God's Battalions (14 page)

Many recent historians have followed Carl Erdmann (1898–1945) in arguing that Pope Urban’s call to the Crusade was nothing new, that it was a potpourri of well-known ideas and practices—holy war, pilgrimage, and indulgences.
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And besides, religious motives were of minor importance to the knights, since they went primarily in pursuit of gain. These historians also have followed Erdmann’s remarkable claim that Pope Urban had far less interest in liberating the Holy Land than he had in sending reinforcements to the Byzantines and perhaps thereby gaining authority over the Eastern church.

None of these claims is sustained by the evidence, not even that cited by Erdmann, who “rummaged through the versions of the [pope’s] sermon [at Clermont] isolating and taking out of context [phrases]…to support his thesis that it was not the liberation of Jerusalem which Urban had in mind but the fulfillment of Gregory VII’s plan for the unification of the Christian church.”
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Since all surviving versions of Urban’s speech at Clermont were recalled and written down well after the fact, there is perhaps some license as to what the pope may have actually preached. But there is nothing ambiguous about the statement issued by the Council of Clermont, convened by the pope just prior to his speech: “Whoever goes on the journey to free the church of God in Jerusalem out of devotion alone, and not for the gaining of glory or money, can substitute the journey for all penance for sin.”
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Nothing here about saving Byzantium.

In addition, in his campaign for volunteers the pope wrote several letters that survive, each of which specifically gives Jerusalem as the destination of the Crusade then being organized. For example, in his letter to Bologna: “We have heard that some of you have conceived the desire to go to Jerusalem, and you know that it is pleasing to us, and you should also know that if any among you travel…. only for the good of their souls and the liberty of the churches, they will be relieved of the penance for all of their sins.”
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As for the claim that the pope’s idea of penitential warfare was nothing new, he did not propose it in a theological vacuum. Penance and pilgrimage had been linked for many centuries. Nor was the idea of a “just war” anything new; it had been assessed at length by Saint Augustine (354–430), among many other theologians. But putting these notions together was creative. And as we have seen, again and again Urban explained in the most direct ways, unadorned by theological quibbles or qualifiers, that anyone who went on the Crusade in the proper spirit would have their sins forgiven. That idea was so new that many theologians opposed it at the time as inconsistent with previous Christian doctrines on violence, which held that fighting always was sinful. Indeed, the “idea of penitential warfare was revolutionary…because it put the act of fighting on the same meritorious plane as prayer, works of mercy and fasting.”
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Finally, even if Erdmann had been right and the pope had not placed the primary emphasis on liberating Jerusalem, the far more important fact is that liberating Jerusalem is what the crusaders believed their mission to be, as they explained in many documents that survive. Godfrey of Boullion and his brother Baldwin of Boulogne issued a document to their mother to go into effect should they not return from their “fight for God in Jerusalem.”
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Raymond of Saint-Gilles claimed he was going “on pilgrimage to wage war on foreign peoples and defeat barbaric nations, lest the Holy City of Jerusalem be held captive and the Holy Sepulchre of the Lord Jesus be contaminated any longer.”
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In addition to such words came the deeds. The knights were not content with having won some decisive victories over Muslim forces and pushing them far back from Constantinople. No! Starving, riddled with disease, having eaten most of their horses, and with greatly reduced numbers, they pushed on to Jerusalem and against all odds stormed over the walls to victory.

NETWORKS OF ENLISTMENT

The primary sources on the Crusades—on the routes marched, the suffering endured, and the battles fought—have been well known for centuries. But only recently have historians recognized the immense amount of data available on the crusaders themselves—on who went and how they financed their participation. As first noted by Giles Constable,
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these data are contained in “legal documents describing transfers of property by endowment, sale, or pledge, many of [which]…record benefactions and other financial arrangements made by the members of the property-owning classes who crusaded, wills drawn up on their behalf, and disputes in which their heirs and families were involved.”
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These treasures took on added significance when Jonathan Riley-Smith entered them in a computer database.
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He did so because he wished to shift the focus from events to individuals, to shed light on why some people decided to become crusaders—given that most of their peers did not.

Riley-Smith’s most important insight was thrust upon him by the data: crusading was dominated by a few closely related families! It appears that it was not so much that individuals decided to accept the pope’s summons, but that families did so. Unbeknownst to Riley-Smith, this is entirely consistent with a very large social scientific literature on recruitment to social movements, be they political campaigns or new religions. People become active in social movements in response to the fact that many of their friends, relatives, or other close associates already have done so. Put another way, collective social activities are not the summation of a number of independent choices made by individuals; rather, they are the product of social networks. So, for example, reconstruction of the initial set of converts to new religions, from Buddhism to Mormonism, shows those religions to have begun as family affairs.
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And so it was with crusading.

Consider the family headed by Count William Tête-Hardi of Burgundy. He had five sons. Of these, three went on the First Crusade and the fourth became a priest who, as Pope Calixtus II (1119–1124), inaugurated an extension of the Crusade to attack Damascus in 1122. Count William also had four daughters. Three were married to men who joined their brothers-in-law and went on the First Crusade, and the fourth was the mother of a First Crusader. As for the Second Crusade, this family sent ten crusaders in 1147. There were many similar examples. Baldwin of Ghent went on the First Crusade, accompanied by his brother, his uncle, and his two brothers-in-law. As for the four Montlhéry sisters, they had so many spouses, children, and other close relatives involved in the Crusades, and in sustaining the crusader kingdoms, that it took Riley-Smith a whole chapter to cover them all.
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Riley-Smith also discovered that, in addition to crusaders’ being highly clustered into immediate families, these crusader families also were extensively tied to one another by marriage and kinship, ties that even crossed the two major nationality groups involved in the First Crusade: the Franks and the Normans. For example, Count William Tête-Hardi’s granddaughter Florina was married to Sven of Denmark and accompanied him on the First Crusade.

