God's War: A New History of the Crusades Read online

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  GOD’S WAR

  ‘A magisterial new history of the crusades… God’s War is rich is reassessments of individuals and institutions involved’

  The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘A timely reminder of what lies behind current Muslim images of westerners… you will not find a saner or more balanced guide to all this than God’s War’ Irish Times

  ‘Told with passion and academic flair, Tyerman’s definitive and engrossing chronicle of the Crusades reads like a centuries-old epic of war, arrogance and the clash of cultures. Its place should be assured on the bookshelves of all politicians’ Western Mail

  ‘Confident descriptions, full of insight… written with dry humour’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘This generation’s definitive history’ Chicago Tribune

  ‘A measured focus on the ideas and actions of people so different from ourselves… Tyerman writes well, sustaining interest as he moves through all the interwoven plot lines’ Financial Times

  ‘Displays massive erudition and patient synthesis… surely reflects the state of historical knowledge about the Crusades better than any other book’ New York Sun

  ‘Writes fluently and well… a serious, competent and well-written survey’ Tablet

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Christopher Tyerman is a Fellow in History at Hertford College, Oxford, and a lecturer in Medieval History at New College, Oxford. He is the author of England and the Crusades, The Invention of the Crusades and The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction.

  CHRISTOPHER TYERMAN

  God’s War

  A New History of the Crusades

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published by Allen Lane 2006

  Published in Penguin Books 2007

  1

  Copyright © Christopher Tyerman, 2006

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  Maps 1 to 17 and 21 to 23 by Reg Piggott are reproduced by permission of

  The Folio Society Ltd. Other maps are by Andrew Farmer.

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90431–3

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  Acknowledgements

  Preface

  Introduction: Europe and the Mediterranean

  The First Crusade

  1 The Origins of Christian Holy War

  2 The Summons to Jerusalem

  3 The March to Constantinople

  4 The Road to the Holy Sepulchre

  Frankish Outremer

  5 The Foundation of Christian Outremer

  6 The Latin States

  7 East is East and East is West: Outremer in the Twelfth Century

  The Second Crusade

  8 A New Path to Salvation? Western Christendom and Holy War 1100–1145

  9 God’s Bargain: Summoning the Second Crusade

  10 ‘The Spirit of the Pilgrim God’: Fighting the Second Crusade

  The Third Crusade

  11 ‘A Great Cause for Mourning’: The Revival of Crusading and the Third Crusade

  12 The Call of the Cross

  13 To the Siege of Acre

  14 The Palestine War 1191–2

  The Fourth Crusade

  15 ‘Ehud’s Sharpened Sword’

  16 The Fourth Crusade: Preparations

  17 The Fourth Crusade: Diversion

  The Expansion of Crusading

  18 The Albigensian Crusades 1209–29

  19 The Fifth Crusade 1213–21

  20 Frontier Crusades 1: Conquest in Spain

  21 Frontier Crusades 2: the Baltic and the North

  The Defence of Outremer

  22 Survival and Decline: the Frankish Holy Land in the Thirteenth Century

  23 The Defence of the Holy Land 1221–44

  24 Louis IX and the Fall of Mainland Outremer 1244–91

  The Later Crusades

  25 The Eastern Crusades in the Later Middle Ages

  26 The Crusade and Christian Society in the Later Middle Ages

  Conclusion

  Notes

  Select Further Reading

  Select List of Rulers

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1. Jerusalem and its environs c.1100 (Corbis/Uppsala University Library, Sweden/Dagli Orti)

  2. Urban II consecrating the high altar at Cluny, October 1095 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Lat. 17716 Fol. 91])

  3. Peter the Hermit leading his crusaders (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1500 Fol. 45v])

  4. Alexius I Comnenus, emperor of Byzantium 1081–1118 (Bridgeman Art Library)

  5. The church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem idealized in later medieval western imagination (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1070 Fol. 5v])

  6. The front cover of the Psalter of Queen Melisende of Jerusalem (British Library, London [Ms Eggerton 1139])

  7. Saladin: a contemporary Arab view (British Library, London)

  8. The battle of Hattin, 4 July 1187: Saladin seizing the True Cross (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 26 Fol. 140])

  9. Frederick I Barbarossa, emperor of Germany, receiving a copy of Robert of Rheims’s popular history of the First Crusade (Scala, Florence)

  10. Embarking on crusade, from the statutes of the fourteenth-century chivalric Order of the Knot (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 4274 Fol. 6])

  11. Women helping besiege a city, as at the siege of Acre, 1190 (British Library, London [Ms 15268 Fol. 101v])

  12. Joshua, in the guise of a Frankish knight, liberates Gibeon from the Five Kings, from an illuminated Bible c.1244–54 (Piermont Morgan Library/Scala, Florence)

  13. Military orchestra of the kind employed by Turkish, Kurdish and Mamluk commanders (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Arabe 5847 Fol. 94])

