God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Although Hugh Bunel’s cause célèbre prevented contact with the west, the presence of westerners as pilgrims, visitors, merchants, mercenaries and settlers in and beyond the Byzantine empire provided a growing medium for the transmission of news and intelligence, such as the English Jerusalem pilgrim Joseph, a Canterbury monk who met Greek-speaking friends at Constantinople, or Guillermus of Cormery, appointed by Alexius as chaplain to western troops stationed around Nicomedia in the early 1090s. The information reaching the west may have sounded an increasingly strident note in portraying the depredations of the Seljuk Turks, even if these were not in fact more onerous. There is evidence that at precisely this juncture Alexius himself played on the Jerusalem-sensitive emotions in the west by sending ‘frequent messages about the oppression of the Lord’s sepulchre and the desolation of all the churches’.⁵³ In this context the story of Peter the Hermit spreading atrocity stories does not sound too unlikely; his may have been one of many such reports. The elements in Urban’s coup of 1095 begin to be apparent: the Greek appeal to the pope of March 1095, only the latest in a consistent series; increasing contacts with the east through pilgrims, mercenaries and correspondence with some of the higher nobility of the west; persistent rumours of persecution of pilgrims and attacks on eastern Christians perhaps reaching a crescendo through the accounts of travellers and Greek diplomats; the consolidation of Urban’s own historical and theological vision; the coincidence of the improved political position of Urban in Italy and France. The roles of Urban, Alexius and Peter the Hermit have often been placed in opposition as explanations of the events of 1095; perhaps instead they should be seen as complementary.

The scale of the reaction to the call to Jerusalem was impressive. While large armies were not unknown in western Europe in the eleventh century – William of Normandy collected perhaps as many as 14,000 men and up to 3,000 horses for his invasion of England in 1066 – the combination of forces being raised simultaneously in so many different regions struck contemporaries as remarkable and novel. The reasons for such a response have been much debated. Generalizations can mislead as motives varied and conflicted from person to person, class to class, region to region; evidence for individual or collective decisions is extremely patchy, transmitted through the prism of clerical interpretation, whether in chronicle, charter or correspondence. However, this does not disqualify such material, as lay attitudes often found inspiration and articulation from the clergy.

A central discussion revolves around the balance between material and ideological motives. Crudely, did crusaders embark for worldly or spiritual profit? In many senses this poses a false dichotomy. The Chanson d’Antioche a couple of generations later declared that those who served Jesus would receive gold.⁵⁴ Subsequent accounts of Urban’s speech by those who heard it unapologetically portrayed him as offering material gain:

Take the road to the Holy Sepulchre, rescue that land from a dreadful race and rule over it yourselves, for that land that, as scripture says, floweth with milk and honey was given by God as a possession to the children of Israel. (Robert of Rheims before 1107)

You will get the enemies’ possessions, because you will despoil their treasures and either return victorious to your own homes or gain eternal fame, purpled with your own blood. (Baldric of Bourgeuil c.1108)⁵⁵

The battle cry at Dorylaeum on 1 July 1097 already mentioned – ‘Stand fast all together, trusting in Christ and in the victory of the Holy Cross. Today, please God, you will all gain much booty’ – made good psychological and theological as well as tactical and logistic sense.⁵⁶ The emphasis was as much on ‘standing fast’ in faith as on the necessary material rewards of military success. The rewards of service to God need not be restricted to the spiritual; given the service was military, it could not be if success were to be achieved.