God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Jerusalem in the eleventh as in other centuries defined an ideal as much as a terrestrial city. It could stand as a metaphor, ‘the holy city, God’s celestial Jerusalem’, as an English royal charter of 1093 put it, for the world redeemed by Christ.²² Jerusalem could represent a spiritual condition and aspiration, as in the religious life of an individual or community, or its attributes could be geographically transposed to create a virtual reality in relics and shrines. Clairvaux abbey in the mid-twelfth century was likened to Jerusalem by its abbot, St Bernard, as had been the imperial courts of Charlemagne or Byzantium. More pervasively, the liturgy recreated scenes from Jerusalem in the mass or enacted whole episodes, as in the increasingly popular Easter plays, each a glimpse of the Holy City. Yet for all its liminality, poised between heaven and earth, God and man, Jerusalem remained a place as well as an ideal, temporal as well as spiritual, corporal as well as supernatural. In the tenth and eleventh centuries its distance – loca remotissima, as one historian of Urban’s expedition put it²³ – and association with Christ’s life, Passion and Resurrection ensured Jerusalem as the most meritorious goal of pilgrimage to such an extent that the chronicler Ralph Glaber noted that such a trip was in danger of becoming a fashionable social accessory rather than an act of piety.²⁴ The difficulties of the journey, magnified a hundred-fold by war, secured its penitential attraction.

Scriptural history and the pseudo-history of Christian prophecy confirmed this unique numinous status. Earlier in the eleventh century the Limousin monk Adhemar of Chabannes insisted on the historical primacy of Jerusalem over Rome itself as ‘the fountain of Christianity… the mother of all Churches’.²⁵ Throughout the century, notably in the 1030s and 1060s, huge bands of pilgrims trekked east, inspired by chiliastic enthusiasm condemned as misguided by one commentator, who nonetheless recorded the potency of such emotions to attract ‘not only the common people but the elites (primores)’.²⁶ Jerusalem played a prominent part in the genre of eschatological literature popular in western monasteries, cathedrals and courts from at least the mid-tenth century, the setting for the final scenes of Judgement at the end of the world. There, it was widely asserted, the Last Roman Emperor would surrender his crown as a preliminary to the Last Things. Unsurprisingly, such prominence in the Divine Plan appealed to imperialists during the contest between Henry IV and the reforming popes, Benzo of Alba advising the king to fulfil these Jerusalem prophecies himself. Western obsessions with the Holy City may have been sufficiently strong to have persuaded the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to cite the liberation of Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre in enticing western nobles into his service in the years before 1095.²⁷