Armies of Heaven (49 page)

This obsession with “Chosen People” is one of the most powerful catalysts toward the creation of national communities. It is strikingly apparent
in the sermon of Urban II as imagined by Robert the Monk, where the pope addressed his audience as the “race of Franks . . . chosen and beloved by God.” The language was a deliberate gloss on Deuteronomy 7:6–8: “Since you are holy, the Lord your God has chosen you that you might be to him a particular people out of all those who are on the earth. The Lord is not joined to you and has not chosen you because you will conquer all peoples through numbers, for you are fewer than all other peoples. Rather, the Lord has loved you and He kept the oath sworn to your fathers and has led you with a mighty hand from the slavery and the domination of King Pharaoh of Egypt.”

The biblical passage recalls several scenes from the crusade. In particular, while fighting in the same deserts as the Children of Israel, the Franks were lifted by God in victory over numerically superior enemies, who were also by coincidence lineal political descendants of the pharaohs. Both the Israelites and the Franks had entered the Promised Land, taking as their leaders Joshua and Jesus, respectively—two names that, according to the rules of medieval biblical commentary, were allegorically the same.
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[Plate 12]

The Franks were not the first to claim this sort of affinity with the Jews, and they would not be the last. The books of the Old Testament, particularly the story of the Exodus and the return to the Promised Land, have proved enduring sources of national passions, continually appealing to religious groups who believed that they, like the Franks in 1099, were taking a lead part in God's plans for history. The citizens of the Dutch Republic, the Parliamentarians of Cromwell's England, and the Puritans who settled in America (to take three seventeenth-century examples) all conceived of themselves as an elect—a Chosen People like Israel—in order to strengthen their sense of community and purpose. The same ideology would inform the American experience, with its sense of Manifest Destiny and of the United States as “a shining city upon a hill.”

Similar rhetoric had played an important part in the history and politics of the early Middle Ages. Most notably, Charlemagne liked to style himself as a new David and his people the Franks, a new Israel. As a recent study by Matthew Gabriele demonstrates, the memory of Charlemagne in France and Europe more broadly may have played a part in the calling of the Crusade. But Charlemagne's use of this Old Testament
language in 800 would have looked very different from the Franks' use of it three centuries later. Whereas Charlemagne's “New Israel” centered on his personality as a new David, the crusaders did not get their David, Godfrey, until after they had arrived in the Promised Land. Their achievement belonged to the people as a whole, and they were encouraged to celebrate that fact, to see themselves as the bountiful and brilliant race whose accomplishment dozens of crusade chroniclers would extol.
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This shared Frankish identity went beyond France. It was an achievement that all Latin Christians could celebrate, and in doing so, they helped to forge a broader category of “Christendom.” The idea of Christendom, the subject of a recent book by Brett Edward Whalen, entered into common parlance in twelfth-century Europe. Expressed in the Latin word
Christianitas
, it can refer to the belief system of Christianity, to the people who subscribe to those beliefs, or, sometimes, to a geographic entity.

The crusade chronicle of Baudry of Bourgueil used
Christianitas
in every one of these senses. As a belief system: “[The Turks] claim that they are descended of Frankish stock, but that their ancestors broke away from Christianity.” As a people: “In our times God called up almost all of His Christendom, from lands everywhere, to snatch Jerusalem, where He especially suffered, from the hands of the filthy Turks.” As a geographic entity : “There was [after the victory of Ascalon] unspeakable joy in all of Christendom.”