  14. Pope Innocent III (Scala, Florence)

  15. Venice c.1300 (Bodleian Library, Oxford/The Art Archive [Bodley 264 fol. 218r])

  16. Innocent III and the Albigensian Crusade (British Library, London [Ms Royal 16 GVI Fol. 3
47v])

  17. Moors fighting Christians in thirteenth-century Spain (The Art Archive/Real Monasterio del Escorial, Spain/Dagli Orti)

  18. A clash between Frankish and Egyptian forces outside Damietta, June 1218, from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 54v])

  19. The capture of the Tower of Chains, August 1218, and the fall of Damietta, November 1219, from Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)

  20. Frederick II, emperor, king of Germany 1212–50 (AKG Images)

  21. Louis IX of France captures Damietta, June 1249, from a manuscript produced at Acre c.1280 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 2628 Fol. 328v])

  22. Outremer’s nemesis: mamluk warriors training (British Library, London [Ms Add 18866 Fol. 140])

  23. Outremer’s nemesis: A Turkish cavalry squadron (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Arabe 5847 Fol. 19])

  24. The battle of La Forbie, October 1244 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 170])

  25. Matthew Paris imagines the Mongols as cannibalistic savages, Chronica Majora, c.1255 (Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge [Ms 16 Fol. 166])

  26. The fall of Tripoli to the Mamluks, April 1289 (British Library, London [Ms Add 27695 Fol. 5])

  27. Charles V of France entertains Charles IV of Germany during a banquet in Paris in 1378 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Fr. 2813 Fol. 473v])

  28. Andrea Bonaiuti’s fresco ‘The Church Militant’, in Santa Maria Novella, Florence (Scala, Florence)

  29. The failed Ottoman Turkish siege of Rhodes, 1480 (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris [Ms Lat. 6067 Fol. 80v])

  30. Mehmed II the Conqueror, by Gentile Bellini, 1480/81 (National Gallery, London)

  31. The battle of Lepanto, 1571 (National Maritime Museum, Greenwich)

  List of Maps

  1. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the First Crusade and Preaching Tour of Pope Urban II 1095–6

  2. Asia Minor and Syria 1097–99

  3. The Siege of Antioch, October 1097–June 1098

  4. Palestine 1099

  5. The Siege of Jerusalem, June – July 1099

  6. Syria in the Twelfth Century

  7. Palestine and Egypt in the Twelfth Century

  8. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Second Crusade and Bernard’s Preaching Tour 1146–7

  9. The Hattin Campaign, July 1187

  10. Saladin Captures Jerusalem, September – October 1187

  11. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the Third Crusade

  12. Syria at the Time of the Third Crusade

  13. The Siege of Acre 1189

  14. Richard I Captures Cyprus, May 1191

  15. Palestine with the Campaigns of 1191–2

  16. Europe and the Near East in the Thirteenth Century

  17. Constantinople at the Time of the Fourth Crusade

  18. Languedoc, France and the Albigensian Crusade

  19. The Spanish Reconquista

  20. The Baltic

  21. Syria in the Thirteenth Century

  22. Palestine and Egypt in the Thirteenth Century

  23. Acre in 1291

  24. Crusades in Europe

  Acknowledgements

  This book has taken longer than even the most sluggish crusade to prepare and complete. I must record my thanks and gratitude to the Trustees of the Leverhulme Trust for the award of a Research Fellowship for the year 1998–9, which allowed me to begin to marshal evidence and ideas for this project. My agent Jonathan Lloyd has proved a tactful and potent warrior in my interests. The invitation to write this sort of book came from Simon Winder, who could not have imagined how long, in many senses, it would turn out to be. His patience and encouragement have been wonderfully sustaining. Indirectly, I have been thinking, working, teaching and writing towards this book for thirty years. Inevitably the debts to friends, colleagues, pupils and other scholars are legion and irredeemable. In particular, I should like to register my obligation for discussion, ideas, criticism and opportunities to air views to Malcolm Barber, Toby Barnard, Peter Biller, Jessalynin Bird, the late Lionel Butler, Jeremy Catto, Eric Christiansen, Gary Dickson, Barrie Dobson, Jean Dunbabin, Peter Edbury, Geoffrey Ellis, L.S. Ettre, the late Richard Fletcher, John Gillingham, Timothy Guard, Bernard Hamilton, Ruth Harris, Catherine Holmes, Norman Housley, Colin Imber, Kurt Villads Jensen, Jeremy Johns, Andrew Jotischky, Maurice Keen, Anthony Luttrell, Simon Lloyd, Jose-Juan Lopez-Portillo, Dominic Luckett, John Maddicott, Hans Mayer, James Morwood, Alan Murray, Sandy Murray, Torben Nielsen, the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education Crusades class of the summer of 2003, David Parrott, Jonathan Phillips, the late John Prestwich, Jonathan Riley-Smith, Miri Rubin, Jonathan Shepard and Mark Whittow. The intellectual vibrancy of my colleagues and pupils in Hertford College and New College provide the most stimulating of creative environments. The Principal and Fellows of Hertford gave me academic shelter for many locust years. Toby Barnard and Peter Biller have long provided personal support and intellectual stimulus with rare companionability. The responsibility for introducing me to the crusades rests with the improbable quintet of the late Ralph Bathurst, David Parry, Eric Christiansen, Maurice Keen and the late Lionel Butler, alike in little except inspiration and civility. I alone can be held accountable for the errors that stubbornly remain like mouse hairs in medieval bread. Simon Winder, editor nonpareil, and his team at Penguin UK have proved a revelation of amenable, intelligent and efficient publishing. I am grateful to those who have pointed out errata in the First Edition, in particular Paul Cobb and Eric Christiansen. For tolerating the distraction of what must at times have seemed another sibling, the book is dedicated to those most healthily but supportively sceptical of the virtues and merits of this work and its author, Elizabeth, Edward and Thomas, with love.

