A History of the Crusades (4 page)

It has often been Thomas’s lot to be cast as the archetypal robber baron of eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, the sort of untamed social menace which thrived when governments were weak and the Church’s moralizing imperfectly respected. This is unfair. Thomas’s problems seem to have been more dynastic than psychological. Victimized by a hostile father and stepmother, he found himself forced to struggle for control of the castles, lands, and rights he believed were his rightful inheritance. A case can also be made for arguing that, far from being a threat to society, Thomas’s energetic lordship brought a measure of stability to an area of France where competition between various jurisdictions—royal, episcopal, and comital—created the potential for disorder. Treated as a piece of reportage Guibert’s pen portrait is clearly tendentious and overstated. Its true significance lies in its exaggeration, since this implicitly reveals the standards of normal behaviour by which notorious misdeeds had to be judged. In order to denigrate Thomas effectively, Guibert could not simply portray him as brutal but as excessively and indiscriminately so. In other words, Thomas and Guibert, two men intimately connected with crusading in their different ways, lived in a society where violence was endemic and in itself unremarkable.

This constitutes perhaps the greatest mental adjustment which a modern observer must make when considering the central
Middle Ages. Violence was everywhere, impinging on many aspects of daily life. Legal disputes, for instance, were often resolved by means of trial by battle or by recourse to painful and perilous ordeals. Around the time of the First Crusade it was becoming increasingly common for convicted felons to suffer death or mutilation, a departure from the traditional emphasis on compensating the victims or their families. Vendettas within and between kindreds were frequent. Seldom neatly contained aristocratic combats, they had wide repercussions, for crude but effective economic warfare was regularly waged on opponents’ assets, and that meant peasants, livestock, crops, and farm buildings. Brutality was so common it could be ritualistic. In about 1100, for example, a knight from Gascony prayed at the monastery of Sorde that God would enable him to catch his brother’s murderer. The intended victim was ambushed, his face was horribly mutilated, his hands and feet were cut off, and he was castrated. In this way his prestige, his capacity to fight, and his dynastic prospects were all irreparably damaged. Moved by feelings of gratitude for what he believed had been divine assistance, the avenging knight presented his enemy’s bloodstained armour and weapons as a pious offering to the monks of Sorde. These they accepted.

This case is one small but revealing illustration of the medieval Church’s inability to distance itself from the violent world around it. Historians used to believe that the Church had been pacifist in the early Christian centuries, but had then become contaminated by the values of its host societies in a process which culminated during the period when crusading was at its height. But the idea of charting attitudes in such a linear way is unrealistic, because in any given period individuals and institutions were capable of varying their approaches to violence. Reactions depended on context. The crucial element in the medieval world’s relationship with violence was choice. Lay society knew this instinctively whenever it came to assess conduct. Was, for example, one knight sufficiently closely related to another to warrant inclusion in a vendetta, either as an aggressor or a potential victim? Was military service on a proposed campaign covered by the contractual obligations which a vassal
owed to his lord? Did a given criminal’s offence merit execution, and had he been convicted by a competent authority? How perilous need a knight’s predicament in battle be, or how desperate the condition of a besieged castle, before surrender could be countenanced without dishonour? The list of such questions is potentially very long because reactions to violence were nuanced by value judgements based on a host of variables.

The Church approached violence in essentially the same way, though its fund of accumulated learning and near-monopoly of the written word naturally enabled it to deal more confidently than the laity on the level of theory and abstraction. Above all, the Church was equipped to impose a degree of systematization and consistency upon the issues which violence raised. It had inherited from Roman Law, the Old and New Testaments, and the early Christian Fathers, pre-eminently St Augustine of Hippo (354–430), various terms of reference by which to analyse instances of violence and pronounce upon their quality. The standard position, which became associated with Augustine and was refined in later centuries, was that the moral rectitude of an act could not be judged simply by examining the physical event in isolation: violence was validated to a greater or lesser degree by the state of mind of those responsible, the ends sought, and the competence of the individual or body which authorized the act.

Thus allowed considerable ideological flexibility, the Church was able to take an active interest in warfare on a number of fronts, including those areas where Latin Christendom came into direct contact with the Muslim world. The second half of the eleventh century was a period of Latin expansion. In the Iberian peninsula the small Christian states in the north were learning to exploit political weakness in Muslim al-Andalus. The most impressive gain was made when Toledo, once the capital of the Visigothic kingdom which had been destroyed by Arab and Berber invaders in the eighth century, fell to King Alfonso VI of León-Castile in 1085. In Sicily Norman warlords, already the dominant force on the southern Italian mainland, gradually eliminated Muslim power between 1061 and 1091. The popes were generally supportive of this expansion. Theirs
was not the decisive contribution which brought about Christian successes, for they could do little more than give their encouragement and hope to supervise the difficult task of reorganizing the Church in conquered territories. But the experience of Spain and Sicily was significant because it meant that for two generations before the First Crusade the Church’s central authorities came to see the West as engaged in a single struggle characterized by its deep religious colouring. What the Mediterranean theatres of war had in common, irrespective of the specific circumstances in each case, was that formerly Christian lands were being wrested from infidel control. Consequently the Holy Land, which had been overrun by the Arabs in the seventh century, was bound to attract the Church’s attention sooner or later.

