God's War: A New History of the Crusades

This is not to say that religion played no part in these wars. Pisan raids on Palermo in Sicily (1063) and al-Mahdiya in north Africa (1087) were consciously placed in the context of Christian service. The Norman invaders of Sicily after 1060, supported by papal encouragement and banner, were regarded by some as champions of the Faith. Their troops took Communion before battle; their efforts were sustained by visions of saints; and one Italian chronicler (who died in 1085, so avoiding the hindsight of the First Crusade that infected others) had the Norman leader Robert Guiscard declare his wish to free Christians from Muslim rule and to ‘avenge the injury done to God’.³⁷

Pilgrimage and war marched closely together. The Pisan al-Mahdiya campaign in 1087 included a pilgrimage to Rome. Frenchmen were habitués of the pilgrimage to Compostela as well as the reconquista. A grant of indulgences by Pope Alexander II has been variously interpreted, if genuine, as applying either to war or pilgrimage or both.³⁸ Gregory VII’s enigmatic reference to the Holy Sepulchre in 1074 hinted at a fusion of ideas, unsurprising in a pope so concerned with the ramifications of confession and penance as well as war. Partly no doubt as a consequence of an increase in pilgrimages, especially to Jerusalem, attested by Muslim as well as western observers and itself a result of the increase in Byzantine power in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean under Emperor Basil the Bulgar Slayer (d. 1025), there was a distinct frisson of outrage at the arbitrary destruction of the church of the Holy Sepulchre by the unstable Fatimid caliph of Egypt, al-Hakim, in 1009. Whether or not Pope Sergius IV (1009–12) encouraged the creation of a Christian relief fleet with a promise of indulgences, news of the outrage rang across the west. In a grim foreshadowing of the anti-Semitism of later Jerusalem holy warriors, a Burgundian chronicler, Ralph Glaber (d. 1046), recorded how Jewish communities in France were perversely blamed for inciting al-Hakim and were violently persecuted in consequence.³⁹ Elsewhere, chroniclers saw those fighting wars of profit in Spain or in the Venetian defence of Bari against Muslims in 1003 as inspired by faith, as indeed may have been the participants themselves. In 1015–16, Pope Benedict VIII (1012–24) openly approved a Pisan and Genoese raid on Muslim pirate bases in Sardinia. The Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes (d. 1034) not only recorded the Jewish libel over the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre, adding gory details of atrocities against eastern Christians, but frequently mentioned campaigns against the Moors in Spain and, in describing a supposed Muslim attack on Narbonne c.1018, told of the Christian defenders receiving Communion before battle. Adam, who referred to his warlike lay uncles with pride, revealed a world in which religiosity and violence were as close as his lay and clerical relatives.⁴⁰