A History of the Crusades-Vol 1 (12 page)

The Holy War in
Spain

War against the infidel in Spain thus acquired
the status of a holy war; and soon the Popes themselves took a hand in its
direction. In 1063 the king of Aragon, Ramiro I, at the outset of a great
offensive against the Moslems, was murdered by a Moslem at Grados. His death
stirred the imagination of Europe. Pope Alexander II at once promised an
indulgence for all who fought for the Cross in Spain and set about collecting
an army to carry on Ramiro’s work. A Norman soldier in his service, William of
Montreuil, recruited troops in northern Italy. In northern France Count Ebles
of Roucy, brother of the Aragonese queen Felicia, gathered an army; and the
largest contingent was brought by Guy-Geoffrey, Count of Aquitaine, who was
given command of the expedition. Very little was achieved. The town of
Barbastro was captured with a large booty, but was soon lost again. But
henceforward French knights streamed over the Pyrenees to carry on the work. In
1073 a new expedition was organized by Ebles of Roucy. Pope Gregory VII invited
the princes of Christendom to join in it, and, while reminding the world that
the Spanish kingdom belonged to the see of St Peter, declared that Christian
knights might enjoy the lands that they conquered from the infidel. In 1078
Hugh I, Duke of Burgundy, led an army to aid his brother-in-law, Alfonso VI of
Castile. In 1080 Gregory VII gave his personal encouragement to an expedition
led by Guy-Geoffrey. During the next years all went well. The Castilians
captured Toledo itself in 1085. There followed a Moslem revival, led by the
fanatical Almoravids; and from 1087 onward Christian knights were urgently
summoned to Spain to oppose them. Pope Urban II gave his anxious support and
even told intending pilgrims to Palestine that they could spend their money
more usefully on the reconstruction of Spanish towns rescued from Moslem
ravages. Till the end of the century Spanish campaigns continued to attract
adventurous Christian knights from the north, till the capture of Huesca in
1096 and Barbastro in 1101 brought this series of campaigns to an end.

By the close of the eleventh century the idea
of the holy war had thus been carried into practice. Christian knights and
soldiers were encouraged by the authorities of the Church to leave their petty
quarrels and to journey to the frontiers of Christendom to fight against the
infidel. To reward them for their service they might take possession of the
lands that they reconquered, and they received spiritual benefits. What exactly
these benefits were is uncertain. Alexander II seems to have offered an
indulgence to the campaigners of 1064; but Gregory VII only gave absolution to
all who died in battle for the Cross. He had given similar absolution to the
soldiers of Rudolf of Swabia fighting against the excommunicated Henry IV of Germany.
The Papacy was taking over the direction of the holy wars. It often launched
them and often named the commander. The land that was conquered had to be held
under ultimate Papal suzerainty.

Though the great princes were apt to remain
aloof, western knights responded readily to the appeal of the holy war. Their
motives were in part genuinely religious. They were ashamed to continue
fighting amongst themselves; they wanted to fight for the Cross. But there was
also a land-hunger to incite them, especially in northern France, where the
practice of primogeniture was being established. As a lord grew unwilling to
divide his property and its offices, now beginning to be concentrated round a
stone-built castle, his younger sons had to seek their fortunes elsewhere.
There was a general restlessness and taste for adventure in the knightly class
in France, most marked among the Normans, who were only a few generations
removed from nomadic freebooters. The opportunity for combining Christian duty
with the acquisition of land in a southern climate was very attractive. The
Church had reason to be pleased with the progress of the movement. Could it not
be applied also to the eastern frontier of Christendom?

