201 Pope Innocent indicated that a man need not seek his wife’s consent.

Regardless of marital status, many crusaders willingly set aside the comforts and security of home and family. A participant in the Second Crusade eloquently outlined the sacrifices made: ‘Yet it is a fact that they [the crusaders] have exchanged all their honours and dignities for a blessed pilgrimage in order to obtain an eternal reward. The alluring affection of wives, the tender kisses of sucking infants at the breast, the even more delightful pledges of grown-up children, the much desired consolation of relatives and friends—all these they have left behind to follow Christ, retaining only the sweet but torturing memory of their native land.’³⁶

The thought of leaving a wife, children, parents, family and friends must surely have weighed heavily on all those who took the cross. Given the rudimentary nature of medieval communications, even sending letters home was a difficult task. For the elite, and those with access to a literate cleric, this was an option, however. In early 1098 Count Stephen of Blois was able to address greetings to Adela, ‘his sweetest and most amiable wife, to his dear children and to his vassals of all ranks’ and report good progress for the First Crusade. Events could change quickly, though, and by the time Adela received the letter a couple of months later, Stephen’s optimism, along with his courage, had evaporated and the count had deserted the expedition.³⁷ Given the restricted levels of literacy, messages to religious houses were often the main conduit of news to the West and the clerics in turn would pass on information to the local people. In the light of these handicaps, all those in Europe could do was to pray for the safety of the crusaders; indeed, they were positively encouraged to do so by the papacy. In one case at least, an even more devout course was taken when one Walter of Treione joined the monastery of St Peter at Chartres to pray for his father as the latter set out on the Second Crusade in 1147.³⁸

As the men fought and marched their way to the Holy Land, their thoughts must often have strayed back to their native lands. A sense of homesickness emerges from some sources, particularly at moments of crisis. As the first Frankish settlers struggled to establish their control over the Holy Land they faced hostile armies far larger than their own. At times such as this the outlook seemed grim, as Fulcher of Chartres wrote: ‘On all sides we were besieged by our enemies ... That day nothing went well; we had no rest, nor were our thirsty beasts even watered. Indeed, I wished very much that I were in Chartres or Orléans, and so did others.’³⁹ One can sense his yearning for the security of the familiar sounds and smells of northern France—and feel the fatigue and fear of an army in trouble and far from home. One advantage later crusaders held over the pioneers of 1095—9 was the presence of fellow-Franks in the Levant. The shared faith, language and, in many cases, family ties represented a bridgehead that could help to soften the cultural shock of the journey to the East.

The safety of family and property were important concerns, too. On a personal level, some may have feared for a partner’s fidelity. The Muslim defenders at the siege of Lisbon in 1147 enjoyed baiting their attackers: ‘they taunted us with the idea of numerous children about to be born at home in our absence, and said that on this account our wives would not be concerned about our deaths since they would have bastard progeny enough. And they undertook that if any of us should survive, we would return to our home lands in poverty and misery; and they mocked us and gnashed their teeth against us.’⁴⁰

One way to try to ensure a woman’s safety, and her sexual purity, was to place her under the close care of a religious house. The First Crusader Gilbert of Aalst actually founded the monastery of Merhem for his sister Lietgard as he prepared to leave for the Levant.⁴¹

The protection afforded by the great religious institutions of the time was important in dealing with another serious worry faced by a departing crusader and his family. Because of the turbulence of the medieval age, the absence of a noble and probably many of his knights presented a (literally) heaven-sent opportunity for a less scrupulous neighbour to exploit. The papacy had tried to pre-empt such a possibility by promising that crusaders’ lands were under ecclesiastical guardianship and threatening heavy penalties for anyone who transgressed. In fact, the welter of legal cases after the First Crusade seems to indicate that, even so, many knights and nobles suffered losses of land or rights in the course of their absence.⁴² In order to prevent this a crusader would appoint someone—often a close relative—to look after his property. Hostile incursions were sometimes resisted as a result. Sibylla of Flanders took control of the county when her husband Thierry left on the Second Crusade in 1146. Two years later, when the neighbouring count of Hainault tried to seize Flemish territory, Sibylla herself led the opposition and forced the invaders to flee. Sibylla was by no means the only woman left in charge when her husband went on crusade, but such moments represented rare opportunities for women to exercise real political power in the medieval age.⁴³

Another consideration before taking the cross was the cost of the campaign. To equip a knight, his squires and servants required a considerable outlay. Chain mail, weapons and, most of all, horses were extremely expensive. It was also essential to take large sums of money to purchase food, although nobles sometimes carried valuables with them to barter, exchange or use as gifts as required.

