God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Such pious generalities were translated into active reconciliation. There are numerous examples of lords and knights taking the opportunity of the Jerusalem expedition to resolve outstanding disputes with local religious houses, some of which had been pursued with considerable savagery, such as Bertrand of Moncontour and Nivelo of Fréteval in northern France or the castellans of Mezenc in the south, whose cruelty to local villagers shocked the hard-bitten Adhemar of Le Puy, who nevertheless absolved them for their Jerusalem journey.⁶⁴ The tone of such deals may have exaggerated both guilt and penitence. While for some, the Jerusalem journey signalled a transformed life, many crusaders were and remained extremely violent. Thomas of Marle notoriously terrorized the Ile de France for years on either side of his march to Jerusalem; the pilgrim remained a psychopath. William viscount of Melun earned his nickname ‘the Carpenter’ because of his skills as a battlefield butcher. Stephen count of Blois, who fled the siege of Antioch and later died a hero’s death at Ramla in 1102, had killed men in private wars. On his return to the Chartres region, Raimbold Croton, a hero at Antioch and Jerusalem, castrated a monk in a land dispute. Such men were not immune to religious anxieties, rather their piety was robust and practical. The lay biographer Ralph of Caen’s famous portrait of Bohemund’s nephew Tancred agonizing over his violent life before the Clermont indulgence reconciled warfare with God’s commandments should be treated with scepticism; Tancred’s dilemma was neither new nor previously unresolved.⁶⁵ Nevertheless, Urban’s remission of sins for such killers was a lifeline indeed.

The success of recruiting in 1096 remains mysterious. The dilemmas of secular rule and war were hardly novel. It is difficult to reconcile eleventh-century history with a view that hundreds or even thousands of powerful arms-bearers suffered from debilitating individual or collective guilt complexes that suddenly became critical, as a literal acceptance of their charters might suggest. There was an increased focus by the church and hence by congregations and patrons on the problem of salvation for sinners. Urban II neatly summed it up: ‘there are only two gates to eternal life; baptism and genuine penitence’.⁶⁶ The supernatural was perceived as real and proximate. Hell, heaven and the place between where souls waited for redemption, if not as yet fully understood as purgatory, were not abstractions. Yet it needed a combination of pressures to excite the response of 1096. Alone, ideology is insufficient explanation.

Concentration on faith by itself is inadequate to explain the genesis or progress of the war of the cross ideologically, sociologically, politically or militarily. Jerusalem was not won by faith alone; faith alone did not send men to Jerusalem. The reductionism implied by the idea of an ‘age of faith’ requires questioning. The picture is more complicated. Faced with sermons repeatedly insisting on the basic merits and message of Christianity; with hagiography in which doubters featured regularly; with academics, such as Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), attempting to construct logically satisfactory explanations of God; and with innumerable anecdotes of lay (and some clerical) mockery of the pretentions of the church, it is hard to argue that we are dealing with an age any more credulous or unthinkingly accepting of religious truth than our own. One much-derided episode during the First Crusade concerned the story of a band of crusaders or pilgrims being led towards Jerusalem by a goose from Cambrai in northern France to Lorraine, where the creature died. The snobbish and irascible Guibert of Nogent dismissed the tale with contempt, as much social as academic, suggesting that the animal would have given more to the cause of Jerusalem ‘if the day before she had set out she had made of herself a holiday meal for her mistress’. Having earlier poured scorn on the credulity of the masses who believed they saw clouds at Beauvais forming (Guibert, who was there, thought they looked like a stork or crane), the abbot explained why he had mentioned the goose at all: ‘we have attached this incident to the true history (historiae veraci) so that men may know that they have been warned against permitting Christian seriousness to be trivialized by belief in vulgar fables’.⁶⁷ Reactions to the Jerusalem journey were hardly undiscriminating.