It is important to note a distinction between the senior clerical policy-makers who would one day devise the First Crusade and the lay people who would volunteer to go on it. The perspective of a Mediterranean-wide struggle was visible only to those institutions, in particular the papacy, which had the intelligence networks, grasp of geography, and sense of long historical tradition to take a broad overview of Christendom and its threatened predicament, real or supposed. This is a point which needs to be emphasized because the terminology of the crusade is often applied inaccurately to all the occasions in the decades before 1095 when Christians and Muslims found themselves coming to blows. An idea which underpins the imprecise usage is that the First Crusade was the last in, and the culmination of, a series of wars in the eleventh century which had been crusading in character, effectively ‘trial runs’ which had introduced Europeans to the essential features of the crusade. This is an untenable view. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that people regarded Pope Urban II’s crusade appeal of 1095–6 as something of a shock to the communal system: it was felt to be effective precisely because it was different from anything attempted before. Contemporary commentators reflecting upon the crusade’s attraction seldom argued in terms of a continuation and amplification of a pressing anti-Muslim struggle. If they did they tended to hark back to the distant and mythologized world of
Charlemagne (d. 814) and his Frankish empire rather than to much more recent events in Spain or Sicily.

It should be noted that the response of western Europeans to the First Crusade did not depend on a developed hatred of Islam and all things Muslim. There existed, to be sure, crude stereotypes and misapprehensions: it was supposed that Muslims were idolatrous polytheists, and fabulous stories circulated about the life of the Prophet Muhammad. But such ideas fell far short of amounting to a coherent set of prejudices which could motivate people to uproot themselves from their homes and families in the dangerous and costly pursuit of enemies in distant places. Those first crusaders who had gained prior experience of the Muslim world were much more likely to have done so on an unarmed pilgrimage to Jerusalem than on the battlefield. Most had never seen a Muslim before. It is significant that the crusaders experienced mixed feelings once they had grown familiar with their enemies’ methods. They were so impressed by the fighting qualities of the Turks that they speculated whether their resilient adversaries might in fact be distant relatives, a sort of lost tribe which centuries before had been diverted from its migration towards Europe and Christian civilization. This was no idle compliment in an age when character traits were believed to be transmitted by blood and stories about the descent of peoples from biblical or mythical forebears went to the very heart of Europeans’ sense of historical identity and communal worth.

Popular understanding of the crusades nowadays tends to think in terms of a great contest between faiths fuelled by religious fanaticism. This perception is bound up with modern sensibilities about religious discrimination, and it also has resonances in reactions to current political conflicts in the Near East and elsewhere. But it is a perspective which, at least as far as the First Crusade is concerned, needs to be rejected. The thrust of research into crusading in recent decades has been to focus at least as much attention on ideas and institutions in the West as on events in the East. Crusading used to be regarded as operating on the margins of western Europe’s historical development: it was a series of rather exotic and irrational episodes of limited
significance. The study of the crusades, moreover, tended to be dominated by scholars who approached the subject from specialisms in eastern Christian or Muslim culture, which meant that their judgements were often unduly harsh. But now medievalists have become more concerned to integrate crusading within the broader history of western civilization. An important element of this approach has been an examination of those features of western Europeans’ religious, cultural, and social experience which can account for the enthusiastic interest shown in the crusades.

What, then, was it about late eleventh-century Europe which made the First Crusade possible? One basic feature was the thorough militarization of society, a characteristic rooted in long centuries of development. The political units which had emerged from the slow and painful dissolution of the western Roman empire were dominated by aristocratic kindreds which derived their wealth and power from the control of land and asserted their status by leadership in war. An inescapable fact of life in medieval Europe was that governments lacked the resources, administrative expertise, and communications to impose themselves upon society unaided. The best they could hope for was to reach accommodations with the ruling élites which had day-today power on the ground. The ideal arrangement was for central authority (usually a king) and regional warlords to find a common purpose so that co-operation and the pursuit of self-interest could combine harmoniously. The ways in which European society was structured on the eve of the First Crusade were the distant legacy of the last time such an accommodation between the centre and the regions had been attempted on a grand scale. In the eighth and early ninth centuries the Carolingian kings who dominated the western European continent had developed a political system which mobilized Frankish society for frequent wars of expansion in southern Gaul, Italy, Spain, and central Europe. In part because convenient victims became ever scarcer, however, and in part because western Europe was forced by Viking and Muslim attacks to look to its internal defences, the rhythm of channelled aggression broke down as the ninth century wore on. The West’s problems were
exacerbated by bitter civil wars between members of the Carolingian family. A consequence was the loosening of the bonds of loyalty and common purpose which had connected the kings to the warrior dynasties of the regions. In one sense political life simply reverted to type, as power became concentrated once more in the hands of economically and militarily dominant kindreds. But the Carolingian legacy supplied an important added ingredient, in that the great nobles—the ‘princes’ in the sense of ‘those who ruled’—were able to perpetuate and exploit the surviving institutions of public governance, often with only notional reference to the centre.

Since the 1950s historians have developed a thesis which sees the dislocation of royal power in the ninth and tenth centuries as the prelude to even more momentous changes which took place in the decades either side of 1000. Because this model of explanation—what French medievalists call the
mutation féodale
, the feudal transformation—has hardened into an orthodoxy, it is worth sketching in outline. From around the middle of the tenth century, according to the
mutationiste
view, the large regional blocs which were the remnants of the Frankish polity themselves became subjected to centrifugal pressures from petty warlords, many of whom had risen to prominence as the princes’ deputies in the localities. Repeating the earlier pattern of fragmentation, but now on a much smaller scale, the local lords flourished by combining their economic muscle as landowners and their residual public powers with regard to justice and military organization. Peasants found themselves subjected to increasingly burdensome rents and labour obligations. Courts ceased to be public forums which served the free population of their area and became instruments of private aristocratic might, privileged access to which was gained by entering into the lord’s vassalage. One compelling demonstration of the lords’ success was the proliferation of castles, particularly in the years after 1000. Wooden structures for the most part, but coming increasingly to be made of stone, the castles amounted to a stark geopolitical statement that power in large stretches of the old Frankish empire had become thoroughly atomized.