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

  For the Jews, the Rhineland pogroms did not mark ‘the first holocaust’.22 There had been assaults before; neither did they mark the opening of a sustained campaign against the Jews. If now more wary and uneasy, the Ashkenazic Jewish communities of the Rhineland and northern Europe survived and thrived for generations, despite further atrocities attendant on the Second and Third Crusades. Jews continued to migrate into the areas of persecution. More conductive to intolerance was the growing exclusivity and general militancy of the western church. With the battles with Islam, in Spain and the east; the conversion of the Baltic; the elaboration of canon law; and the war against heresy, the persistence of a religious minority appeared more anomalous and, to some, more offensive. 1096 was only one part of this process. Ironically, its impact on Ashkenazic memory was testimony to its lack of profound material effect on the victimized communities. It was to renewed and expanding Jewish congregations in the Rhineland itself that the image of the martyrs of 1096 spoke most eloquently, as in the liturgical prayer first mentioned by Ephraim, a twelfth-century rabbi in Bonn: ‘May the Merciful Father, who dwells in heaven, in his abundant mercies remember compassionately the pious and righteous and pure, the sacred communities who sacrificed themselves for the sanctification of the Divine Name’.23

  THE SECOND WAVE, 1096–7

  The failures and excesses of the bands travelling east in the summer of 1096 attracted scorn, contempt and ridicule but hardly impinged on the project’s popularity. By the date fixed by Urban II for departure, 15 August 1096, all three German expeditions had collapsed; Peter the Hermit’s troops were perched precariously in their base on the rim of western Asia, soon to be annihilated; none of the princes of the west had embarked. Yet Urban II had not yet returned to Italy and recruitment was gathering momentum across western Europe. Before stopped by their local bishop, the abbot and monks of Cerne in Dorset had invested thirty shillings in a ship to take them to Jerusalem. At the same time, the pope voiced anxieties about indiscriminate enlistment, especially by clergy and young husbands with itchy feet.24 Frustrated veterans of the first armies sought new comrades. By the end of the year, by land and sea, by boat, horse, wagon and on foot, perhaps another 50–60,000 had embarked for the east, casting the earlier efforts into a deep shade.

  For each crucesignatus and those left behind, departure was a solemn moment. While most hoped to return, none could guarantee it. As he travelled south to rendezvous with the duke of Normandy and count of Blois in September 1096, Count Robert of Flanders was received at a monastery near Rheims by a procession of monks; there too a local magnate came to pay his respects.25 Most adieux lacked such grand ceremony, although many would have been witnessed by parish priest and villagers and accompanied by ritualized as well as genuine grief. Fulcher of Chartres, chaplain on the march to Count Robert’s companion Stephen of Blois, provided an imaginative, yet universal description:

  What sighs, what weeping, what lamentation among friends when husband left wife so dear to him, his children, his possessions however great, his father, mother, brother and other relatives. But however many tears those remaining shed for departing friends and in their presence, none flinched from going… Then husband told wife the time he expected to return, assuring her that if by God’s grace he survived he would come back home to her. He commended her to the Lord, kissed her lingeringly, and promised her as she wept that he would return. She, though, fearing that she would never see him again, could not stand but swooned to the ground, mourning her loved one, whom she was losing in this life as if he were already dead. He, however, like one who has no pity – although he had – and as if he were not moved by the tears of his wife nor the grief of any of his friends – yet secretly moved in his heart – departed with firm resolution. Sadness was the lot of those who remained, elation, of those who departed.26

  The first great western lord to set out for Jerusalem, somewhat paradoxically, was the brother of the king Urban II had excommunicated at Clermont. Hugh count of Vermandois was the younger brother of Philip I, the Fat. Distinguished only by blood, Hugh acted as a magnet for some of his brother’s leading vassals, including the king’s constable (Walo of Chaumont-en-Vexin) and seneschal (Gilbert of Garlande). The Ile de France was well represented in Hugh’s entourage, including later William the Carpenter of Melun, Thomas of Marle and Drogo of Nesle. Capetian interest was not entirely ideological. Participation in the expedition was agreed during a council at Paris in February 1096; in July, Hugh’s participation was announced to the pope by King Philip with his own submission to Urban’s judgement over his adulterous marriage (to the wife of the count of Anjou, to whom Urban had presented a golden rose during his preaching tour in March). Thus Urban’s Jerusalem scheme produced immediate and direct political gains for the wider papal cause by allowing Philip to be reconciled without losing too much face. The settlement suited both sides, Hugh receiving a papal banner to carry on his pilgrimage. The numerous recruits from the Paris region indicate another political benefit, this time for the Capetians, by providing a rare opportunity to exhibit practical leadership over their unruly vassals of the Ile de France, although Hugh hardly proved a dominant figure.

