The Surprising Purpose of the First
Crusade
While the First Crusade is
overwhelmingly portrayed as a decidedly Catholic (i.e., Western) affair, the aims
and objectives of its chief participants from the West must never obscure those
of the great Byzantine Empire to the East. This essay examines four main areas
in which a diverse set of motives can be shown to have been at work during the
tumultuous events, which left their mark on the world during the final years of
the 11th century and affected the way we live today. The author seeks to
interpret the rationale that led the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, Pope Urban
II, and vast numbers of crusaders to engage in a historical episode of
staggering proportions.
By
Troy Southgate
During the
reign of Pope Gregory VII, the tense relationship between Catholicism and its
estranged counterparts in Constantinople had rarely been so bad. With the advent
of Urban II, however, the mutual tension between these opposing strands of
Christianity was alleviated somewhat by the pope’s decision to reverse the
excommunication imposed on Alexius I some years earlier. Consequently, Alexius
himself “welcomed this new gesture of friendship from the papacy and responded
at once by calling a synod in Constantinople, attended by the patriarchs of
Constantinople and Antioch and some 20 prelates.”1
This synod is significant in that it represented a
genuine attempt to bring an end to the contentious rivalry, which had
threatened the unity of Christendom. That Alexius felt confident enough to
initiate such proceedings demonstrates that the first 10 years of his reign had
been relatively successful. He confronted the two most prominent questions of
the period head-on. On the one hand he had used diplomacy and tact with which
to calm the perpetual threat of Norman aggression, and, through sheer force of
arms on the other, had successfully crushed the Pechenegs. (See our informational
item on the Pechenegs on page 6.)
This allowed Alexius to turn his thoughts toward
strengthening and maintaining his frontiers with Asia. However, due to the fact
that the Byzantine “treasury was short of money, while recruitment for the navy
and army slackened seriously,”2 Alexius was faced with a dilemma.
While on the one hand the empire “would previously have resented, and resisted,
any attempt by the barbarians of the Latin West to interfere in Palestine or
Syria,”3 on the other Alexius “seems to have felt that the western
European market, which could provide an abundance of luckless knights and cheap
soldiers, had not been sufficiently exploited.”4
When the Byzantines had lost almost the whole of
Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert, Alexius had appealed
for help to Gregory VII, although the Investiture Controversy inevitably meant
that the pope was so busy trying to sort out the problems of the West that he
had either little or no time to think about those of the East.
In 1090, Alexius also had serious negotiations
with Count Robert of Flanders as the latter happened to travel through
Constantinople on his return from a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Robert agreed to
send a contingent of 500 knights to assist the Byzantines in their struggle
against the Pechenegs, who at that time were threatening to encroach upon the
capital itself. But while Alexius was keen to secure Constantinople’s eastern
frontiers and eager to hire Western mercenaries in order to achieve such an
objective, he never envisaged that his counterparts in the West would launch
anything like a huge military crusade to remove the infidel from the Holy Land.
As far as he was concerned, Palestine was irrelevant if the Byzantine Empire
itself was in danger of collapse and his primary motive was to reclaim the
lands that had been stolen by his enemies.
On November 27, 1095, at Clermont in central
France, Pope Urban II delivered the emotional speech that launched the First
Crusade. Employing a multitude of colorful adjectives with which to motivate
and inspire his listeners, the pope described how “the Turks, a Persian race,
have overrun the eastern Christians right up to the Mediterranean Sea.
Occupying more and more of the land of the Christians on the borders of Romania
[the Byzantine Empire], they have conquered them . . . slaughtering and
capturing many, destroying churches and laying waste the kingdom of God. So, if
you leave them alone much longer they will further grind under their heels the
faithful of God.”5
There is little doubt that Urban II sought to play
upon the emotions of his audience, but, according to author Marcus Bull—who has
recently taken a fresh look at the events leading up to the First Crusade—few
people were actually present during the meeting at Clermont, “and only a small
minority of those who went on the crusade could claim that they had heard”6
the call to arms. In fact the meeting was mostly comprised of
ecclesiastical representatives, and few lay folk were actually present. The
pope’s message found its way across Europe by way of preachers—men like Peter
the Hermit—but who could have foreseen that tens of thousands of people from
all walks of life would seek to converge upon the “Holy Land” in defense of
their faith?
