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

  The exercise is hardly straightforward. The judgemental confidence of a Macaulay – or a Runciman – is warranted neither by modern fashion nor by the discipline of the subject. All historical investigations remain contingent on surviving evidence. One of the regular temptations seducing historians and their audience is to imagine knowledge of the past. Most has been lost, by nature, accident or design. The muddle of existence is simplified both by the historians’ craft, which is at root that of selection, and by the gaps in evidence. To illustrate the tenuous links that inform our knowledge, two of the most vivid, full and important contemporary narratives of the Second Crusade (1146–8) survive in a single manuscript each. Without them, our view of that remarkable event would be entirely different. Most of the evidence that once existed for the history of the crusades has been lost. Conversely, what does survive inevitably favours certain perspectives over others for which less evidence has survived. The story of the most familiar episode of all, the First Crusade and the conquest of Jerusalem (1095–9), is based on a remarkably narrow twelfth-century historiographical tradition which may, but equally may not, reveal what was of greater or lesser importance at the time. Thus any modern historical account can only be to some degree tentative. If the requirements of the narrative obscure the delicacy of the interpretive choices reached here, this in no way suggests they were easy, simple, straightforward, necessarily incontrovertible or even conclusive. They merely represent what the author, to the best of his understanding, now thinks.

  The crusades were and are controversial and contentious far beyond the academic community. More than any other incident of medieval European history they have entered the sphere of public history, where the past is captured in abiding cultural myths of inheritance, self-image and identity. Many groups and nations find their memory awkward, even distressing. The massacres of Palestinian Muslims and Jews at Jerusalem in 1099 or of Greeks at Constantinople in 1204; the butchery of Rhineland Jews in 1096 or 1146, or English Jews in 1190; the defeats of Latin Christians by great Islamic leaders, Saladin and Baibars; the expulsion of western conquerors from the mainland of western Asia in 1291; the long triumphs of the Christians in Iberia, of the Germans in the eastern Baltic or the Turks in Asia Minor, the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean; all these aspects of crusading history have left a residue of resentment, pain, anger, guilt and pride, depending on which legacy, if any, modern observers wish to claim for themselves. Therefore, for any historian the perspective taken is of importance. Yet to look at a subject from a particular vantage point is to adopt a position in order to more clearly inspect the view. It does not mean taking sides.

  My perspective is western European. This accords best with my own research experience. More importantly, it matches the origins, development, continuance and nature of the phenomenon. Although having an impact far beyond western Europe, the crusade as an ideal and human activity began and remained rooted in western European culture. By adopting this stance in no way implies approval of crusading. It does not ignore the sources generated by the opponents and victims of crusading. Nor does it privilege the value or importance of the experience of western Europeans over others involved, as will be apparent in what follows. However, it is a necessary device to see the subject clearly through the fog of ignorance, obscurity, the passage of time and the complexity of surviving sources. A history of the crusades could be very different in structure if composed from the viewpoint of medieval Syrian, Egyptian or Andalusian Muslims, or European or Near Eastern Jews, or Balts, Livs or Prussians. However, the essential contours of the subject would, if observed dispassionately, look much the same, because this study is intended as a history, not a polemic, an account not a judgement, an exploration of an important episode of world history of enormous imaginative as well as intellectual fascination, not a confessional apologia or witness statement in some cosmic law suit. Readers will decide whether the view is worth the journey.

  Introduction: Europe and the Mediterranean

  In the eleventh century of the Christian Era, the region between the Atlantic, the Sahara Desert, the Persian Gulf, the rivers of western Russia and the Arctic Circle lived in the shadow of two great empires, Rome and the Baghdad caliphate, and accommodated two world religions, Christianity and Islam. The legacy of the classical Roman empire still determined cultural assumptions even outside the attenuated rump of the eastern Roman empire that survived as a comparatively modest but still powerful Greek-speaking empire situated between the Danube and the Taurus mountains, based on Constantinople, known to modern historians as Byzantium. In western Europe north of the Pyrenees, where Roman imperial rule had vanished five centuries before, the image of Rome, in law, art, architecture, learning and the Latin language, persisted, even in places between the Rhine and Elbe where the legions had never established their grip. The rulers of Germany claimed to be the heirs of the western Roman emperors, direct successors to the Caesars. To the east of Byzantium, the Near East, Egypt, the southern Mediterranean coastlands and most of the Iberian peninsula preserved the inheritance of the great Arab conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries, which had established an empire centred on the caliph (Commander of the Faithful, political heir of the Prophet) of Baghdad from the mid-eighth century.