CHAPTER II

THE ROCK OF
SAINT PETER

‘By me kings
reign
,
and princes decree justice’
PROVERBS VIII, 15

As the tide of Islam receded in Spain the Pope
had little difficulty in establishing his authority over the Church of the
reconquered lands. The Donation of Constantine, widely if incorrectly accepted
as genuine by western Christendom, gave him temporal suzerainty over many
countries, to which the addition of the Iberian peninsula passed unnoticed. Nor
was there any ecclesiastical power in Spain that could challenge him. But
eastern Christendom was differently organized. The Patriarchates of Alexandria
and Antioch, the latter founded by Saint Peter and the former by Saint Mark,
were as old as the see of Rome. The Patriarchate of Jerusalem, the Church of
Saint James, though younger possessed the prestige that was due to the world’s
most sacred city. And the Patriarchate of Constantinople was the most
formidable rival of all. Despite its alleged foundation by Saint Andrew, it
could not claim the same authority of age. But Constantinople was New Rome. It
had superseded the older capital. It was the seat of the unbroken line of
Christian Emperors. It was by far the greatest city in Christendom. Its
Patriarch might reasonably call himself Oecumenical, the chief ecclesiastical
magistrate of the civilized world. The religious opposition in Byzantium might
at times seek to use the authority of Old Rome as a counter against the
increasing domination of the Emperor; but no one in the East seriously thought
that the bishop of the shrunken western city, so often in the power of its
turbulent petty nobles or of barbarous potentates from the north, should hold
any jurisdiction over the eastern churches, with their long-established and
enduring traditions. Yet Rome could still command a special respect. Though her
claim to supremacy was ignored, she was almost universally allowed a primacy
amongst the great sees of Christendom, even by the Oecumenical Patriarch. Nor
was anyone ready to challenge the belief that Christendom was and should be
one.

After the Arab conquest, the Patriarchates of
the south-east had lost much of their power; and Constantinople emerged as the
champion of the eastern churches. There had been many controversies and
quarrels between Rome and Constantinople on ecclesiastical affairs, though none
of them had been so serious and prolonged as later polemists came to believe.
The unity of Christendom was still generally accepted. But in the eleventh
century the organization of the Roman Church was overhauled. The reforms had
been largely suggested by monastic influences from Cluny and from Lorraine and
had been at first carried out by the lay authorities that had at the time
dominated Rome. The emperor Henry III had been particularly active, and had
given them such momentum that after his death the Church was able to continue
and develop them independently of and eventually in opposition to the lay
government; and out of the movement there emerged theories that insisted on the
universal spiritual dominance of Rome and its ultimate superiority over secular
princes. These in their turn provoked new controversies with the East.

Rome and
Constantinople

The fundamental issue lay in the reaffirmation
of the Roman claim to supremacy. But disputes began over details of doctrine and
of usage. In its desire to establish its authority, the Papacy sought to make
the usages of the Church uniform. Not only did it, for political as well as for
spiritual reasons, desire to abolish the marriage of the secular clergy, but it
attempted to standardize the liturgy and ritual. Such reforms were possible in
the West; but the usages of the eastern churches were different. There were
Greek churches in the Roman sphere just as there were Latin churches in the
sphere of Constantinople; and in southern Italy the frontier between the two
spheres had long been under discussion. At the same time German influence at
Rome had led to the insertion there of the word
filioque
in the Creed in
connection with the Procession of the Holy Ghost. The reforming Popes were less
willing to compromise or to remain tactfully silent on such matters than their
predecessors had been. Clashes were inevitable.

Pope Sergius IV, in his systatic letter, the
declaration of faith sent by a Pope or Patriarch to his colleagues on his accession,
included the word
filioque.
The Patriarch Sergius II of Constantinople
thereupon refused to commemorate his name in the diptychs of the Patriarchal
churches at Constantinople. To the Byzantines this indicated that the Pope
personally was considered unorthodox on a point of doctrine; it did not impugn
the orthodoxy of the whole western Church. But to the Pope, and to the western
churches, accustomed to regard him as the source of orthodox doctrine, the
insult seemed more general and far-reaching. The Patriarch came to realize that
there was bargaining power in an offer to restore the name.