In addition to the fact that networks form the basis for joining social movements, there was a second reason that families were so prominent in generating crusaders: families were inevitably deeply involved in the ability of a knight to go crusading. Substantial sums had to be raised to fund the venture, and arrangements had to be made about estates and heirs in case of death. Indeed, that’s why Riley-Smith was able to assemble such an elaborate body of data on the crusaders: these arrangements were recorded in formal, written documents. In many instances, these took the form of very large mortgages, promissory notes, or loan agreements.

FINANCES

Crusading was a very expensive undertaking. A knight needed armor, arms, at least one warhorse (preferably two or three), a palfrey (a riding horse), and packhorses or mules, all of them being very costly items. For example, Guy of Thiers paid ten pounds for a warhorse, which was equal to more than two years of salary for a ship’s captain.
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A knight also needed servants (one or two to take care of the horses), clothing, tenting, an array of supplies such as horseshoes, and a substantial amount of cash to buy supplies along the way, in addition to those supplies that could be looted or were contributed, and he needed to pay various members of his entourage. In those days, money consisted entirely of coins, and because coins are so heavy, a group of knights often shared a treasury wagon.
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Most crusaders also needed funds to sustain their families and estates while they were away in the East. The best estimate is that a typical crusader needed to raise at least four or five times his annual income before he could set forth.
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This reveals the absurdity of all claims that the crusaders were mostly landless younger sons, since it would have been cheaper for families to have kept such sons at home and provided them an adequate inheritance.

Pope Urban asked the richer crusaders to subsidize those lacking sufficient funds, and in response some great nobles put a substantial number of knights on their payrolls. But that still left large numbers, especially among the lesser nobility, in need of very large sums. A few financed their participation by selling property, and some huge sales were involved. In order to raise needed crusading funds, Godfrey of Bouillon sold the entire county of Verdun to King Philip of France. The Viscount of Bourges sold both the city and the county of that name; the buyer also was King Philip.
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In similar fashion, “part of the county of Chalon and the castle Couvin”
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changed owners. And on a smaller scale, there are many records involving the sale of vineyards, mills, and forests, and even of peasants being sold new rights to their land.

However, medieval families placed so much emphasis on
never
surrendering any property that most aspiring crusaders preferred to borrow rather than sell. Some approached their relatives and friends for loans. Of course, since crusading was so concentrated in families, that often was a dead end, as all who might otherwise have lent the money were themselves seeking funds. Consequently, only about 10 percent of the crusaders obtained their funding from relatives.
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One of these was Robert, Duke of Normandy, who “pawned the entire duchy of Normandy” to his brother King William II of England for ten thousand marks in 1096,
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a sum that would have paid the wages of twenty-five hundred ship’s captains for a year.
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To obtain such a sum, the king had to impose a new tax on the nation despite many angry protests.
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And even having sold the county of Verdun, Godfrey of Bouillon mortgaged his county of Bouillon to the bishop of Liège for fifteen hundred marks.
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Since banks had yet to be invented, in this era monastic orders served as the primary financiers in Europe,
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and it was to them that most aspiring crusaders turned. Because the Church still clung to its opposition to interest payments (on grounds of usury), the transactions were quite creative. Today one pledges property such as a farm or a factory to a lender and repays the principal, plus interest—the latter being payment for use of the principal. Meanwhile, the borrower retains possession of the mortgaged property and receives any income the property produces. In the eleventh century, however, a lord would borrow a sum of money in the form of a
vifage,
an arrangement whereby control of the property and all or part of the income it generated passed to the lender until such time as the principal was repaid. The income gained from the property by the lender was, of course, a substitute for interest, but it was not defined as such by the Church, and hence no sin of usury was involved. Thus, for example, in order to go on the First Crusade, William of Le Vast pledged his land for three silver marks to the abbey of Fécamp. In return, the abbey would collect all the rents until William repaid them. (Repayment was not taken from the rents.) Bernard Morel was able to get better terms when he borrowed against his farm from the nuns of Marcigny. His
vifage
agreement awarded only half of all the income from the farm to the nuns until he, or his heirs, repaid the loan.
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Of course, as with modern mortgages, failure to pay resulted in foreclosure, and because such a high percentage of those knights and nobles who went on the First Crusade died from disease or starvation or were killed in battle, foreclosures were widespread. Thus, the mortgage agreement signed by Achard of Montmerle with the monks of Cluny pledged his property in return for two thousand solidi with the provision that “[n]o person can redeem [this mortgage] except myself. Thus if I die…that which is the subject of this mortgage…shall become the rightful and hereditary possession of the monastery of Cluny in perpetuity.” Achard was killed in fighting near Jerusalem.
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But it wasn’t only raising the funds needed for crusading that caused knights who had taken the cross to enter into negotiations with religious orders. They wanted to insure, as best they could, their fate and that of their families. Thus, Stephen of Blois gave a forest 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.”
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Robert of Burgundio of Sablé gave a vineyard and a farm to the same abbey “so that God may keep me healthy and safe in going and returning.”
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Many others gave substantial property to monastic groups in return for regular prayers for their souls and their success.

Finally, it must be kept in mind that about 85 to 90 percent of the Frankish knights
did not
respond to the pope’s call to the Crusade.
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This gives further support to the claim that those who went were motivated primarily by pious idealism. It must be supposed that if it had been widely believed that great returns were to be had from looting a land of “milk and honey,” there would have been a much greater turnout.