God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Gregory was not merely a rhetorician or theorist. Even before becoming pope, as archdeacon of the Roman church, he had taken a keen interest in wars on behalf of the church, in Sicily, England and Milan. As pope, this continued. In 1076, he offered absolution of all sins to the knights of Count Roger of Sicily on a projected campaign against the Saracens as he did to those joining an attack on Byzantium in 1080 to restore, as Gregory mistakenly thought, the rightful emperor. Throughout the 1070s and 1080s, he tried to enlist milites in Italy, Germany and France to coerce clergy contumaciously clinging to unreformed practices of simony and fornication as much as he encouraged the civil conflict in Milan and, after 1080, armed resistance to Henry IV in Germany and Italy. Beyond the specific justifications of war and the function of the arms-bearer, this extension of papal approval and rhetoric lent these conflicts a sustained ideological quality Gregory deliberately fostered and publicized. Those involved were bombarded with rhetoric from all sides insisting on the principles for which they were fighting, conceived in terms of service to God. Many, like the fidelis beati Sancti Petri Raymond IV of Toulouse or the duke of Lower Lorraine, Godfrey of Bouillon, who fought for the emperor in Italy against the pope in the 1080s, were to answer the call to Jerusalem in 1096. The level of this propaganda war was such as to indicate that catching the imaginations of the knights themselves was no accident. Not all was conducted on the highest intellectual plane. One imperialist propagandist nicknamed Godfrey of Bouillon’s predecessor but one as duke of Lorraine, another Godfrey, but a staunch papalist, as ‘Prickfrey’ or ‘Shitfrey’.³¹

The ideological rhetoric of the Investiture Contest wars and the recruitment of knights to establish and protect the Peace and Truce of God depended on the susceptibility of western knights to a religiously framed ideology of war. The Anglo-Norman chronicler Orderic Vitalis left a sharp portrait of one such pious warlord. Hugh, count of Avranches in western Normandy and earl of Chester in north-west England, a nephew of William the Conqueror, had done very well out of the Norman conquest of England, a classic example of that eleventh-century aristocratic mobility and fluid opportunistic careerism that fuelled the First Crusade. In establishing his power on the fringes of the Anglo-Norman realm, Hugh, called by some ‘the wolf’, acquired a foul reputation; vicious, violent, addicted to gambling, a lecher and a glutton, so fat he could hardly move, he was ‘a great lover of the world’ (not a recommendation in the eyes of the monk who used the phrase). Brave, extravagant and generous to the point of prodigality, he attracted around him a rowdy household in which many were as debauched and sybaritic as he. Yet Hugh was also a patron of monks and an old and close friend of the saintly abbot and archbishop Anselm. He employed a chaplain, Gerold, who furthered the moral instruction of his household with stories of ‘holy knights’ from the Old Testament and of Christian military heroes, including the legendary William of Orange, a saintly warrior in one of the earliest cycles of chansons de geste. Some in Gerold’s audience were so moved that they became monks; Hugh himself died (in 1101) in the habit of a Benedictine.³² Such figures were found across western Christendom, from Denmark to Sicily. In such a raucous atmosphere of passion, carnality, militarism and piety was nurtured the mentality of the holy warriors of 1096, among them friends and relatives of Hugh, possessed of the self-righteousness of ideological conviction to add to the heady brew of hedonism, brutality, guilt, obligation, spirituality and remorse. These were precisely the skilled soldiers Gregory VII had hoped to recruit and Urban II did.

The most dramatic and quixotic of Gregory’s military plans was that of 1074, when he announced his intention to lead in person an army to help the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, who were beleaguered by the Seljuk Turks, ‘to take up arms against the enemies of God and push forwards even to the sepulchre of the Lord under His supreme leadership’. The diplomatic context, involving a delicate and unstable triangle of Byzantium, the papacy and the Normans, was specific, in part a consequence of the Greek defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert (1071). However, the objects of the enterprise – apparently Jerusalem, the consolidation of relations with the eastern church, the demonstration of active papal leadership of the whole of Christendom, lay and ecclesiastical, east and west – as well as the rhetoric, pointed directly to the path his protégé Urban II later chose. The language was especially striking, with its persistent emphasis, not only on St Peter, as was usual in his calls to arms, but on Christ Himself: