A History of the Crusades (12 page)

A much less welcome consequence of taking the cross was often obloquy. No group of people in the central Middle Ages brought down on their heads such venomous criticism as did crusaders. The reason was that failure in God’s own war fought at his bidding could not possibly be attributed to him, but only, as it had been in the Old Testament, to the unworthiness of the instruments at his disposal, in this case the soldiers of Christ.
Because it was ideologically necessary to blame them for every failure, crusaders were subjected to torrents of abuse from reactions at home to the disasters of 1101 onwards.

But whether a crusade was a success or a failure, every crusader risked death, injury, or financial ruin, and apprehension shrouded the charters issued before departure like a cloud. In 1096 Stephen of Blois gave a wood to the abbey of Marmoutier ‘so that God, at the intercession of St Martin and his monks, might pardon me for whatever I have done wrong and lead me on the journey out of my homeland and bring me back healthy and safe, and watch over my wife Adela and our children’. He and many others found comfort in the thought that intercessory prayers were being said for them back home. According, it must be admitted, to the intercessors themselves, Ranulf of Chester, returning in 1220 from Damietta in a ship tossed and nearly wrecked by a storm, remained unmoved until midnight, when he suddenly became active because at that time ‘my monks and other religious, whom my ancestors and I have established in various places, arise to chant divine service and remember me in their prayers’.

Stephen of Blois’s anxiety about the security of the family he was going to leave behind was echoed in many charters, in spite of the role of protector the Church had assumed. It has often been written that Pope Urban had hoped to canalize the bellicosity of the armsbearers away from western Europe and that in this respect the crusade was an instrument of domestic peace. But everyone must have known that the absence of leading magnates from the scene would have the opposite effect and this may be why the preaching of the crusade was accompanied by a renewal of peace decrees in church councils. Flanders suffered while Count Robert was absent on the First Crusade. When Guy of Rochefort came riding back into his castellany in 1102 he was met with a catalogue of complaints; while he had been away ‘scarcely anyone could be brought to justice’. In 1128 Baldwin of Vern d’Anjou came to a very detailed arrangement with his brother Rual ‘concerning his land and all his possessions and his wife with their only daughter’. Rual promised always to deal faithfully with the two women, never to try to
take away property to which they had a right, and to aid them against anyone who injured them ‘even to making war himself’. The agreement, which demonstrates clearly the threat posed by a younger, and probably unmarried, brother to a crusader’s wife and daughter and the need to take steps to counter it, was witnessed by ten men and was guaranteed by Baldwin’s immediate lord.

The fact is that even in the thirteenth century and in England, where the crown had taken over the protection of a crusader’s property, the experiences of kin, particularly women, left behind for several years to manage estates and bring up families, surrounded by rapacious neighbours and litigious relations, could be horrific, and judicial records reveal a depressing inventory of the injuries of every sort to which they were exposed. William Trussel’s wife was murdered six weeks after he had left on crusade in 1190 and her body was thrown into a marl pit. Peter Duffield’s wife was strangled while he was on the Fifth Crusade, and Ralph Hodeng came home to find his daughter and heiress married to one of his peasants. It is not surprising that crusaders felt safer taking measures of their own. For instance, in 1120 Geoffrey of Le Louet put his wife into the care of the nuns of Le Ronceray d’Angers for a fee; he promised a supplement to the sum as an entry gift should she wish to become a nun herself. At the same time Fulk of Le Plessis-Macé arranged for the nuns to look after his daughter. If he should not return, they were to allow her to marry or become a nun ‘according to her will and that of her brothers and other friends’. If she should decide not to enter the community he promised the nuns one of his nieces as an oblate and he guaranteed her entry gift. Touching arrangements were negotiated by a recruit to the Second Crusade, Hugh Rufus of Champallement, who had a very sick or disabled brother called Guy. Hugh made a grant of property to the monks of Corbigny, from the rents of which Guy was to be provided with a pension in cash and kind, payable at fixed times in the year. The monks would bury him in their cemetery should he die.

