God's War: A New History of the Crusades (44 page)

WARS OF THE CROSS

This ephemeral nature of the wars of the cross can partly be explained by lack of occasion. The disastrous campaigns of 1101 killed extravagant optimism. Jerusalem remained in Christian hands. The very success of the Franks of Outremer in carving out principalities militated against any sense of crisis, relatively few laymen thinking in terms of permanent holy war, fewer even than those wishing to settle in the east. Pilgrimage and later the military orders provided the main connection between the two parts of Catholic Christendom, not crusading. Yet sporadic attempts were made to summon up enthusiasm for the old cause as well as to apply its forms to conflicts elsewhere.

Bohemund of Antioch’s campaign of 1107–8 demonstrated both the potential and the limitations of attempts to revive the spirit of 1096. On his release from Danishmend captivity in 1103, Bohemund was faced by the loss of much of his conquests in Cilicia to the Byzantines and, in 1104, of his eastern provinces to Ridwan of Aleppo. Western assistance provided an obvious solution; Bohemund’s reputation would act as the chief recruiting officer. Arriving in Italy in 1105, after securing the approval of Paschal II, Bohemund proceeded to France early in 1106, accompanied by a papal legate, Bruno of Segni, a veteran of Urban II’s preaching tour a decade before. Bohemund planned to harness concern for the Holy Land to an attack on the Byzantine empire, a sleight of hand highlighted by the presence with him on his triumphal tour of France of a spurious pretender to the Byzantine throne and other Greek exiles. During his sermon at Chartres in early April, Alexius I was identified as a target, those who joined up being promised ‘wealthy towns and castles’. Writing to the pope in 1107, Bohemund argued that he sought, in the general context of aiding the Holy Land, to resolve the supposed Greek problem by ending Alexius’s usurpation, the ecclesiastical schism and Byzantine hostility to crusaders. Yet Bohemund’s official line during 1106–7 focused on the
via Sancti Sepulchri
. One eyewitness remembered the papal legate at a council at Poitiers in June 1106 particularly emphasizing the need to arouse enthusiasm for the journey to Jerusalem.
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Whatever his motives, Bohemund used his fame to acquire a high-class wife, Constance, daughter of King Philip of France, and create a mood of excitement. Nobles apparently queued up to
persuade him to become godfather to their children. King Henry of England, preparing his attempt to conquer Normandy from his crusader brother Duke Robert, was sufficiently alarmed as to ban him from crossing the Channel lest too many knights joined the eastern adventure. The number, geographic range and social standing of Bohemund’s recruits testified to his charisma and successful propaganda. Not only did they come from lands associated with the leader’s ancestry, Italy, Normandy, England, but also from large swathes of France from the Limousin and Poitou northwards across the Loire through the Chartrain and Ile de France to Flanders and imperial Burgundy. The rumour of war may also have inspired more distant interest in Jerusalem, including that of King Sigurd of Norway, although he had no practical involvement in Bohemund’s plans. While piety may have played a significant part in the success of Bohemund’s carefully orchestrated appeal, at least one later observer noted, perhaps with the cynicism of hindsight, that many ‘set out on the road for Jerusalem like men hastening to a feast’.
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By October 1107, even the most purblind of his followers could see that Bohemund’s intention was to revisit the battlefields of his youth in the western Balkans. Landing in Albania on 9 October, Bohemund directed his army, which marched under a papal banner, to besiege Durazzo. For all his famed military skill, Bohemund found himself completely outmanoeuvred. By the spring of 1108, his force was surrounded and cut off from reinforcements across the Adriatic. It is testimony to his determination and generalship that he resisted the logic to surrender until September. Writing a generation later of Bohemund’s final interview with Alexius I before agreeing to the humiliating Treaty of Devol, Alexius’s daughter, Anna, was prompted to include her famous description of this dangerous but attractive barbarian: tall, muscular, broad chest, slim waist, ‘perfectly proportioned’, pale skin, short, light-brown hair verging on reddish, shaven face, light blue eyes, a man of disconcerting charm, with a ‘hard, savage quality’ about him such that ‘even his laugh sounded like a threat to others’. To rub Bohemund’s nose in his failure, Alexius ensured that the Byzantine witnesses to the treaty included a number of leading Normans in his service.