  Cultural divisions were reinforced and defined by religion; Christianity in Byzantium and western Europe from northern Iberia to the Elbe, Ireland to the Hungarian plain; Islam to the east and south, in western Asia, north Africa and the southern Mediterranean. Neither religious block was united. In the later tenth century, the traditional authority of the caliph of Baghdad had been usurped in Egypt by a caliph adhering to the minority Shi’ite Islamic tradition that had separated from the majority, orthodox Sunni tradition in the late seventh century over the spiritual legitimacy of the successors of the Prophet. In Spain, the Muslim community owed allegiance to an indigenous caliphate, based at Cordoba, until its disintegration and fragmentation in the early eleventh century. In Christian territories, although a sharper separation of powers existed between religious and secular authority than in Islamic states, two main distinctive forms of Christianity had developed since the later Roman empire; the Greek Orthodox tradition based on the Byzantine empire and a Latin tradition theoretically centred on the papacy in Rome but largely driven by the twin forces of local, aristocracy-led churches and a network of monasteries. In both Christianity and Islam, apparently monolithic belief systems concealed within them infinite local variety and tensions born of social, linguistic, ethnic, cultural and geographic diversity and distance. There were few non-Christians in lands ruled by Christians, although Jewish communities were spreading from the tenth century north of the Alps, especially to France and the Rhineland. By contrast, every Muslim region contained non-Muslim inhabitants, often in large numbers, mainly those Islamic law called the People of the Book, Jews and Christians, the latter from a range of local sects and confessional traditions deriving from late Roman theological interpretations different from either Latin or Greek orthodoxies.

  In central areas of this Afro-Eurasian region, those of Christian and Muslim observance and rule, the religious and political structures rested on settled agrarian economies and populations. Byzantium and the Islamic states shared a flourishing commercial system that supported gold currencies and towns, while in Christian western Europe, by 1000 urbanization – or, in the perspective of the Roman empire, reurbanization – had only recently begun to accelerate along the major trade routes north of the Alps: the North Sea and north-west Mediterranean coasts, the Rhine, Rhône, Seine, Loire, Thames. In Italy towns and cities had survived more robustly since the collapse of the late Roman economy and civilization, even if on a far smaller scale than further east. The economic imbalance was reflected in the size of cities in the eleventh century. In the eastern Mediterranean, the great metropolis cities boasted populations of hundreds of thousands – Baghdad perhaps half a million; Old Cairo slightly less; Constantinople perhaps 600,000 at most. In Mus
lim Spain, 100,000 people may have lived in Cordoba, although some estimates make it much more. By contrast, the largest western Christian cities – Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan, Cologne – hovered around 30–40,000. Paris and London in 1100, sustained by a largely rural hinterland, probably counted about 20,000 each, the equivalent of rather third-rate cities in the Near East or less. Elsewhere in northern Europe, cities were even smaller, while some important towns could muster only a very few thousand inhabitants. One of the striking features of the following two centuries lay in the massive growth in western urban populations, but even by 1300 cities such as Paris, pushing towards 100,000, still barely competed with the great entrepôts of the eastern Mediterranean.

  Even with heightened economic and commercial activity in western Europe, the imbalance of trade remained evident, the west having to rely on an often limited silver coinage as the wealth flowed eastward and southward, gold, much of it from west Africa, never reaching or staying in large enough quantities to sustain currencies beyond the Pyrenees, Alps or Danube. International trade revolved around luxury items, notably spices and finished textiles such as silk from the east and slaves, fur, timber and some metals from the west and north. Local exchange, primarily of foodstuffs but also certain basic living materials, such as wool and woollen cloth, provided the main engine of regional commerce in the rural economies. The mosaic of local economies varied widely across the region: cereals, wheat in the more southerly areas, rye and oats further north; wine in the south, beer in the north; sugar cane in Syria; olives around the Mediterranean; fishing everywhere along the enormously long shores of Afro-Eurasia. The growth of towns in Europe between the Alps and the Atlantic indicated an acceleration in such commercialization, a process that acted as a liberating dimension for large sections of the peasant communities who were mainly tied to the land by law, hierarchy, custom, coercion and economic necessity. In market places, transactions may have been taxed and regulated but they tended to operate outside bonds of tenure. Slavery, once ubiquitous in Roman and post-Roman Afro-Eurasia, persisted in the Arab world, but was gradually dying out in Christian lands, whether through moral distaste driven by the church or economic prudence.

  Rather different demographic and economic patterns survived outside the heartlands of settled communities, around the geographic margins of the region – the Atlantic seaboard, the fringes of the Sahara, the plains, forests, steppes and tundra north of the Black Sea and Carpathian mountains, north and east of the Elbe towards the Arctic Circle – as well as in the areas within the settled regions on the edge of cultivatable land – deserts, mountains, marshes and islands. Many places on the periphery of the region harboured nomadic tribes, shifting Turkish alliances in the Eurasia steppes; Bedouin in the deserts of the Near East; seasonal herdsmen such as the Lapps near and beyond the Arctic Circle. These groups depended on varying degrees of intimacy with their settled neighbours; most of the Bedouin and many of the Turkish nomads had accepted Islam; waves of Turkish invasions from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries into the Balkans and Near East, followed by the Mongols from the Far East in the thirteenth century, highlighted this relationship. Similar mechanisms of exchange between the central lands and the geographic fringes applied to the non-nomadic peoples of northern Europe, Basques, Irish and the Scandinavians commonly known as the Vikings. In northern and north-eastern Europe, paganism flourished and resisted the cultural penetration of Christianity unenforced by commerce or conquest. Christianity (or Islam) was not necessary for the creation of stable cultural and political institutions. The eastern Baltic only began to be converted in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Lithuania remained staunchly pagan until the late fourteenth century and then converted on its own terms for political reasons.

