God's War: A New History of the Crusades

Contemporaries had few doubts of the genesis of the expedition. Whether described as rumour or a great stirring, the emotions whipped up in 1095–6 were neither ephemeral nor superficial. A previous ‘terror’ in 1064 had been observed to inspire men of all classes to leave their families and possessions for Jerusalem, including bishops and at least one scholar who entertained his companions with vernacular songs about Christ’s miracles, a technique of boosting morale probably repeated in the armies of 1096.⁶⁸ The well-attested astrological episodes early in 1095 – apparently a meteor shower – could be used to agitate moods, as had Halley’s Comet of 1066. Enthusiasm for the Jerusalem expedition was not the result of any famine or ergot-inspired hallucinations; if it can be described as a form of mass hysteria, it was by no means inchoate. The patterns of delivering the message and of recruitment tracked the dynamics and bonds of society; of lordship, kinship, locality, authority, towns, and of worship. Ceremony, symbolism and repetition of a simple creed provided focus for disparate ambitions involving faith, self-image and the pressure of peers. Although, as one rather bemused onlooker noticed, the huge number moved by this single objective was inspired by word of mouth, one to another,⁶⁹ the elites of church and lay rule provided the kernel of idealism as well as the prosaic but vital mechanics of action. Part revivalism, part politics, part a search for release and personal renewal, both a manipulation of popular beliefs and prejudices common to all social groups and an attempt to channel these towards a narrowly laudable yet essentially familiar and explicable end, the summons to Jerusalem succeeded because it caught the imagination of a society not necessarily ready but psychologically, culturally and materially equipped to answer the call. In the level of official enthusiasm, in the rapidity of popular acceptance, in the extremes of response, in the widespread uncertainty, indifference and regional variation shadowing extravagant and well-publicized bellicosity, 1096 was the 1914 of the middle ages.

1. Europe and the Near East at the Time of the First Crusade and Preaching Tour of Pope Urban II 1095–6

3

The March to Constantinople

The polity of western Christendom comprised regions rather than kingdoms. Consequently, recruitment, politics, structure and command of the First Crusade were dominated by provincial lords, not kings. Writers on and of the expedition to Jerusalem took pains to identify different regional identities. Sigebert of Gembloux specified recruits from Provence, Aquitaine, Brittany, Scotland, England, Normandy, Francia (i.e. roughly, in this context, the area from the Loire to the Meuse), Lotharingia (i.e. greater Lorraine), Burgundy, Germania, Lombardy and Apulia. From his Lotharingian perspective, Albert of Aachen listed Franks, Lotharingians, Alemans, Bavarians, Flemings, ‘all the people of the Teutons’, Swabians, Normans, Burgundians and Bretons. From the south, Raymond of Aguilers distinguished between Franks, northern French, and Provençals, southern French, amongst whom he further separated those from Provence itself, Burgundy (probably the county east of the Saône/Rhône corridor, not the duchy), the Auvergne, Gascony and ‘Gothia’ (i.e. what might now be called Languedoc). Fulcher of Chartres described his companions as western Franks; Albert of Aachen mentioned East Franks. Raymond commented that the Muslims called them all Franks, clearly well informed of the Arabic catch-all for western European Christians, ‘al-ifranj’. The anonymous, possibly Normano-Italian author of the Gesta Francorum, who often used general terms such as ‘Christiani’, carefully differentiated those from Italy who joined Peter the Hermit at Constantinople as ‘Lombardi’, from the Po region, and ‘Longobardi’, his neighbours from the centre and south of the peninsula. The Gesta retains the older name ‘Gauls’ for the geographic France. The fiercely xenophobic Guibert of Nogent insisted on a fabricated nationalism, arguing that Urban II had specifically summoned the ‘Franks’, not the Germans, to protect Christendom from the Turks, a distortion of the events that rapidly gained favour with other ‘French’ writers such as Robert of Rheims and Baldric of Bourgeuil: thus were invented the Gesta Dei per Francos, the Deeds of God through the Franks, the title of Guibert’s admiring account, a national gloss that concealed the nature and structure of the expedition itself. So keen was Guibert on the Frankish monopoly on the Gesta Dei that he insisted that Bohemund – an Italian Norman – through his family’s origins and later marriage ‘might very well be considered a Frank’. Judged by their own letters, the members of the expedition called themselves ‘Christiani’, their clerics as ‘Latini’, in contrast to the local ‘Graeci’.¹