God's War: A New History of the Crusades

The luminosity of the story of triumph over adversity in the cause of God, shining with epic, romance, adventure, excitement, glamour, heroism and the supernatural, casts shade as well as light. It suited promoters and apologists as well as the conquering heroes themselves, the proud Jerusalemites, to depict this holy war as a coherent narrative, of defined armies and a clear pattern of campaign. The story of the march to Jerusalem obscured much that failed to fit an acceptable and accepted literary and theological pattern, or challenged the embroidered reminiscences of the returned warriors of Christ. So far from a sudden clap of thunder or a leap in the dark, the devising and prosecution of what is now called the First Crusade, if unexpected, was not entirely unfamiliar, while much of the process remains unknown and unknowable.

The traditional version, largely derived from contemporary chronicles reflecting the experiences and perspectives of contingents and commentators in northern and southern France combined with a distinctive view from Lorraine, describes a series of armies leaving the west from the spring to the autumn of 1096 in explosive popular response to the inspirational and novel preaching of Urban II and his agents; their rendezvous was Constantinople, which all had reached by the end of May 1097. The earliest contingents, some associated with the charismatic preacher Peter the Hermit, often misleadingly known as the Peasants’ Crusades, after engaging in destructive attacks on Jewish communities in France and the Rhineland, continued to display indiscipline as they were picked off by enraged locals during separate marches across the Balkans, those who eventually reached Constantinople being massacred in their first serious military encounter with the Turks of western Asia Minor in the autumn of 1096. The armies of the so-called Princes’ Crusade, with more discipline, military skill, diplomatic contacts and money, fared better. Led by great nobles such as the dukes of Lower Lorraine and Normandy, the counts of Toulouse, Boulogne, Flanders, Blois and the brothers of the king of France and count of Apulia, accompanied by important churchmen, including a papal legate, and large numbers of knights, dependent and free, as well as footsoldiers, servants, camp-followers and subsidized pilgrims, these armies coalesced at the siege of Nicaea near the Asiatic shore of the Bosporus in June 1097.

With financial and military assistance from the Byzantine emperor, this skilled but disparate army fought its way across Anatolia before crashing into northern Syria in October 1097. During an extraordinary siege of Antioch (October 1097 to June 1098), when appalling material conditions and fear of military vulnerability caused many to desert, and a near-miraculous defeat of a Syrian relief force, the western army found sustenance to their morale in visions, relics and a growing belief in their providential status. In the wake of this advance, parts of Cilician Armenia, some ports on the north Syrian coast and the city of Edessa across the river Euphrates in northern Iraq fell under western control or effective influence. After internal bickering over precedence and land following the death of the papal legate (August 1098), most of the leaders joined the final, largely unopposed march south into Palestine in May 1099, reaching Jerusalem on 7 June. After a desperate siege in arid high summer, with the threat of an Egyptian relief army ever closer, the city was bloodily stormed on 15 July, its occupation confirmed by a startling victory over the Egyptians at Ascalon a month later. Leaving a garrison established in Jerusalem under Godfrey of Bouillon, most of the troops, their vows well fulfilled, returned home, mainly by sea, their deeds exciting immediate, if unsuccessful, imitation, in particular by armies from Lombardy, Bavaria and France (1100–1102), and almost universal praise. Judged on any criteria, the achievement of the expedition to Jerusalem was stupendous.²