  His journey was carefully planned; before leaving, probably in late August, he wrote to Alexius I, informing him of his intended itinerary.27 This took him through Italy, where he may have received the papal banner and blessing, to Bari. By this time Hugh’s small contingent of knights had been swelled by the French lords from Emich of Flonheim’s misadventure led by William of Melun. In southern Italy, his party was joined by one of Bohemund’s nephews, William FitzMarquis, and others, including veterans of Byzantine service.28 Crossing the Adriatic in October, after the indignity of a shipwreck, Hugh was held under comfortable house-arrest in Durazzo by the nonetheless hospitable Greek authorities before being escorted under close guard to Constantinople. Alexius seemed concerned lest Hugh linked up with the large numbers of Italians following the same route along the Via Egnatia from Durrazzo to the capital; or he may have received warning that his old enemy Bohemund was only a fortnight behind the count. Hugh was welcomed at Constantinople in November, only a few weeks after the massacre at Kibotos. Alexius’s treatment of Hugh betrayed nervousness; although well entertained and apparently rather embarrassingly easily flattered by the emperor’s attention, the count’s movements were monitored and some of his followers kept under close arrest. The emperor was beginning to appreciate the scale of his problems. Almost every day, news came of more western grandees bearing down on him while the flow of lesser pilgrims became a flood, swelled by the bumper harvest experienced in the west in the autumn of 1096. Miraculous would not necessarily have been Alexius’s word for it.

  Shortly before Christmas 1096, Godfrey of Bouillon, duke of Lower Lorraine, arrived at the Greek capital with a substantial army derived mainly from Lotharingia (Lorraine) and the Low Countries. He proved an awkward guest. His march through central Europe followed the pilgrims’ road which had carried Peter the Hermit’s armies some months earlier. In contrast to his predecessor, Godfrey’s diplomacy worked all the way, a sign of meticulous preparation. Far from the selfless hero of chivalric legend he later appeared, Godfrey struck a number of hard bargains to raise funds for his expedition. Apart from extorting money from Rhineland Jews, he sold some estates; Bouillon itself he mortgaged to the bishop of Liège, with a proviso of restitution if he returned. Although unmarried, perhaps from sexual preference, Godfrey did not regard the expedition to Jerusalem as an excuse for abandoning his status in the west. The younger brother of the wealthy Count Eustace III of Boulogne, Godfrey’s career had flourished as a partisan of Henry IV. Succeeding to the disputed duchy of Lower Lorraine as a teenager in 1076, Godfrey fought for Henry in Italy in 1083. In 1087, his rights as duke were confirmed by a grateful emperor: his army in 1096 attracted many imperialists from the diocese of Liège.29 Although before his departure he had minted coins inscribed ‘Godefridus Ierosolimitanus’, and despite appare
nt political ineffectiveness, he never relinquished his duchy even after becoming ruler of the Christian enclave in Palestine in 1099. With him were two future kings of Jerusalem, his ambitious opportunist younger brother Baldwin and his cousin Baldwin lord of Le Bourcq; the counts of Toul and Hainault; other relatives such as Henry and Godfrey of Esch; and perhaps over 100 other knights. He was later joined by survivors from Peter’s army, such as Fulcher, brother of the vidame of Chartres. One of his strengths on crusade, and as ruler of Jerusalem, lay in the loyalty of his sizeable military household.