In 1024 a suggestion reached Pope John XIX from
Constantinople that points at issue between the Churches might be solved by the
acceptance of a formula ingeniously worded to grant Rome titular supremacy and
to leave Constantinople with full practical independence. It declared that ‘with
the consent of the Roman pontiff the Church of Constantinople be accounted
universal in her sphere as that of Rome was in the universe’. John himself was
ready to agree; but the Cluniac abbot of St Benignus at Dijon wrote hastily and
sternly to remind him that the power to bind and loose in Heaven and on earth
belonged to the office of Saint Peter and his successors alone, and urged him
to show more vigour in his government of the universal Church. Byzantium was to
learn that the reformed Papacy would tolerate no such compromise.

In the middle of the century the Norman
invasions of southern Italy made desirable a political alliance between the
Pope and the eastern Emperor. But by now the reformed Papacy was committed to a
policy of standardization and wished to abolish usages current in Greek
churches in southern Italy and copied by many Italian churches as far north as
Milan. In 1043 a proud, ambitious man, Michael Cerularius, had become Patriarch
of Constantinople and was equally eager to standardize usages within his
sphere. His original motive was to absorb more easily the churches of the newly
occupied Armenian provinces, where divergent customs, such as the use of
unleavened bread, were practised. But his policy affected also the Latin
churches in Byzantine Italy and those that existed in Constantinople itself for
the benefit of merchants, pilgrims and soldiers of the Varangian Guard. When
these latter churches refused to conform, they were closed by order of the
Patriarch, whose court began to issue tracts denouncing the usages of the
Latins.

The
‘
Schism
’
of 1054

Cerularius was not, it seems, interested in the
theological issue. He was ready to restore the Pope’s name to the diptychs in
return for reciprocal treatment at Rome. The dispute was over usages; and it
therefore raised the problem of the ecclesiastical frontier in Italy, a problem
made more acute by the invasion of the Normans, themselves members of the Latin
Church. Negotiations were undertaken by the governor of Byzantine Italy, the
Lombard Argyrus, a Byzantine subject who followed the Latin rite. The Emperor
trusted him, but Cerularius inevitably was suspicious; and circumstances played
into his hand. In 1053, before legates had been appointed to go from Rome to
Constantinople, Pope Leo IX was captured by Normans. When his legates, led by
the Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida, arrived in Constantinople in January
1054, they were honourably received by the Emperor; but Cerularius questioned
whether they had in fact been appointed by the Pope and whether the Pope in his
captivity could implement any promises that they made. In April, before the
discussions had gone far, Leo suddenly died; and the legates lost whatever
official backing they might have possessed. It was a year before the next Pope
was elected; and no one knew what his policy might be. Cerularius refused to
continue the negotiations. In spite of the Emperor’s desire for an accord,
feelings ran high; till at last the legates departed in fury, leaving on the
altar of St Sophia a bull excommunicating the Patriarch and his advisers but
expressly admitting the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Church. In answer the Patriarch
held a synod condemning the bull as the work of three irresponsible persons,
and deploring the addition of
filioque
to the Creed and the persecution
of married clergy, but making no mention of the Roman Church as a whole nor of
the other usages in dispute. There was, in fact, no change at all in the
situation, except that bitterness had been aroused.

The churches of Alexandria and Jerusalem had
taken no part in the episode. The Patriarch of Antioch, Peter III, definitely
thought that Cerularius had been unnecessarily difficult. His Church had
continued to commemorate the Pope’s name in its diptychs; and he saw no reason
why that practice should cease. He may have feared that Cerularius, whose
ambitions he suspected, had designs against the independence of his see. He
probably sympathized with the Emperor’s policy. Moreover, he could not support
the standardization of ritual and usage; for his diocese contained churches
where a Syrian liturgy was in use, and many of them lay beyond the political
frontiers of the Empire. He could not have enforced uniformity there, even had
he desired it. He kept himself outside of the quarrel.