God's War: A New History of the Crusades

On arrival in the Rhineland, Peter appears to have delegated his own preaching commission to a local priest, Gottschalk, who, demonstrating that he was no rabble-rousing bumpkin either, in turn recruited a large army in southern Germany, which reached Hungary via Bavaria only to be massacred in late July by the Hungarian army, outraged at the violent and indiscriminate foraging. Gottschalk’s force may have been intended as the right flank of Peter’s own army, predominantly comprised of Frenchmen and led by lords from Chartres and Champagne, which marched through the Rhineland in April before travelling down the Danube to Hungary and across the Balkans to reach Constantinople on 1 August. It is possible that Peter also delegated recruitment to another German, Volkmar, whose contingent followed a route to Peter’s north, through Saxony and Bohemia before being dispersed by the Hungarians in late June. To Peter’s preaching may be attributed the participation of numerous other German lords, in particular the Swabian count Emich of Flonheim and Count Hartmann of Dillingen-Kybourg, who joined forces with lords from the Ile de France as well as, apparently, some Englishmen. Even if these groups took the cross independent of Peter, his contribution was significant, possibly papally authorized and suggestive of just how much is unknown about the genesis of the First Crusade. Peter, a man of some learning and habitually boastful, may have spent his retirement at the abbey of Neumoustier in Lorraine embroidering his own legend. The tragedy of the subsequent military failure of all of his contingents and Peter’s own equivocal fortitude during the sieges of Antioch ensured the relegation of his initial contribution by writers eager to emphasize the successes of their favoured leaders for didactic purposes. Yet between the two extremes, those returning to Lorraine from the Jerusalem adventure in 1099 did not dismiss him; some even remembered him as its ‘primus auctor’.⁴⁸

Urban’s initiative, like that of Gregory VII, could have been still-born. That it was not indicates a social and cultural predisposition to accept his radical concept of guiltless, meritorious violence and a skilful publicity campaign. Both are evident in the events of 1095–6. However, the question of timing remains. Why did 1095 strike Urban II as the ‘acceptable year of the Lord and the day of vengeance of our God’ (Isaiah 61:2)? Western aristocratic arms-bearers had been anxious for their souls for generations; Greek emperors had been asking for and receiving western military aid for decades; campaigns against Muslims in Spain, Sicily or north Africa had become an increasingly common feature of western Mediterranean warfare; church discipline of secular society had been at least notionally acknowledged though the Peace and Truce of God movement in many areas; papal thinking on holy war and penance had a long pedigree. Yet a convergence of circumstances persuaded Urban to recast Alexius’s appeal; and the immediate context of 1095 allowed for its success.

There is little direct evidence that, as was later alleged, the pilgrim route to Jerusalem or the treatment of Jerusalem pilgrims had deteriorated since the conquest of much of Asia Minor and parts of northern Syria by the Seljuk Turks since the 1070s. Among Near Eastern observers, there are traces of anxiety about western (i.e. for them primarily Byzantine) threats. The Persian Naser-e Khosraw, a visitor to Palestine in 1046/7, recorded that the Fatimid rulers of Egypt had garrisoned the Nile Delta port of Tinnis ‘as a precaution against attacks by Franks and Byzantines’. A century later, the Aleppan historian al-Azimi (d. 1161) referred to Frankish and Byzantine pilgrims being prevented by strong-arm tactics from reaching Jerusalem in 1093/4, adding, ‘those of them who survived spread the news about that to their country. So they prepared themselves for military invasion.’⁴⁹ The neatness with which this account mirrors western propaganda invites suspicion. Visiting Jerusalem was always dangerous and ran the risk of violent confrontation, as the 1064/5 German pilgrims discovered when attacked at Ramla. There is no evidence of pilgrimages drying up in the 1090s. Roger count of Foix happily set out for Palestine in late April 1095; the Norman Odard’s pilgrimage actually coincided with the crusade itself.⁵⁰