The Age of Chivalry (10 page)

In March 1095 ambassadors from the Greek emperor Alexius I Commenus delivered a message to Pope Urban II, who was presiding at the Church council convened in Piacenza. The Byzantine empire had lost most of Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks following the Greeks' defeat in the Battle of Manzikert (August 26, 1071), and Alexius wanted Western military aid in order to regain his lands. His emissaries had also been instructed to remind the pope and council that Jerusalem was Muslim-controlled, and that Western pilgrims' access to the Holy City was being frustrated as a result. This call to arms was to lead to the series of fierce struggles between Christian and Muslim forces known as the crusades
.

When the Greek emperor Alexius requested military aid to help expel the Muslims from Jerusalem, his timing could not have been better. Seljuk princes were quarreling among themselves, and the Turks' advance had stalled. The papacy's confrontation with the German empire was proof of its new self-confidence, and relations between the Greek and Latin Churches were once again relatively amicable. The East-West split had become a formal schism in 1054, and the Greeks were resolute in denying primacy to the Roman see over their patriarchates at Constantinople, Nicaea, Antioch and Jerusalem. Following his election to the papacy Urban was, however, keen to end the divide. He had lifted the sentence of excommunication imposed on Alexius by Gregory VII and was also sympathetic to the plight of Greek Christians subjected to persecution by the Turks.

The pope's formal and public response to Alexius's missive came in November 1095 at the synod held in Clermont in the Auvergne. Urban had spent the intervening months in his native France drumming up support for intervention in Palestine and Syria. His discussions with Adhemar, the bishop of Le Puy, as well as with Raymond IV of Toulouse, prepared the ground for his announcement at Clermont, and their influential support gave a powerful leadership in southern France to the crusading cause. Urban's impassioned speech of November 27 proclaimed the vision of an armed pilgrimage
whose adherents would fight for the liberation of the holy places. His statement guaranteeing that the pilgrims' sins would be remitted if they died fighting for so sacred a cause gave an original, and highly appealing, twist to this declaration of war. From late 1095 onward the message was spread by the clergy not only in the rest of France but also in Italy and Germany. Most who “took the cross” were poor and pious peasants, and their vow committed them to a pilgrimage that would only end on arrival at Jerusalem's Church of the Holy Sepulchre. During 1096 a group of knights and nobles emerged to lead and organize the vast and French dominated army of devout peasants that had been created so suddenly.

A
BOVE
Pope Urban II presides over the Council of Clermont in 1095, as shown in this manuscript of
Livres des Passages d'Outre-mer, c.
1490
.

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15th-century woodcut engraving of Godfrey of Bouillon arriving in Jerusalem on horseback in 1099
.

This, then, was the crusade that would lead to the establishment of the kingdom of Jerusalem, the principality of Antioch, and the counties of Tripoli and of Edessa. These crusader states would help to relieve Byzantium of the pressure it had been under in the late 11th century, while the Greeks re-established control of much of Western Asia Minor. However, the victorious Latins refused to hand back to the Greeks territories in Palestine and Syria that had been in Byzantine control before the Arab armies' seventh-century conquests in the region. Western European rulers would direct eight further crusades toward the Middle East in the next two centuries, but none enjoyed the success that came to the first of these ventures—a campaign whose mass appeal surprised even its own leadership.

Following the Battle of Manzikert, the Greek empire was mostly confined to the Balkans and a narrow strip of land in northwest Anatolia. But the Seljuk Turks failed to maintain a coordinated impetus, and in the 1090s there were separate, and often quarrelsome, principalities located in Anatolia, Aleppo and Damascus. Further south the Seljuks confronted a major enemy in the Fatimids, an Arab dynasty that had ruled Egypt since the late tenth century and which had subsequently expanded into parts of Palestine. The Fatimids' regime seems to have been a tolerant one so far as Christian areas within Palestine were concerned. However, their Shiite Muslim faith divided them from the Seljuks—who were followers of Sunni Islam—and the military conflict between the two powers caused massive disruption to the Christians of the Palestinian region. Jerusalem was Fatimid controlled until the early 1070s, and the dynasty regained the city from the Turks in 1098, just before the crusaders' arrival. It was the Turkish occupation of Anatolia and the Syrian south that formed the immediate background to the First Crusade. Accounts of the suffering inflicted on the regions' Christians reached Western Europe and gained a wide circulation by the 1090s. But the Seljuk occupation of Palestine from
c
.1073 onward had a similarly destructive impact on Christian lives and property.

THE FIRST CRUSADE

1071
Following the defeat of the Byzantine army at Manzikert, most of Anatolia is controlled by the Seljuk Turks.

1095
At a synod held in Clermont, Auvergne, Pope Urban II launches a campaign for the liberation of the “holy places” in Syria and Palestine.

1097
A crusading army is transported from Constantinople to the shores of Asia Minor: Nicaea's Turkish garrison surrenders (June 19), and by October the crusaders are besieging Antioch.

1098
Establishment of the county of Edessa, the first crusader state. Antioch falls (June).

1099
The crusading army arrives at the walls of Jerusalem (early June) and besieges the city. Jerusalem falls (July 15). Godfrey of Bouillon is elected to rule the city, and establishes the Principality of Galilee and the county of Jaffa as territorial components within what will become known as the “Latin kingdom of Jerusalem.”