  CJT

  Oxford

  15 June 2007

  Preface

  ‘The Lord is a man of war.’ (Exodus 15:3)

  Violence, approved by society and supported by religion, has proved a commonplace of civilized communities. What are now known as the crusades represent one manifestation of this phenomenon, distinctive to western European culture over 500 years from the late eleventh century of the Christian Era. The crusades were wars justified by faith conducted against real or imagined enemies defined by religious and political elites as perceived threats to the Christian faithful. The religious beliefs crucial to such warfare placed enormous significance on imagined awesome but reassuring supernatural forces of overwhelming power and proximity that were nevertheless expressed in hard concrete physical acts: prayer, penance, giving alms, attending church, pilgrimage, violence. Crusading reflected a social mentality grounded in war as a central force of protection, arbitration, social discipline, political expression and material gain. The crusades confirmed a communal identity comprising aggression, paranoia, nostalgia, wishful thinking and invented history. Understood by participants at once as a statement of Christian charity, religious devotion and godly savagery, the ‘wars of the cross’ helped fashion for adherents a shared sense of belonging to a Christian society, societas christiana, Christendom, and contributed to setting its human and geographic frontiers. In these ways, the crusades helped define the nature of Europe.

  By forcing an otherwise improbably intimate contact with western Asia through centuries of contest over the Christian Holy Places in Palestine, the crusades encouraged European inquiry and experience beyond traditional horizons. One path to the thought-world of Christopher Columbus stretched back to Pope Urban II’s first call to arms for the Christian reconquest of Jerusalem in 1095. The moral certainties fostered by crusading left physical or cultural monuments and scars from the Arctic Circle to the Nile, from the synagogues of the Rhineland to the mosques of Andalusia, from the vocabulary of value to the awkward hinterland of historic Christian pride, guilt and responsibility. Whether admired,
with a contemporary of the First Crusade in the 1090s, as ‘the greatest event since the Resurrection’, or mocked, with Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century, as a ‘rendezvous of cracked brains that wore their feather in their head instead of their hat’, or condemned, with the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian David Hume, as ‘the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation’, the crusades remain one of the great subjects of European history.

  A familiar but baneful response to history is to configure the past as comfortingly different from the present day. Previous societies are caricatured as less sophisticated, more primitive, cruder, alien. Such attitudes reveal nothing so much as a collective desire to reassure the modern observer by demeaning the experience of the past. Within the cultural traditions of Europe and western Asia, since the sixteenth century the crusades have regularly attracted precisely such condescension from hostile religious, cultural or ideological partisans. The crusades have been dismissed as a symptom of a credulous, superstitious and backward civilization in order openly or covertly to elevate a supposedly more advanced and enlightened modern society. Yet this hardly helps understanding of past events. Another contrary vision, no less distorted, regards the past as a mirror to the present. Thus the battles of the cross are held to presage the conflicts of European imperialism, colonialism and western cultural supremacism. Yet many of the supposed links between past events and current problems are modern, not historical, constructs, invented to lend spurious legitimacy to wholly unconnected current political, social, economic and religious problems. So the crusades have been presented as symbols both of the past’s inferiority and relevance. It is, by contrast, perhaps worthwhile to attempt to explore the phenomenon as far as possible on its own terms. That is the purpose of what follows.

  More than half a century ago, Steven Runciman, with typical style and false modesty, imperishably pitted his pen against the ‘massed typewriters of the United States’. He won. His History of the Crusades, published in three volumes between 1951 and 1954, became the classic twentieth-century account of the subject and remains a remarkable work of literature as much as history. It would be folly and hubris to pretend to compete, to match, as it were, my clunking computer keyboard with his pen, at once a rapier and a paintbrush; to pit one volume, however substantial, with the breadth, scope and elegance of his three. Yet scholarship and the world have moved since 1954: the former in part directly due to Runciman’s inspiration; the latter in contradiction to the civilized and humane principles of faith and reason that shine from his great work. The crusades are no longer understood in quite the way they were in the 1950s either by scholars, informed by the new insights of research, or a wider public who imagine a largely spurious relevance to the twenty-first century. On these grounds, an attempt to describe again what is now perhaps the most familiar, if misunderstood, of all medieval phenomena may be justified.