God's War: A New History of the Crusades

By explaining these spectacular events in terms of divine will, contemporaries found neither need nor inclination to inquire too deeply into the gestation, purpose, timing or nature of Urban’s appeal. Still less were they able to produce a comprehensive view of all operations connected with the journey east. Although there was disagreement between local traditions over details (as in different provinces boasting one of their own as the first man over the walls of the Holy City), and at least one account, that of the Lorrainer Albert of Aachen (Aix), attributing the original inspiration of the whole enterprise to Peter the Hermit rather than the pope, the events themselves provided their own explanation and justification without causing anxiety over what occurred beyond the vision or hearing of the writer and his sources. Thus the direct and indirect accounts of eyewitnesses, many of which fed off each other, were partial and artificial, literary and didactic. Raymond of Aguilers, chaplain to the count of Toulouse, is frank about his concerns, lest the deeds of the victors of 1099 be distorted by rumours spread by ‘misfits of war and cowardly deserters’. His openness may stand for all:

It is a matter of record that God’s army, although it bore the whip of the Lord for its transgressions, nevertheless triumphed over all paganism because of His loving kindness. But it seems too tiresome to write of each journey since some went through Sclavonia, others by Hungary, by Lombardy, or by the sea. So, we have taken care to write of the Count of Saint-Gilles, the bishop of Le Puy, and their army without bothering with the others.³

As a result, although the most famous episode of its age and place, there is much about the First Crusade that is confused and irrecoverable. It is not only private motives that elude scrutiny. After the first five identifiable groups of Jew-persecuting crusaders had left the Rhineland by the beginning of June 1096, further attacks on Jewish communities occurred in June and July to the north, in Xanten, Geldern, Neuss, Wiehr and Wevelinghoren, hitherto untouched by the pogroms. Who precisely the perpetrators were, who led them and what happened to them is wholly obscure. When Peter the Hermit arrived in Constantinople in August 1096, he discovered a large army of Italians already there; again their provenance, leadership, organization and route have left no trace in the sources. When the princes’ army arrived in the environs of Antioch in October 1097, they discovered that two nearby ports on the coast of north Syria, St Symeon and Lattakiah, had already been captured by western fleets that included Genoese and angli (literally ‘English’). These may have acted in concert with crusade leaders or the Byzantine emperor, or not. For the next eighteen months, western shipping appeared regularly in Levantine waters without any clear account of their origins, such as another fleet of angli that reached St Symeon in March 1098, having put in at the Italian port of Lucca en route. These mariners, numerous other groups and thousands of individuals who joined the ‘great stirring’ (motio valida) have little or no history.⁴ To generalize about their expectations and experiences is inherently futile and possibly distorting. The picture of the First Crusade is far from clear, well delineated or fixed despite the fierce attention it has attracted over more than 900 years. Its story can only be tentative and incomplete, the stuff of legend indeed.