While the actual motives of the participants
themselves will be discussed in due course, the Catholic Church does seem to
have been driven by a genuine sense of religious piety. In addition, “Urban was
well disposed toward Alexius as a result of their earlier negotiations, and he
sincerely wanted to help and protect the eastern Christians. He felt that if
the Christians of the West went to the support of their brothers in the East,
the eastern Emperor, who had already shown himself amenable, would be so
grateful that all differences would be resolved and the whole of Christendom
united (as it must be) under the leadership of Rome.”7
However, Urban II did consciously seek to
exaggerate the problems that had beset the eastern fringes of Christendom.
Indeed, whilst he vilified the character of the murdering, pillaging Turk, he
also severely overestimated the potential of the Turkish army. Despite all the
scare-mongering at Clermont, by 1098 the Turks had lost control of Jerusalem to
the Egyptians. But my use of this example is not necessarily intended to
suggest that the papacy was somehow adhering to a secret agenda or that the
pope was seeking to deceive those who sought to take his words in a literal
sense. On the contrary, perhaps Urban II simply got slightly carried away by
his own propaganda. Any Christian worthy of the name was certain to be outraged
by the rise of a “heathen” (since Christians of that era regarded Islam as
heathen) enemy that sought to impose its alien methods across the very land in
which Christ and his disciples had walked more than a millennium before.
Meanwhile, however, Alexius I was greatly dismayed
at the incredible reaction his request for help had inadvertently set in
motion: “He had asked for mercenaries and auxiliaries to fight with the Byzantine
armies. But what he provoked was a whole army, a succession of whole armies,
almost a mass migration from West to East; and he can hardly have enjoyed
discovering that four of the eight leaders of the First Crusade were Normans.”8
At first,
the crusaders appeared to be guided by spiritual motives, believing that “if
people fought God’s enemies on earth and completed a pilgrimage to the Holy
Land, their actions would receive a spiritual reward of remarkable magnitude.”9
This attitude was expressed in the following
manner by Nivelo of Fréteval (in France, near Vendome), who sought to redeem
himself for the crimes he had committed against the village of St. Peter:
“Whenever the onset of knightly ferocity stirred me up, I used to descend on
the aforesaid village, taking with me a troop of my knights, and a crowd of my
attendants, and against nature I would make over the goods of the men of St.
Peter for food for my knights. And so, in order to obtain the pardon for my
crimes which God can give me, I am going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.”10 But
were the penitential motives of the average crusader really that sincere?
The call to arms had initially sought to create a
unified military force, an international network controlled and directed by an
aristocratic elite under the watchful eye of the papal legate, but those who
comprised the knightly contingents of Europe had formed themselves into four
distinct armies. The first (and truly official) contingent came from southern
France and was led by Count Raymond of Toulouse; the second came from northern
France and was directed by Hugh of Vermandois (the brother of the French king),
Count Robert of Flanders, Count Stephen-Henry of Blois and Robert, Duke of
Normandy; the third was drawn from the French-German borderlands and was led by
Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine and his brother Baldwin; and
finally, the fourth wing came from southern Italy and was directed by Bohemond,
the son of Robert Guiscard. The latter, in particular, did not receive a very
warm welcome from Alexius I. Bohemond’s father had been a bitter enemy of the
Byzantine Empire and Alexius Comnenus could hardly be expected to trust the
offspring of a hated adversary, and rightly so, for Bohemond’s motives were far
from honorable. Both he and his father had invaded the Empire on many
occasions, “and their valor and treachery were well known.”11
As a result, Alexius demanded that the crusaders
take an oath of fealty, something with which they were forced to comply in
order to receive a safe escort through Byzantine territory. Alexius also agreed
to provide the crusaders with supplies, although the men of the West had to
promise that “in return they would restore to him any provinces of his Empire
which they should recover from the Muslims.”12
At this point it becomes apparent that the two
sides in this uneasy alliance had very different motives, for the leaders of
the First Crusade had shown suspicious alacrity in swearing their allegiance to
Alexius and were more eager to conquer the Near East for themselves, despising
the Levantine Christians almost as much as the Muslims. Bohemond revealed a
snippet of his true designs when he asked the emperor to appoint him grand
domestic of the East, the Byzantine equivalent to regional commander-in-chief.