  Godfrey’s march was prolonged but not turbulent. Leaving Lorraine in August, he negotiated a peaceful crossing of Hungary and access to markets with King Coloman who insisted, as he had with Peter the Hermit, on the security of grand hostages, in this case an extremely reluctant Baldwin of Boulogne and his Anglo-Norman heiress wife, Godehilde of Tosni. Godfrey’s chief spokesman had been Godfrey of Esch, a veteran of earlier diplomacy with the Hungarians, another indication of the scale, depth and complexity of the political as well as material preparations. Reaching the Byzantine frontier in early November, Godfrey quickly struck a deal with the Greek authorities over provisions, promising not to engage in violent foraging in return for secure food supplies, the Byzantines having prepared large food dumps along the route. After a leisurely escorted progress, by the time he reached Adrianople, Godfrey, learning of the treatment of Hugh of Vermandois, become alarmed lest he was walking into a gilded trap. Given his minor role in western European politics, the duke’s pride and self-importance unexpectedly came to the fore as he insisted Alexius release the Frenchmen. As later admirers and perhaps he himself liked to recall, a descendant of Charlemagne, whose mythologized exploits furnished an important corner of the mental world of aristocratic crusaders,30 Godfrey behaved as if he were the emperor’s equal, not a policy designed to endear him to Alexius. Perhaps Godfrey saw himself in some way as representing his lord, the western emperor Henry IV; certainly the chronicler of Godfrey’s campaign, Albert of Aachen, placed the German king at the head of his list of rulers in 1096, above the pope.31 Godfrey’s objections to Alexius’s handling of Count Hugh spilt over into violence, as Alexius cut off aid and the Lorrainers began to pillage the neighbourhood of Salabria, between Adrianople and the Sea of Marmora. Only by sending an embassy of Franks in imperial service to reassure the duke of his reception did hostilities cease, but it was a somewhat prickly Godfrey who arrived at Constantinople on 23 December 1096. Stationed on the Golden Horn, then at Pera opposite the city, for weeks Godfrey resisted Alexius’s attempts, conveyed by Hugh of Vermandois and others, to arrange a meeting. Alexius again withdrew food supplies, forcing Godfrey into an abortive assault on the city (13 January 1097) and further ravaging until diplomacy prevailed. Hostages were exchanged (including Alexius’s son and eventual successor, John) before Godfrey attended an audience with the emperor. The outcome was satisfactory to all concerned. Godfrey swore an oath to the emperor, of vassalage according to Albert of Aachen.32 Alexius became his patron and helped ship his army across the Bosporus by the end of February 1097. For the Greek emperor, the presence of such a large army, even if peaceful, had presented serious logistical and political problems. Godfrey’s initial refusal to reach some accommodation with Alexius or to move forward across the Bosporus to Asia presented dangers as the winter progressed and the capital and its suburbs had to absorb increasing numbers of pilgrims. Both Alexius and Godfrey were exercised by the imminent arrival of the other major commanders of the expedition; the one fearful of the implications to his capital’s food supplies and security; the other eager to consult with his peers as to how best to proceed. Around 20 January 1097 Godfrey apparently received an embassy from Bohemund, then making very slow but careful progress from the Adriatic coast, suggesting a combined attack on the capital. Despite his stand-off, Godfrey rejected Bohemund’s plan; later veterans of his army spoke about the Greeks without hostility or malice.33 At a popular level, relations remained good; equally, Godfrey had not resisted manipulation by Alexius only to become a pawn in Bohemund’s deep-rooted schemes concerning the Greek empire.

  Bohemund of Taranto is the most controversial leader of the First Crusade. Of all the major surviving commanders, he alone failed to join the march to Jerusalem in 1099, more concerned with securing his hold over Syrian Antioch. Admired for his generalship, his pious credentials have been impugned in the light of his priorities in 1099 and his career of attempting to carve out for himself a kingdom in the Balkans at the expense of the Byzantine empire. The traditional view sees his motives as basely material, in contrast to the supposedly more elevated inspirations of some of his colleagues. This is untenable. The psychologies of the crusade’s leaders cannot be reconstructed. Each can be shown to have as much avarice or as little piety as the other. The dichotomy between spiritual and mercenary possesses little meaning. Raymond of Toulouse, whose religious sincerity has been widely accepted, proved both scheming and petulant in his earnest quest for an eastern principality, which he finally achieved in the lands around Tripoli in the south Lebanon. The spiritual agonizing of Tancred of Lecce, Bohemund’s nephew, was matched by his alert political opportunism. Godfrey of Bouillon accepted power and lands when offered them in 1099. Baldwin of Boulogne, the most obviously careerist of all, devoted the last twenty years of his life to defending the Holy Places. All the leaders sought to protect their material interests rather than proceed to Jerusalem in the five months after July 1098. Bohemund was not alone in his desire to achieve status, lands and wealth; neither did this ambition automatically contradict the genuineness of his adherence to the cause of Jerusalem. With Baldwin, he undertook a tricky and dangerous journey to fulfil his pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre at Christmas 1099, a gesture that, for lack of evidence, cannot be assumed to have been purely for reasons of image or politics.