Just as vital to the interests of crusaders were the arrangements they had to make for the administration of their properties in
what were bound to be long absences: at the time of the First Crusade there seems to have been already talk of a three-year campaign and in 1120 Fulk of Le Plessis-Macé was allowing for the fact that he might be away for a similar period. Members of the family or neighbours or vassals could be made responsible for management. From the family it could be the eldest son, or a younger one, or a brother, for instance the first crusader Gerald of Landerron’s brother Auger, prior of St Pierre de La Réole, in whose care Gerald left his castles and sons. Auger promised to ‘rear the sons until the time that he himself would make them knights’. It was also quite common for wives or mothers to take over these responsibilities, but sometimes it seems that there was no one in a family considered capable of the charge. In 1101 Guy of Bré handed custody of his land and daughter to a neighbour, Oliver of Lastours, whose father and uncle had been on the expedition of 1096–9. Oliver later married her. Among other early crusaders, Geoffrey of Issoudun left his castle in the hands of one of his vassals and Hugh of Gallardon entrusted his castle and daughter to his knights. From the late twelfth century English crusaders were appointing attorneys to look after their interests.

Crusaders knew that they were involving themselves in something that was going to be very costly, and we have already seen how expensive crusading was. There is very little evidence for the first crusaders coming home wealthy after the crippling expenses and severities of the campaign, although they certainly brought back relics and showered European churches with them. Guy of Rochefort was said to have came back in 1102 ‘in glory and abundance’, whatever that might mean. A knight called Grimald, passing by Cluny, became a
confrater
, made a will in the abbey’s favour and presented it with an ounce of gold. Hadvide of Chiny, who had crusaded with her husband Dodo of Cons-la-Grandville, gave St Hubert-en-Ardenne a complete set of vestments in precious cloth and a chalice made from nine ounces of gold and adorned with jewels. But these are the only known references to riches possibly gained on the earliest expeditions and it is not likely that there are many more to be found, given the expenses of the return journey and the impracticability of carrying quantities of bullion or precious material over such long distances.

On the other hand, the survivors and their families had pledges to redeem and debts to repay, and a pressing need for cash led some men, and sometimes their relations, to try to lessen the damage by resorting to whatever measures were available to them. When Fulk I of Matheflon came back from the East in 1100 he tried to exact a toll on a bridge he had built and to levy another on pigs, and he shrewdly turned to his advantage an old dispute with the nuns of Le Ronceray d’Angers. Early in the eleventh century the village of Seiches-sur-le-Loir had been given to the nuns by Countess Hildegarde of Anjou. The castle of Matheflon had then been built in the parish and within its enceinte a wooden church had been constructed. But the population had grown and Fulk and Le Ronceray had agreed to replace the church in stone. The church had been built and Fulk had agreed to surrender his share of the tithes and to fund a priest, although he was given a substantial sum for this. He had not kept his side of the bargain, however, and he had held on to the tithes, so that he and the nunnery were at odds up to the time he left on the First Crusade. While he was away his son Hugh came to recognize that the nuns had a case and made over the tithes for another, larger sum, which he agreed to return if Fulk refused to accept what he had done. When Fulk got back he wanted, or pretended to want, to nullify the agreement, but he was persuaded to endorse it for an even larger amount.

Fulk’s share of the tithes of Seiches had cost the nuns dear, which may be why they took a strong line in a related case. This involved a man called Geoffrey Le Râle, who had sold the tithes of the mill of Seiches to Le Ronceray when raising money for his crusade. On his return he decided to sell the mill itself, presumably to settle his debts, but he wanted the tithes to be sold with it—they would obviously enhance its value—and he was furious with the abbess of Le Ronceray when she refused to be party to the sale. He seized the mill, but he was hauled into the abbess’s court, where he pleaded guilty and was fined.

Crusading was so unpleasant, dangerous, and expensive that the more one considers crusaders the more astonishing their
motivation becomes. What did they think they were doing? And why did catastrophes, which might be expected to induce cynicism, indifference, and despair, only heighten their enthusiasm? What was in their minds?