Alexius managed to avoid granting this ambitious request by insinuating that
such a move was far too premature. But the emperor could hardly expect the
crusaders to risk their lives simply to enable him to recover lost Byzantine
territory. Indeed, that Alexius sought to use the crusaders as mere pawns in
his efforts to rebuild a shrinking empire is best demonstrated by the fact
that, in May 1097, the Anatolian Turkish capital at Nicæa chose to surrender to
the Byzantines rather than to the crusaders themselves (thus depriving them of
the spoils of war). Consequently, however, after defeating a Seljuk army at
Dorylæm and attacking Antioch on October 21, 1097, the crusaders captured the
city several months later (on June 3, 1098) and set about exterminating its
inhabitants. Bohemond clearly had no intention of relinquishing the territory
that he himself had acquired by way of his own inspirational leadership, and
was fully aware that Antioch was an important center for trade between East and
West. Furthermore, the astute Bohemond must have realized that the city and its
hinterlands occupied a strategic position on the fringes of the Byzantine
Empire and the mutually contentious Turkish emirates of Aleppo, Mosul and
Damascus. In accordance with the prevailing 11th-century mindset, territory was
all and the future of the First Crusade was now hampered by the fact that
“Bohemond had claimed Antioch and had preferred to secure the conquest of its
surrounding territory rather than to advance on Jerusalem.”13
Elsewhere, of course, “many other crusaders were
showing unmistakable signs of ambition either for themselves or their
protégés.”14 Similarly, whilst Urban II had originally agreed that
all recaptured territory should be handed back to Alexius, “in both Spain and
Italy, the pope had maintained (successfully) that all territories conquered
from the Muslims should be held as papal fiefs, and signs were not lacking that
he had the same intentions in Palestine.”15
After the fall of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099,
Godfrey de Bouillon refused to accept the title of king and, instead, was made
“defender of the city” or, to give him his full title, advocate of the Church
of the Holy Sepulcher. But whilst Godfrey’s own motives were to establish a
Latin government and grant the papacy ultimate rights over the whole area, the
same cannot be said of his brother, Baldwin. Instead of accepting the authority
of the pope once Godfrey had died in 1100, Baldwin had himself elected king and
ruled for a further 18 years. As far as the motives of the church itself are
concerned, although Urban II had been genuinely committed to the spiritual and
temporary liberation of the Holy Land right up until his death in 1099, his
successor, Paschal II, appeared to pursue the acquisition of Eastern territory
in an exceedingly blatant fashion. In 1107, with the blessing of the pope
himself, Bohemond—“[f]ickle, malicious, courageous, tenacious”16—threw
caution to the wind and returned to the East, determined to crush the
perfidious Alexius and replace the empire of the Byzantines with a Norman
alternative. The fact that his resources proved inadequate and led to failure,
however, does not in any way obscure Bohemond’s ambitious mentality; a
mentality, of course, which he had been forced to suppress during those first
tentative steps of the First Crusade. But what of the ordinary pilgrims? What
were their motives?