The funding of a crusade obliged men to mortgage or sell their land and property rights, usually to the Church, because it was the only institution with sufficient resources to buy or lend large sums of money. Thousands of transactions, recorded in documents known as charters, survive from the medieval period and a significant proportion of them are connected with financing crusades. In a few cases we can see two or three documents made by the same man as he sought to organise the disposal of various property rights and to raise the cash he needed. At times, particular churches could not cope with the demand for money and were compelled to melt down valuables. They might also give gifts to an individual crusader in the form of money or useful items such as pack animals. Doubtless families offered whatever backing they could, although the disposal of land and rights often led to interminable arguments as to the validity of particular promises or deals.

It has been estimated that a knight needed to spend four times his annual income to pay for a crusade—yet his family still needed to survive at home and there had to be provision for them in case he did not return. Many crusaders seem to have run out of money in the course of their journey to the East, which meant that they relied on the patronage of the most senior nobles, or on securing booty from the campaign. If either of these was not forthcoming, destitution loomed; there was still the need to pay for a passage back to the West, too. It is not surprising to find crusaders expressing concern over financial matters. Hugh of Saint-Pol was one of the leading figures on the Fourth Crusade and in July 1203 he wrote to friends in northern Europe: ‘I am quite anxious about my lands and my loans because, if I return (God willing), I will return burdened with many debts, and it is in my interest that they be paid off from my lands.’⁴⁴

As people have discovered following recent episodes such as the Vietnam War and the 1991 Gulf conflict, it is easy to overlook the mixture of emotions generated in the aftermath of a crusade. For some families the homecoming brought fame and joy. Men’s achievements were enshrined in oral verse and literature. William of Malmesbury, writing in the 1120s, rhapsodised about the achievements of Godfrey of Bouillon and Tancred of Antioch:

... leaders of high renown, to whose praises posterity, if it judge aright, will assign no limits; heroes from the cold of Europe plunged into the intolerable heat of the East, careless of their own lives ... they overwhelmed so many enemy cities by the fame and operation of their prowess ... Let poets with their eulogies now give place, and fabled history no longer laud the heroes of Antiquity. Nothing to be compared with their glory has ever been begotten by any age.⁴⁵

In the 1130s the Anglo-Norman monk, Orderic Vitalis, described why he included the story of the First Crusade in his Ecclesiastical History: ‘a noble and marvellous theme for exposition is unfolded for writers to study ... Never, I believe, has a more glorious subject been given ... than the Lord offered in our own time to poets and writers when He triumphed over pagans in the East through the efforts of a few Christians whom He had stirred up to leave their homes . . .’⁴⁶ The Flemish historian Lambert of Ardres wrote of the deeds of his own lord, Arnold the Old: ‘It ought to be known, however, that in this fight at Antioch [June 1098], Arnold the Old was reputed to be the best amongst the many nobles of many nations and peoples, because of the strength of his spirit as much as the skill in knighthood of his outstanding body.’⁴⁷ Crusaders such as Count Robert II of Flanders became known as ‘Jerosolimitanus’ in recognition of their exploits in the East.

Against the prospect of fame and admiration other, more negative features emerge. Most crusaders returned in relative poverty, although Guy of Rochefort came home from the 1101 campaign ‘renowned and rich’, according to a contemporary.⁴⁸ More commonly, a journey to the Holy Land opened up the possibility of bringing back relics—objects of inestimable value—to present to a local ecclesiastical institution. In part this was to give thanks for a safe return; in part to acknowledge a church’s financial support. Churchmen carried back relics for their own religious houses. In 1148—9, Bishop Ortleib of Basel presented the monastery of Schönthal with a piece of the True Cross along with stones from Gethsemane, Calvary, the Holy Sepulchre, the tomb of Lazarus and Bethlehem: all objects sanctified by their association with the holy places. Aside from relics, one crusader found an altogether more bizarre souvenir to commemorate his experience: Gouffier of Lastours brought a tame lion home with him; its fate is unknown.⁴⁹

Yet for crusaders whose campaigns foundered there was the burden of defeat. Expeditions that had, in theory, been divinely blessed at their outset must have failed for a reason and the explanation given usually represented either a practical or a spiritual angle. In the course of the Second Crusade, as the French army crossed Asia Minor, it lost formation and was decimated by the Turks. One man, Geoffrey of Rancon, was consistently mentioned and the chroniclers made it plain that he was held fully responsible for the huge losses. Odo of Deuil was present at the battle and wrote: ‘Geoffrey of Rancon ... earned our everlasting hatred ... the entire people judged that he should be hanged because he had not obeyed the king’s command about the day’s march; and perhaps the king’s uncle, who shared the guilt, protected Geoffrey from punishment.’ ⁵⁰ Bernard of Clairvaux, the churchman who had led the preaching of the Second Crusade, preferred to identify the participants’ thoughts of greed and glory as the cause of their defeat.