Over the last sixty years the theology of Christian violence has been intensively studied, and the ways it contributed, at an intellectual level, to ideas of Christian holy war in general and to crusading thought in particular, have become reasonably clear. The reactions of men and women to the call to crusade are beginning to be explained as responses to the popularization of that ideology, presented to them by preachers in ways which related to their day-to-day religious concerns. But even in terms of the history of theories of Christian violence crusading was a startling development. The First Crusade was the culminating surge towards the Holy Land of a cult of the Holy Sepulchre which had regularly spawned mass pilgrimages to Jerusalem throughout the eleventh century, but it was not only much the largest of these pilgrimages; it also differed from the others in being at the same time a war. Two Provençal brothers, Geoffrey and Guy of Signes, took the cross ‘on the one hand for the grace of the pilgrimage and on the other, under the protection of God, to wipe out the defilement of the pagans and the immoderate madness through which innumerable Christians have already been oppressed, made captive, and killed with barbaric fury’. And in the Limousin Aimery Brunus ‘was mindful of my sins and desired to go to fight the Muslims with the Christian people, and to visit the Sepulchre of the Lord which is in Jerusalem’.

Making a pilgrimage is a penitential, devotional act, requiring a frame of mind which is traditionally at the opposite end of the spectrum from that of a warrior. The intentions of eleventh-century pilgrims from the arms-bearing classes, who could certainly travel with splendour and panache, had been generally purely peaceful. The crusaders, on the other hand, intended war to be an integral part of their penitential exercise. It was officially described as an expression of their love for their Christian brothers and sisters and for their God, and commitment to it was considered to be a ‘true oblation’, a sacrificial surrender of self. In spite of its often flamboyant trappings, crusading was as
much a devotional as a military activity, and the notion of a devotional war suggests a form of war-service which can be compared to saying a prayer.

In preaching the First Crusade, therefore, Pope Urban had made a revolutionary appeal. The notion that making war could be penitential seems to have evolved in the 1070s and 1080s out of a dialogue between Pope Gregory VII and a circle of reform theorists which had gathered around his supporter Mathilda of Tuscany. Urban took the idea, which was without precedent, and made it intellectually justifiable by associating warfare with pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The writer of the Monte Cassino Chronicle, probably a curial official who had accompanied the pope on his journey to France, described his initiative as a pastoral move, giving armsbearers the chance of contributing to their own salvation by undertaking an act of severe penance which did not entail the abandonment of their profession of arms or the humiliating loss of status involved in pilgrimaging without weapons, equipment, and horses. And a commentary on the crusade as something deliberately created so that nobles and knights could function as soldiers not just beneficially but devotionally, is to be found in Guibert of Nogent’s famous statement, to which reference has already been made: ‘God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in its wake… might find a new way of gaining salvation. And so they are not forced to abandon secular affairs completely by choosing the monastic life or any religious profession, as used to be the custom, but can attain in some measure God’s grace while pursuing their own careers, with the liberty and in the dress to which they are accustomed.’

Men definitely responded to this. In the Limousin, Brunet of Treuil had intended to enter the priory of Aureil, but now he changed his mind; he must have seen in the crusade a way of satisfying his desire for a more positive life while remaining in the world. He persuaded the priory to use the rent from his entry-gift to buy him armour and a young relative was found to take his place in the community. A similar case may have been that of Odo Bevin from near Châteaudun, who had been
involved in a lengthy dispute with the abbey of Marmoutier over property. Odo fell ill and informed the local prior that he wanted to enter the community and that he would renounce his claims on the property as his entry gift. But when the prior returned from Marmoutier he found that Odo had recovered and was now saying that he preferred to go to Jerusalem. In southern Italy, the Norman knight Tancred had been troubled by the contradictions for a Christian in the life he led. His mind had been ‘divided, uncertain whether to follow in the footsteps of the Gospel or the world’. He recovered his spirits ‘after the call to arms in the service of Christ, [which]… inflamed him beyond belief’.