When Urban II launched the First Crusade he
intended for it to be an entirely military affair. However, his message had
undoubtedly struck a deep chord with people from a variety of social and
economic backgrounds and it soon became clear that women, children, the elderly
and the poor “would hinder the progress of an army because they had to be fed
and protected. The pope tried to limit their involvement by requiring people to
consult their parish priests before taking their vows, but this measure failed
and the crusade set out accompanied by many non-combatants.”17
While some wanted to atone for their sins, others
wanted to sample the delights of an exotic culture. The largest and most
important group of pilgrims was recruited by Peter the Hermit, an apostle of
the First Crusade and a native of Amiens in France. But although the
participants in the “popular” crusade were numerous, only a tiny fraction of
them were to succeed in reaching the Middle East; even fewer survived to see
the ultimate triumph of the crusade at Jerusalem. In 1096, Peter the Hermit led
his raggle-taggle band of pilgrims through Constantinople and onward to Asia
Minor, where they were annihilated by the Turks while he was busy seeking help
elsewhere. The “popular” crusaders were simply townspeople or peasants, many of
whom had been caught up in the wave of folkish enthusiasm and religious piety
that swept across medieval Europe. Their motives were clearly sound; it was
their judgment that was flawed. It is easy to trivialize the hopes and desires
of a past generation whilst looking back from an age in which the glossy travel
brochure has achieved a god-like status of its own, but there remains little
doubt that these 11th-century pilgrims were totally oblivious to the dangers
such an expedition entailed.
So while I have accounted for the various motives
behind the First Crusade, we must never lose sight of the fact that two distinct
worlds had collided as a result of Islamic expansion at the vast expense of the
Byzantine empire; a scenario in which the spiritual—and let us not forget the
temporal—desires of Western Christendom were taken to extreme lengths in order
to reassert the supremacy of Rome. Had the Turks been able to seize control of
the East, Christianity would have been faced with an enemy the like of which
the world had never seen. In reality, however, the Byzantine Empire was almost
sacrificed completely during the cataclysmic struggle between the Earth’s most
bitter rivals: Christianity and Islam—a struggle, perhaps, which has yet to be
resolved because of the perceived decline of Christian values in our own era.
History may be about to repeat itself. In the words of Hilaire Belloc: “We are
divided in the face of a Mohammedan world, divided in every way—divided by
separate national rivalries, by the warring interests of possessors and
dispossessed—and that division cannot be remedied because the cement which once
held our civilization together, the Christian cement, has crumbled.”18
Endnotes:
1 D.M.
Nicol, “Byzantium and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century,” in The Journal of
Ecclesiastical History, 1962, Vol. 13, 15.
2 Kenneth
M. Setton, A History of the Crusades: Volume II, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1962, 125.
3 R.H.C.
Davis, A History of Medieval Europe: From Constantine to Saint Louis.
4 Nicol,
op. cit., 17.
5 Pope
Urban II at the Council of Clermont, November 27, 1095.
6 Marcus
Bull, “The Pilgrimage Origins of the First Crusade” in History Today March
1997, 10.
7 Nicol,
op. cit., 18.
8 Ibid.,
18-19.
9 Jonathan
Phillips, “Who Were the First Crusaders?” in History Today, op. cit., 16.
10 Nivelo
of Freteval, in A Charter to the Abbey of St. Peter of Chartres, 1096.
11 Davis,
op. cit., 269. Deutschen Reichstag, February 26, 1891, p. 1805.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.,
270.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.,
271.
16 Setton,
op. cit., 127.
17 Phillips,
op. cit., 19.
18 Hilaire
Belloc, The Crusade: The World’s Debate, Cassell, 1937, 306.
Bibliography:
Atiya, Aziz S., Crusade, Commerce and Culture,
Oxford University Press, 1962.
Campbell, G.A., The Crusades, Duckworth, 1935.
Krey, August C., The First Crusade: The Accounts
of Eye-Witnesses and Participants, Peter Smith, 1958.
Mayer, Hans Eberhard, The Crusades. Oxford
University Press, 1991.