  The oldest institution in western Europe in the eleventh century, selfconsciously tracing an uninterrupted history back a thousand years, was the papacy. Originally one of five patriarchs of the early church (Jerusalem, Constantinople, Antioch and Alexandria being the others), the bishop of Rome claimed primacy as the successor to SS Peter and Paul, the guardian of these founding saints’ bones (supposedly buried beneath St Peter’s basilica) and the diocesan of the seat of empire, from the Emperor Constantine (306–37) and the fourth century, a Christian empire. After the Arab invasions of the seventh century, only Rome and Constantinople remained in Christian hands; Jerusalem had fallen to the Muslims in 638. The absence of a western Roman emperor after 476 drew the pope and the eastern, Byzantine, emperor closer together, if in an uneasy relationship. The absence of effective imperial power in Italy had propelled the papacy into a position of temporal authority over the city of Rome and, in theory at least, parts of the central peninsula. Papal spiritual authority was enhanced by its sponsorship of the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century and of the Frisians and continental Saxons in the eighth.

  In the early eighth century, the Byzantine emperors’ flirtation with Iconoclasm (rejecting the religious efficacy of images, icons, etc.) and their inability to protect Rome and the pope from the Lombard rulers of northern Italy persuaded Popes Gregory III (731–41), Zacharias (741–52) and Stephen II (752–7) to enter into alliances with the Franks, the rulers of a large kingdom that stretched from modern south-west France to the Rhineland and the Low Countries. As part of this new orientation of policy, the papal court (or Curia) concocted the so-called Donation of Constantine, one of the most powerful forgeries in world history only properly exposed in the fifteenth century. This claimed that, on becoming a Christian, the Emperor Constantine surrendered his imperial authority to Pope Sylvester I (314–35), who returned it while retaining pre-eminence over the other patriarchates, theoretical temporal jurisdiction over the western empire and direct rule of Rome, its surrounding region and Italy in general. This forgery formed one basis for the later papal insistence on its claims to a state in central Italy and its wider assertion of primacy over imperial authority in western Europe.

  The papal–Frankish alliance proved mutually advantageous. The papacy gained effective protection in Italy; the Franks legitimacy for their mid- to late-eighth-century conquests in Lombardy, Gascony, Bavaria and Saxony between the Rhine and Elbe. The culmination of the alliance came on Christmas Day 800 when Pope Leo III (795–816) crowned the king of the Franks, Charles the Great or Charlemagne (768–814), as the new Roman emperor in the west, inaugurating what came to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, which survived, with various interruptions and changes of fortune, nature and substance, until abolished in 1806 on the insistence of Napoleon. While the Frankish, or Carolingian (i.e. family of Charles), empire lasted, until the 880s, the papacy remained rather overshadowed. Thereafter the throne of St Peter tended to be the preserve of a dim succession of Roman nobles, some youthful, dissolute, even irreligious. Yet the reputation of their office remained high, especially in northern Europe, where papal authority still appeared as a final arbiter of ecclesiastical and spiritual issues; the newly converted King Miesco I of Poland sought papal protection in 991. In 962, the king of Germany, Otto I, who had recently conquered northern Italy, revived the western empire by being crowned in Rome by Pope John XII (955–64), a notoriously debauched twenty-five-year-old nobleman and libertine who apparently met his death, still only about twenty-seven, after a stroke suffered during intercourse with a married woman.

  By the early eleventh century the papacy alternated between grand protégés of the German emperors, such as the scholar Gerbert (Pope Sylvester II, 999–1003), and a succession of local appointees of distinctly uneven calibre usually taking the names Benedict or John. Increasingly elements within the Roman church and elsewhere in Christendom sought to reform both the papacy and the wider secular church in the west by re-emphasizing the separation and dominance of the spiritual over the secular in church appointments, management, finance and behaviour. Under the patronage of Emperor Henry III (1039–56), the reformers seized control of the papacy. A succession of German, Italian and French popes i
n the half-century after 1048 transformed both the papacy and western Christendom. Deliberately and innovatively international in outlook and personnel, central in the policies of the reforming papal Curia came the understanding that the church of Rome was synonymous with the universal church; that the pope held temporal as well as spiritual jurisdiction on earth as the heir to St Peter, to whom, according to the so-called Petrine texts in Matthew’s Gospel, Christ entrusted the keys of heaven and the power to bind and loose on earth and in heaven (Matthew 16:19). The more general reformist agenda included the improving of the morals and education of the clergy and the eradication of simony (paying for church office) and clerical marriage (a move both moral and economic, to protect church land from being inherited by non-clerical clergy children). An attempt was made to make secular priests more like monks, wholly distinctive from their lay neighbours and relatives, and loyally obedient to Rome.