Some families, of course, had to learn the tragic news of the loss of one of their kin. Aside from the effect this had on dynastic and political affairs, we have very limited insight into the human and emotional cost of such a loss, although a few rare examples do survive. We know that Ebrolda, the widow of Berengarius, a knight who died on the First Crusade, withdrew from the world and became a nun at the priory of Marcigny. More difficult still were the cases where no one knew for certain whether a man had been captured or killed. In 1106, Ida of Louvain took the remarkable step of making a journey to the East in the hope of finding her husband, Baldwin of Mons, count of Hainault, who had gone missing in Asia Minor in 1098. A local chronicler wrote that ‘out of love for God and her husband, with great effort and expense, she travelled to the Levant, where, unfortunately, she found no comfort or certainty’.⁵¹ Another contemporary wrote: ‘Whether he was killed or captured, no one knows to this day.’⁵²

Even if a crusader returned safely to the West, he had to deal with the psychological impact of years of warfare and suffering, as well as memories of the loss of friends and relatives in the course of the fighting. Men had to become reaccustomed to their homelands, rather than sharing in the routine labours of the crusade. Sometimes relatives would have died in their absence; on occasion their lands would have been reduced or threatened by the actions of a local rival, which in turn led to negotiations, warfare or a difficult legal case in order to regain lost territory or rights. The crusader’s family and household also had to readjust to an individual whose absence they had compensated for during the time of the crusade. Medieval sources are not especially attuned to providing such information, but in one or two instances the participants’ behaviour hints at what a terrible ordeal they had been through, both physically and mentally. King Conrad III of Germany received a head wound in battle in Asia Minor in 1147 and, although he recuperated at Constantinople before returning to the crusade the following year, the injury troubled him for the remainder of his life. Conrad may also have contracted malaria in the East, because for several years after his crusade he was plagued by a debilitating illness, not connected with his head wound. Another crusader, Guy Trousseau of Montlhery, suffered what appears to have been a nervous breakdown. He had deserted from the First Crusade during the siege of Antioch and, as Abbot Suger recorded, ‘he had been broken by the stress of a long trip and the irritation that comes from various afflictions, and by guilt for his behaviour at Antioch ... Now wasting away and devoid of all bodily strength, he feared that his only daughter might be disinherited.’ In such a status-conscious military society it seems that Guy could not bear the dishonour of his actions and he was, literally, dying of shame.⁵³

Another glimpse of the human cost of a crusade can be had in a contemporary statue in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nancy (see plate section). It is believed that the couple are Count Hugh of Vaudémont and his wife Aigeline of Burgundy. The sculpture was originally placed in the abbey of Belval, a priory supported by the Vaudémont family, and it was probably commissioned by Aigeline when her husband died in 1155. Hugh had taken part in the Second Crusade, and the statue shows his wife greeting him on his return. The sculpture conveys genuine emotion and intimacy and is a moving and powerful reminder of the feelings of separation and fear generated by a crusade. The couple cling tightly to each other with Aigeline’s left hand protectively clasped around her husband’s waist, just below his crusader’s cross, while her right hand tenderly rests on his right shoulder and touches his neck. Her head rests against his bearded face, nestling on his left shoulder, determined to feel his warmth and closeness. Aigeline is clearly relieved to see Hugh again, yet her pleasure is mixed with tension and the way she clings to him so closely gives the impression that she never wants to let go of him; after the years of being apart, she cannot bear the thought of losing him again. On Hugh’s part, the strain of completing the journey is apparent in the fixed expression on his face; the count stares straight ahead, exhausted, but resolute and unbowed at the completion of his vow. He grips his pilgrim’s staff tightly (there was a close overlap between the ideas of pilgrimage and crusading at this time, hence the pilgrim’s staff and wallet) and his shoes are in tatters, showing the hardship of the trip. Yet he too reveals his feelings for Aigeline, with his left hand placed protectively around her left shoulder and his fingers just squeezing her for reassurance. Hugh and Aigeline were fortunate in that they were reunited and their mutual devotion still shines through, but for many others, of course, the outcome of a crusade was not so happy.⁵⁴

In essence, a crusade was known to be a highly dangerous, expensive business. It could bring fame and honour to an individual and his family; it could also bring death, insecurity and financial ruin. The reasons why generations of westerners chose to engage in this most hazardous of ventures are complex and powerful.