1100
Baldwin, count of Edessa, succeeds his brother Godfrey and is crowned king of Jerusalem.

1103
Raymond of Toulouse launches a military offensive in the Lebanon against the emir of Tripoli. His son Bertrand continues the campaign after Raymond's death (1106) and, following the emir's surrender (1109), a county of Tripoli is established.

In the early 1080s Bohemond, prince of Taranto and the son of Robert Guiscard, had directed his fellow Normans' campaigning against Byzantine lands in southern Italy. He was joined on the crusade by his nephew, Tancred. Although Bohemond had carved out a small principality for himself in the Italian south, he hoped to take over a larger one while on crusade. Godfrey of Bouillon also joined the crusade, despite having been a supporter of the emperor Henry IV in the imperial struggle against the papacy. He was joined in the venture by his brother, Baldwin of Boulogne. The other major leaders joining the crusade included: Hugh of Vermandois, who was the younger brother of King Philip I of France; King William II of England's younger brother Robert of Normandy; Count Robert II of Flanders; and the Count of Blois, Stephen II, who was married to William the Conqueror's daughter.

The crusader forces were due to congregate in Constantinople in mid-August 1096. But the enthusiasm engendered by Urban's call to arms led many peasants to form their own crusading organizations. Peter the Hermit, a priest from near Amiens, was the most celebrated of the many populist preachers who traveled through France advocating a crusade. In the spring of 1096, assisted by a few knights, he was leading thousands of illiterate peasants toward the east when some of their number massacred Jews in the Rhine valley—an area that was the scene of much anti-Semitic violence in 1095–96. In fact, Peter's unofficial “People's Crusade” posed a threat to public order, and it provoked counter-attacks by the armies of both the Hungarians and the Greeks as the rabble advanced toward Constantinople. An alarmed Alexius ferried Peter's army across the Bosphorus as quickly as possible, and most of the force was slaughtered by the Turks at the Battle of Civitate in October.

Alexius was also keen to be rid of the official crusading army, which was camped outside his capital's walls in the winter of 1096–97. Hungry crusaders were already pillaging in the outskirts of Constantinople. Alexius had no interest in joining them, but he did expect the leaders of these Latins to swear fealty to him in return for food and military supplies. Raymond of Toulouse would only go as far as promising not to damage the Greek empire's interests. Eventually, however, all the other crusade leaders agreed to the oath, and in the opening months of 1097 the entire expedition, accompanied by two Greek generals, was transported to Asia Minor.

The ancient Christian city of Nicaea, captured 20 years earlier by the Seljuk Turks, was now the capital of their Anatolian principality, the Sultanate of Rum. It was subjected to a month-long siege and Alexius, encamped some distance away, supplied the crusaders with military reinforcements. The Greek general Manuel Boutoumites received the surrender of Nicaea's Turkish garrison on June 19. Boutoumites was named
dux
or duke of Nicaea, and the city once more became part of Byzantium's empire.

The crusading army, now divided into a Norman component led by Bohemond and a French division led by Raymond, advanced across the Anatolian plain. On July 1, at Dorylaeum, the reunited army gained its first victory in battle over the Seljuk Turks, but further progress was slow. The local population were mostly Christian and therefore friendly, but lack of supplies still meant that the crusaders had to resort to pillaging and looting. Leadership quarrels were also emerging, and Baldwin of Boulogne separated from his colleagues. The kingdom of Cilicia (in modern southeast coastal Turkey) was a recent foundation established by Armenians fleeing from the Seljuk invasion, and this Christian state would be a strong ally of European crusaders. To its east lay Edessa—another region populated by Armenians but ruled by Thoros, a local nobleman alienated from his subjects by his Greek Orthodox religion. Thoros was first persuaded to adopt Baldwin as his heir and was then assassinated—possibly by his protégé, who duly succeeded him as ruler in March 1098 and then took the title of count.

The first of the crusader states had therefore been established, but by now the main body of the crusading force was facing the immense challenge of Antioch—a city that had been heavily fortified by the Byzantines for centuries and whose walls were guarded by the Turks after its occupation in 1085. During the eight-month siege that started in October 1097 the crusaders defeated two major expeditionary forces sent by the princes of Damascus and Aleppo to relieve the city's defenders. When Antioch fell in June 1098 a bloody massacre of its inhabitants followed. Internal rivalries within the Seljuk army that arrived shortly afterward to besiege the city led to another major Christian victory.

The crusade's military commanders continued to quarrel, however, and Adhemar's death in August deprived the expedition of a significant spiritual leader and shrewdly political counselor. Bohemond now contended that Alexius had deserted the crusade and that the oaths sworn to the Greek emperor were therefore invalid. Raymond of Toulouse was among those who objected to Bohemond's territorial claim to the defeated city, and the crusade came to a halt in the remaining months of 1098. Both pilgrims and knights became increasingly resentful at the delay, and it became critical for the dispute to be resolved. The resolution came early in 1099; as the expedition resumed its march to the south and toward Jerusalem, Bohemond was left behind in possession of Antioch as its prince.