To create this sense of common Christian identity had been one of the major goals in Urban II's crusade plan. Given the sense of triumph, celebrated throughout the European world in ceremonies and processions of thanksgiving, transcending the boundaries drawn during the continuing wars between pope and emperor, this aspect of his plan must be viewed as a success, but only a qualified one. The broader Christian world, Latin and Greek, was damaged, if not irreparably broken. Owing in no small part to ideas propagated in many crusade chronicles, the First Crusade engendered in certain learned circles an unrelenting hatred of the Greeks—an effeminate race, not only ungrateful for the military support that the Franks had given but also actively conspiring with the Turks against their fellow Christians. Rather than unite Western and Eastern churches, then, the crusade had only accentuated their differences. This
sense of distinction turned out to be one of the crusade's most enduring legacies .
¹⁰

There was now a fundamental series of oppositions between Latin and Greek and, more broadly, between West and East. The distinction is an old one, with roots in antiquity (Greeks and Persians, Romans and barbarians), but the crusade gave it new life and new detail. The opposition went beyond Christian and Saracen, beyond “Christendom” and “Pagandom,” as Raymond of Aguilers put it. It was a question of two different worlds, an effeminate, flighty, unbelieving (schismatic or heretical) East that stood in sharp opposition to a virtuous Latin West. It is a dichotomy fundamental to the Franks' thought. As mentioned previously, Ralph of Caen could still recall how, while a child in Normandy, he had seen the skies turn a frightening shade of red the night after Mardi Gras in 1098. “Those in the West who saw it shouted out, ‘The East fights!'” Or stated more succinctly, the English historian Henry of Huntingdon, thirty years after the conquest of Jerusalem, described the vision in which Christ appeared to Stephen of Valence and explained to him how the Christian army might yet prevail at Antioch. “You shall tell these things,” he said, “to the sons of the West.”
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The differences between East and West were on the surface religious, but the root cause was climatic. It is again an old idea, dating back to Hippocrates and Aristotle, but one that received new valorization because of the crusade. According to Guibert, the excessive heat in the East caused men's thoughts to be more transient, less stable, and unfixed. “The faith of Orientals has always been rather mutable,” he wrote, and that is why most every major heresy originated in their world. William of Malmesbury mentioned the importance of climate in connection with the crusade on three separate occasions. Easterners, he observed, were dried up because of heat. They had less blood, which gave them more cunning minds, and they feared close combat because they had so little blood to spill. The heat also caused their blood to be less vital than the Franks', giving them a slavish character. For that reason alone—the inert blood of its people—the Persian Empire endured so long. The emperor's subjects lacked the vigor to rebel. The Franks, born in more temperate regions, were bold and savage and on several occasions shook themselves free of
a single people's domination. The untamed ferocity of crusade warriors thus became, in William's analysis, a sign of cultural virtue.
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This emphasis on opposites, part of a style of thought that is fundamentally apocalyptic, was born of the oppositions with which by now we have become familiar: heaven and hell, the saved and the damned, God and Devil, Christ and Antichrist, Christian and Saracen. The vision of a West in perfect opposition to an East, the formation of a single people out of diverse tribes, the accomplishment of divine mission through an army of saints—all are apocalyptic ideas. The experience of a shared Apocalypse, one that did not disappear in a moment of sudden disillusionment in 1000, 1033, and 1065 but rather haunted the imagination for years, reified these ideas and transformed them into beliefs shared and celebrated in circles that extended beyond courtly and intellectual classes. When the crusade disappeared, these habits of thought, these imaginative bonds joining together disparate communities behind a label otherwise meaningless—“the West”—survived.

Some historians, and no doubt some readers, will be inclined to go further still, to see in the crusade not just the birth of the High Middle Ages but also the birth of the modern world, as we find ourselves living in a time again marred by religious strife and characterized by an instinctive division between East and West. Caution is necessary on this point. The word “crusade” has been used to distressing effect by all sides in recent global conflicts and never with anything resembling thoughtfulness or precision. It is surely ludicrous to draw one-to-one parallels across nine centuries of history. But at the same time, it is difficult to ignore the resonances between the eleventh-century story I have told and our own time: a Western army attacking a little-understood Eastern culture, earnestly believing itself to be a liberator of the cities it conquered, trusting that God was on its side and that to die in battle was to attain a martyr's death, both anxious and hopeful that its exertions would remake the world and create a peace so profound that history itself might draw to a close (with Christianity or liberal democracies covering the globe), only to discover that the sudden liberation of Jerusalem had led not to a new world but to an endless and endlessly dangerous occupation of enemy territory.