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The Treaty of Devol ended Bohemund’s remarkable career. Returning to Apulia with the remnant of his army, he skulked in the west until his death in 1111, leaving a son, a famous legacy but little else. A few of those who took the cross in 1106–7 may have pursued their goal of Jerusalem
after the debacle at Durazzo. Most found only disillusionment, as one commentator understated it: ‘in that expedition things did not fall out as the
peregrinationes
desired’.
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Bohemund’s failure was more than a defeat, it was an embarrassment, tarnishing not only his reputation but also the use of the
via Sancti Sepulchri
, especially sensitive precisely because of the extent of genuine devotion to Jerusalem, witnessed by pilgrimages as well as by Bohemund’s own recruiting. Yet the extension by analogy of the Jerusalem expedition to other theatres of conflict with the infidel continued to flourish. In the same year as the Treaty of Devol, a Flemish propagandist associated with the archbishop of Magdeburg explicitly linked war against the pagan Wends of the south Baltic with the Jerusalem expedition, calling on his audience to ‘follow the good example of the Gauls… sally forth and come, all lovers of Christ and the Church, and prepare yourselves just as did the men of Gaul for the liberation of Jerusalem’. By analogy, the German church became ‘our Jerusalem’.
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Spain provided an active arena for such parallels. Although before 1095 Urban II had regarded the rebuilding of the frontier town of Tarragona south of Barcelona as a penitential exercise meriting offers of plenary indulgences, only after Clermont was the Jerusalem expedition equated with the Christian
reconquista
in Spain.
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Thereafter, this interpretation of a common conflict between Christianity and Islam lent fragmented secular wars for territorial gain and political advantage spiritual energy and coherence, a transformation reflecting papal efforts to control the Spanish church as much as any indigenous religious revival. This ideological import conveniently and importantly coincided with the dominance of Muslim al-Andalus by the Almoravids, a fundamentalist Islamic sect from north Africa. Thus there were real battles to be fought against Muslims, which, with the eye of rhetoric, could be viewed in the context of a struggle between Faiths that embraced the Holy Land. At a council held in Santiago de Compostela in January 1126, Archbishop Diego Gelmirez, ‘St James’s catapult’, urged his audience to imitate the conquerors of Jerusalem and ‘become knights of Christ and, after defeating his wicked enemies the Muslims, open the way to the same Sepulchre of the Lord through Spain, which is shorter and much less laborious’, a geographic and military fantasy with a long future.
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Thanks to the papally inspired clerical attitude, the language and props of the Jerusalem penitential holy war began to suffuse the far
from idealistic conquest of al-Andalus. The holy war tradition persisted after most of al-Andalus had fallen to the Christian kings in the thirteenth century, the link with Jerusalem never entirely fading for the rest of the middle ages. Yet in the twelfth century it was fuelled as much by evocation of an older legend; in the poem on the capture of Almeria, Alfonso VII is lauded as ‘continuing the deeds of Charlemagne, with whom he is rightly compared’.
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The interest in warring in Spain from north of the Pyrenees reflected a tradition of itinerant fighting among the affluent arms-bearing elites of western Europe that reached back far beyond 1095. In that sense, the contest with the infidel, in the eastern or western Mediterranean, scarcely altered social mores, even if it provided fresh outlets. The new focus of holy violence exerted only a sporadic, occasional, irregular and uneven hold on the activity of the fighting classes however powerful a grip it exerted on imaginations, or, at least, those recoverable parts of their thought-world which owed most to the new orthodoxies of the western church. Victims of sordid internecine political feuding, such as Duke Canute of Denmark, murdered in 1131, could be elevated into crusader saints by association with the Holy Land adventure – which in life he lacked.
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Yet, despite its iconic status as living proof of God’s immanence and favour attracting the anxious attention of clerical and monastic chroniclers, Outremer failed to provide as popular theatre for chivalry as for pilgrims. Sustained interest tended to run in families: those with claims to Outremer inheritances, such as Bohemund II, brought up in Apulia, who arrived to claim his inheritance in Antioch in 1126, or with political influence in the east, such as the extended Montlhéry or Le Puiset affinities from northern France, who dominated Jerusalem politics and patronage under Baldwin II.
