God's War: A New History of the Crusades

From 1060, the reformed papacy applied their theories of justified war with even greater vigour and legal precision to campaigns against the infidel than they did to those against their Christian enemies. In Sicily, the ethos of holy war was carefully nurtured, extending to the eccentric but politically convenient expedient of appointing the military commander, Count Roger, Robert Guiscard’s equally bellicose younger brother, as papal legate, the pope’s representative in running the church in the newly conquered island. Although it appears that many holy war aspects of the reconquest of Muslim Spain resulted from the First Crusade rather than the other way round, the Iberian peninsula attracted interest from popes and French knights and fitted neatly and centrally into the increasingly grandiose concepts of world destiny being peddled not just by papal apologists but by monastic reformers as well. Glaber, a Cluniac Benedictine whose order had a long and close interest both in the Christian kingdoms of northern Spain and in promoting pilgrimage, peppered his chronicle with accounts of pilgrimages to Jerusalem (which he feared had become abused as a fashionable accessory for those seeking prestige not penitence); Christian warfare against the Moors in Spain and, on one occasion, the Slavs beyond the Elbe; and the Peace and Truce of God movement. Glaber was in no doubt of the efficacy of all of them; even monks who broke their vows and in extremis took up arms, were seen as gaining salvation.⁴¹ In this context, papal approval and grants of specific spiritual privileges to warriors against infidels would have occasioned little surprise. It is likely that Alexander II offered a lifting of all penances and remission of sins to campaigners in Spain in 1064. Gregory VII advertised ‘eternal reward’ for recruits against the infidel (and others) in 1074. In 1089, Urban II himself urged the colonization of the devastated frontier city of Tarragona on the Spanish coast south of Barcelona as a penitential act. The rebuilding of the city was described in military terms, as providing a wall of Christianity against the Muslims; those joining the enterprise could substitute it for any planned penitential pilgrimage, including that to Jerusalem, later specified as ‘indulgence of your sins’.⁴²

Theories and practices of morally just and spiritually meritorious warfare had developed unevenly in response to changing political circumstances, religious outlook and social behaviour. Many clung to older concepts of sin and spiritual war. Some feigned or genuinely felt shock at the unapologetic and unequivocal combination of war and penance proposed by Urban II in 1095. Yet the pre-history of the First Crusade was long and illustrious. Holy war against infidels who, by the late eleventh century, appeared if not in retreat then at least to be subject to attack on equal terms, provided one means of morally legitimate expression for a military aristocracy whose social authority and robust culture served to highlight their spiritual vulnerability. The detritus of legal justifications, scriptural, Patristic and classical, thrown into relief by actual experience in the Carolingian period and by romanticized echoes of it enshrined in vernacular chansons de geste, supplied material from which fresh theories of holy war could be constructed. The catalyst was as much the perspectives and interests of the reformed papacy as the external threats presented by Islam: together they set the stage for Urban II. Yet much of what was proclaimed as new by the call to arms in 1095 represented old wine in new bottles; the winepress from which it came was grimed with use and age.

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The Summons to Jerusalem

The sermon preached by Pope Urban II outside the cathedral at Clermont in the Auvergne on Tuesday, 27 November 1095 has been seen as setting in train one of the most renowned sequence of events in the history of western Europe and Christianity. The story has resonated down the centuries; of how tens of thousands willingly uprooted themselves for the sake of liberating Jerusalem, a place of unimaginable physical remoteness yet ubiquitous immediate appeal; of how, suffering horrific losses and agonizing obstacles, they were painfully forged into an army that appeared to campaign as much in a war of the spirit as of the flesh; of how they surmounted seemingly fatal odds, of climate, terrain, local hostility and superior enemy numbers in repeated desperate battles and skirmishes; and of how, after three years on the road, the survivors stormed the Holy City, reclaiming it for Christendom, as one awed observer remarked, 460 years after its loss to Islam under the Emperor Heraclius.¹ If the response to Urban’s appeal astonished all and shocked some, the outcome provided its own justification, creating a legend to feed the imaginations of western Europeans, to stir their emotions and haunt their nightmares.