  The picture of Bohemund the ruthless schemer derives from the Alexiad of Anna Comnena, Alexius’s daughter.34 Writing half a century after the First Crusade, Anna insists on the deviousness of the westerners, their consistent desire to subvert and occupy the Byzantine empire, and the heroic patience and skill of Alexius, in an attempt to exonerate the emperor from any responsibility for admitting the Franks into the empire and his subsequent failure to establish Greek overlordship over Antioch. Bohemund, who invaded the Balkans twice, in the 1080s and again in 1107–8, is one of the villains of her staunchly anti-western account that has as much to do with the tangled dynastic and imperial politics of the twelfth century as with the events of the 1090s. Seductively vivid, Anna is a confused and misleading source for the crusade let alone the motives of the western leaders. Even her famous description of Bohemund himself – tall, slim, muscular, good complexion, short light-brown hair, forbidding expression – cannot be trusted, still less Runciman’s fancy that the teenage Anna was taken by his good looks, ‘being, like all Greeks down the ages, susceptible to human beauty’.35

  Nonetheless, Bohemund’s position on crusade is intriguing. The dominant personality in the expedition’s military leadership from April 1097 until January 1099, he founded a Norman dynasty in Antioch that outlasted the Norman kings of England and of Sicily. Yet in 1096, in contrast to all the other leaders who were at least of comital status (i.e. of a count), Bohemund was technically still a vassal of a count, his half-brother, the ineffectual Roger Borsa (1089–1111), younger son and heir of Robert Guiscard in southern Italy. The fabulous inheritance promised him by his father, Robert Guiscard, in the Balkans had come to nothing after the failure of the Norman invasion of 1081–5. Despite rebelling in 1085 and 1087 against Roger Borsa, Bohemund had failed to establish an independent territorial title for himself in the west, a political frustration that shaped his actions on crusade. Although possessed of political clout and contacts above his formal station – he knew Urban II personally – he lacked the extensive patrimony or dependent baronage that supported his fellow leaders. The army he gathered about him in southern Italy in the a
utumn of 1096 reflected this. The core seems to have been his close relatives, including his nephew, Tancred of Lecce and cousin, Richard of Salerno, known as Richard of the Principate, as well as his standard bearer, Robert FitzGerald. In addition there were former rebels, such as Robert of Ansa; and vassals of his half-brother, such as Robert FitzTristan, and of his uncle, Count Roger of Sicily, such as Robert of Sourdeval.36 His whole force was small, perhaps in total between 3,500 and 4,000 men. Lacking the power of lordship or the purse, Bohemund had to rely on more overt political and military skills. Even these failed to impose cohesion on his force. One nephew, William FitzMarquis, joined Hugh of Vermandois; another, Tancred, fought under his own banner, refused to accept Bohemund’s authority at Constantinople and thereafter pursued an increasingly independent line.

  Bohemund’s army crossed the Adriatic from Bari to the coast of Epirus in late October 1096, probably deliberately avoiding the Byzantine garrison at Durazzo. It then dawdled its way to Constantinople, taking the best part of six months, at an average of just over three miles a day, almost being caught up by the larger force under Raymond of Toulouse, who had landed at Durazzo over three months behind. Yet there was almost no fighting or local resistance. If the story of his approach to Godfrey for an anti-Greek alliance in January 1097 is credited, the initial delay in the western Balkans is explicable as Bohemund would not wish to become too closely entangled with Greek escorts or garrisons near the capital. Godfrey’s rebuff may have inspired a volte face. As his troops neared Thrace, Bohemund left them under the command of Tancred on 1 April and hurried on to Constantinople, which he reached on 9 April. There, so far from fomenting trouble for Alexius, he proved the emperor’s staunchest ally in the often tetchy negotiations with other leaders. Bohemund spent longer with Alexius than any of the other leaders, almost a full calendar month. He eagerly took an oath of fealty and tried to obtain a future role for himself as military commander or ruler of new conquests in the east as the emperor’s vassal. His efforts to persuade Raymond of Toulouse to come to terms with Alexius and to force Tancred to swear an oath of fealty confirmed his alliance with the emperor. In return, Alexius employed him as his agent with the crusade leaders, Bohemund appearing to have acted as the expedition’s quartermaster for the siege of Nicaea, after which he shared the vanguard of the army with Alexius’s representative Tatikios. When he arrived at Constantinople, without his army, Bohemund was the least powerful of the western magnates at the imperial court; when he left Nicaea less than two months later, he was one of its undoubted leaders. Part, at least, of this must be ascribed to his private diplomacy with Alexius.