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Even the army mustered in 1128 by Hugh de Payns and his colleagues revolved around the acceptance by Fulk of Anjou of the hand of Princess Melisende and the inheritance of Jerusalem. In the event, the 1129 sortie against Damascus failed, and many regarded the whole enterprise as a fraud, which was probably unfair as the campaign, involving most of the great leaders of Outremer as well as the western recruits, was thwarted by poor tactics and worse weather, not malice or indifference. The
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
recorded Hugh’s great recruiting success – ‘so large a number of people as never had done since the first expedition in the days of Pope Urban’ – and subsequent disappointment: ‘He [Hugh] said that thoroughgoing
war was prepared between the Christians and the heathens. Then when they arrived there it was nothing but lies – thus miserably were all the people afflicted’.
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Different priorities and expectations of westerners and residents of Outremer persisted throughout subsequent dealings between the east and west. Much active campaigning by westerners in Outremer was opportunistic, a matter of local rulers fitting the martial skills and ambitions of chance visitors to desired objectives, such as Sigurd of Norway and the seizure of Sidon in 1110. However, a crisis in Outremer’s affairs could excite widespread support however uneasily eastern setbacks stood beside the providential triumphalism that the capture of Jerusalem had originally inspired.

The disaster of the defeat of Roger of Antioch at the Field of Blood in 1119 provoked Baldwin II and his advisers early in 1120 to send ambassadors west to seek help from the papacy and Venice. A number of western lords, including Fulk of Anjou, may have answered the call. Pope Calixtus II, perhaps inspired by his abundant family ties with crusading and the east, added his weight to the appeals to the Venetian doge, Domenico Michiel, sending him a papal banner for an eastern campaign. The Doge, who acquired a well-deserved bellicose reputation, took the cross with other prominent Venetians in 1122 before embarking with a substantial fleet for the eastern Mediterranean. The Venetian expedition of 1122–4 encapsulated many of the diverse motives that propelled westerners eastwards; trade, plunder, military adventurism, colonial expansion, profit, piety and the appetite for relics. On the way out, the fleet attacked Corfu in retaliation for the reduction in their trading privileges proposed by Byzantine emperor John II. Only on hearing of the capture of Baldwin II by Balak of Aleppo in April 1123 did the Venetians proceed to the Levant, where the following month they destroyed an Egyptian fleet between Jaffa and Ascalon. While the doge claimed to be fulfilling a longstanding wish to visit the Holy Places, the Venetian credentials as soldiers of the cross operated within a frame of self-interest. Only after protracted negotiations with the regency government of Jerusalem held during Christmastide 1123 and much wrangling among the Jerusalemites as to the best target did the doge agree to an attack on Tyre, with Ascalon the last great port of the Levantine coast outside Frankish possession. In return for this aid, Venice was to receive a third of Tyre with extensive privileges in the
conquered city, including free trade, the use of their own weights and measures, wide legal autonomy and immunities and an annual tribute of 300 besants. The siege lasted from February to July 1124 before the Damascene garrison surrendered. Along with the immediate booty and future privileges, the Venetians, whose commercialism never excluded piety, carried off a lump of marble on which Christ was alleged to have sat. The capture of Tyre did not end the Venetian campaign. Returning westwards, they terrorized the Aegean, sacking Rhodes and wintering in Chios, where they acquired relics of the martyred St Isidore, before pillaging Samos, Lesbos and Andros, then launching a series of raids along the Dalmatian shore of the Adriatic culminating in the plunder of Zara, after which, singing the
Te Deum Laudamus
, they returned to Venice ‘full of happiness and joy’.
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Or so it was remembered in the lagoon. Seen only from the perspective of wars of the cross, the Venetian crusade represented a serious commitment of time and investment in ships, men and money. While the Venetian fleet was at war it could not be trading as well. Yet the context for the victories off Ascalon and at Tyre was an extended, Viking-like raid on Christian Byzantine territory and property. The whole enterprise appeared designed for tangible as well as spiritual gain; it certainly reaped the former. While this did not represent as much of a contradiction at the time as it may seem now, such a layered response informed much of the interest in the cause of the cross and the Holy Land. It also serves as a foretaste and clue to the events eighty years later that led to the sack of Constantinople.