Whether that parallel will persist remains to be seen. In the Middle Ages, more than half a century was needed to sort out just which Apocalypse
had happened, if any, and another half century still was required to iron out the various nuances of crusade doctrine. In the meantime the unintended consequences of that first great exercise in medieval holy war continued to pile up, one disaster atop another.

An event buried deeply in the past, with so many causes and effects between its day and ours, offers no clear lesson. But the First Crusade, as the original and perhaps the only Apocalypse fulfilled, does present a somber warning about the dangers of holy war once an army or the authority behind an army chooses to believe that its goals align with God's. The rivers of blood such a war unleashes run no less deep, specious though their otherworldly justifications may be.

 

AT SOME POINT in the twelfth century, an unnamed scribe was just finishing a copy of Raymond of Aguilers's history of the First Crusade. He had a couple of blank pages at the end of the book. Not wanting to waste parchment, he filled them with a few details about Ida of Boulogne, Godfrey's saintly mother. In summing up her achievements and her life, he skipped naturally to July 15, 1099. Influenced by the general tenor of what he had just read in Raymond's book but not really recalling the details, he described the final entry of the Franks into Jerusalem. Godfrey and Tancred led the way. “At the point of attack where Godfrey was besieging Jerusalem, a white horseman came galloping down from the Mount of Olives. Godfrey and Tancred were the first to follow it.” In the words of Apocalypse, “And I looked, and behold a white horse, and he who sat upon it held a bow, and a crown was given to him, and he went forth conquering, and to conquer. The armies who are in heaven were following him, on white horses, and they were clad in fine linen, white and pure.”
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In such literary dark corners the apocalyptic First Crusade endures, where fallen knights like Galdemar Carpenel stand watch over a demonic foe, their spears raised toward Babylon in an unending war for the heavenly Jerusalem—a dream from which medieval men and women would one day awake, even if, like many a forgotten nightmare, the delirium of holy war would continue to haunt their psyches and shape their waking lives.

I
n 1999, while attending a professional conference, I presented what I expected to be the first of three or four papers concerning the First Crusade. With luck, I hoped to turn these papers into a professional article. Twelve years later, I am finally able to publish this book, the first major contribution in an ongoing research project to which I would like to devote still more years. It has been, and remains, a long and rewarding journey. While undertaking it, I have benefited from the advice, friendship, and support of more people and institutions than I can possibly remember. But I will make a go of it here.

The serious work behind this book began thanks to the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), which in the academic year 2002–2003 enabled me to undertake research in and around Paris devoted to the First Crusade. I had very definite ideas about the crusade at this time—among them, that the First Crusade had almost nothing to do with the Apocalypse. Things changed. If I had not had this year to explore the literature and the manuscripts, this book would not have been possible.

In 2006–2007 I was fortunate enough to receive an ACLS Burkhardt Fellowship, which enabled me to spend a year at the American Academy in Rome, now with very different ideas about the crusade. The administrators of the American Academy, in particular the director at the time, Carmela Franklin, were incredibly supportive. The fellows of the Academy proved to be a welcoming and engaging community, whose questions, ideas, and enthusiasm for my research enriched this book immeasurably.

In the following year, 2007–2008, I returned to Paris, this time through the support of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, where the first full version of this book began to take shape.

Without the support of these agencies (not to mention the generosity of my employer, the Department of History at the University of Tennessee, which allowed me to begin my career in Knoxville with a two-year leave), this book would certainly not have been possible. During the early months of my second year in Paris, I received a fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. It has opened up whole new opportunities for research and writing, making it possible for me now to think of this book as the first chapter in a larger research project on the impact of the crusade movement in Europe.