God's Battalions (15 page)
Authors: Rodney Stark,David Drummond
INITIATING A DEBACLE
The pope made frequent efforts to limit crusading to warriors and their needed support personnel. At Clermont he said: “We do not…advise that the old or feeble, or those unfit for bearing arms, undertake this journey; nor ought women set out at all, without their husbands or brothers or legal guardians. For such are more of a hindrance than aid, more of a burden than advantage.”
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He also forbade clerics from taking part unless given permission to do so by their superiors.
In the groups organized by the nobility, the pope’s advice prevailed to at least a modest extent, although even these contingents contained substantial numbers of noncombatants: monks and clergy, those too elderly to fight, some wives, and the unarmed poor, as well as the usual large contingents of camp followers and whores.
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Unfortunately, the largest groups to head east for the First Crusade paid little heed to the pope’s sensible limitations. Instead, they consisted mainly of peasants and villagers, including many women and children. There were a few knights among them, and although many of the other men had secured some arms, they had no training in using them—a fatal deficiency, as matters turned out. These groups have come to be known as the “People’s Crusade.” They were aroused and led by Peter the Hermit.
Peter the Hermit was so small that his friends called him “Little Peter.” He was “swarthy and with a long lean face, horribly like the donkey that he always rode and which was revered almost as much as himself. He went barefoot; and his clothes were filthy. He ate neither bread nor meat, but fish, and he drank wine.”
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Peter was born near Amiens and apparently had attempted a pilgrimage to Jerusalem sometime before 1096 but was turned back and tortured by the Turks, according to Anna Comnena.
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It is uncertain whether he was at Clermont to hear the pope speak, but he quickly embraced the call to crusade and began a remarkably effective evangelistic campaign in support. According to William of Tyre, “[H]e was sharp witted, his glance was bright and captivating, and he spoke with ease and eloquence.”
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At a time when most people had rarely if ever heard any impassioned preaching, at each stop Peter’s charismatic harangues caused outbreaks of public excitement. Guibert of Nogent, who actually met him, wrote that Peter “was surrounded by so great throngs of people, he received such enormous gifts, his holiness was lauded so highly, that no one within my memory has been held in such high honor.”
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Indeed, as he moved from town to town, he inspired so many to leave their homes and follow along that by the time Peter reached Cologne, his train of followers is thought to have numbered fifteen thousand men, women, and children,
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or equal to the population of London and not far below that of Paris.
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Peter called a brief halt in Cologne in order to preach to the Germans and gather a larger force. But many of his French followers, especially the knights, were in no mood to wait. In early April 1096 (nearly five months ahead of the August 15 departure date fixed by Pope Urban), several thousand marched off toward Hungary under the leadership of Walter the Penniless. Very little is known about Walter, aside from the fact that he was a Frankish knight from Burgundy and was “a well-known soldier” according to Albert of Aachen.
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His true name was Walter Sans-Avoir, but he wasn’t poor. His contingent included some of the knights who had joined Peter and “a great company of Frankish foot-soldiers,”
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and they had adequate funds to pay their way across Europe. However, by jumping the gun Walter put irresistible pressure on Peter for a prompt departure, and so he and his great mass of followers, perhaps numbering twenty thousand, began their march east about ten days later. Their unexpectedly early arrival in Constantinople upset the Emperor Comnena’s timetable and damaged the relationship between the crusaders and the Byzantines.
CONCLUSION
The knights of Europe sewed crosses on their breasts and marched east for two primary reasons, one of them generic, the other specific to crusading. The generic reason was their perceived need for penance. The specific reason was to liberate the Holy Land.
Just as it has today, the Church in medieval times had many profound reservations about violence, and especially about killing. This created serious concerns among the knights and their confessors, because war was chronic among the medieval nobility and any knight who survived for very long was apt to have killed someone. Even when victims were evil men without any redeeming worth, their deaths were held to constitute sins,
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and in most instances the killer enjoyed no obvious moral superiority over the victim—sometimes quite the reverse. In addition to violence, the lifestyle of medieval knights celebrated the Seven Deadly Sins and was in chronic violation of the commandments against adultery, theft, and coveting wives.
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Consequently, knights were chronically in need of penance, and their confessors imposed all manner of acts of atonement, sometimes even demanding a journey all the way to the Holy Land.
Thus the call to crusade was not a call to do something novel; no doubt many knights had long been considering a pilgrimage (and a few had already gone and returned). Now the pope himself was assuring them that crusading would wash away all their sins and that at the same time they could rescue the Holy Land, including Christ’s tomb, from further damage and sacrilege at the hands of the enemies of God. It was an altogether noble and holy mission, and the knights treated it as such. The Burgundian Stephen I of Neublans put it this way: “Considering how many are my sins and the love, clemency and mercy of Our Lord Jesus Christ, because when he was rich he became poor for our sake, I have determined to repay him in some measure for everything he has given me freely, although I am unworthy. And so I have decided to go to Jerusalem, where God was seen as man and spoke with men and to adore the place where his feet trod.”
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Had the crusaders been motivated not by religion but by land and loot, the knights of Europe would have responded earlier, in 1063, when Pope Alexander II proposed a Crusade to drive the infidel Muslims out of Spain. Unlike the Holy Land, Moorish Spain was extremely wealthy, possessed an abundance of fertile lands, and was close at hand. But hardly anyone responded to the pope’s summons. Yet only thirty-three years later, tens of thousands of crusaders set out for the dry, impoverished wastes of faraway Palestine. What was different? Spain was not the Holy Land! Christ had not walked the streets of Toledo, nor had he been crucified in Seville.
Knights wearing their chain-mail armor head for the Holy Land, with bishops leading the way. Perhaps more than 60,000 crusaders set out, but only about 15,000 of them reached Jerusalem, most of the rest having died or been killed along the way.
©
Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
N
O ONE REALLY KNOWS
how many people set out for the East during the First Crusade. Fulcher of Chartres claimed that 6 million fighting men began the journey east and that six hundred thousand reached Nicaea.
1
This is impossible, since the total population of France, from which most crusaders came, was less than 5 million in 1086.
2
Anna Comnena reported that Peter the Hermit’s force alone consisted of “80,000 infantry and 100,000 horsemen.”
3
In fact, Peter’s entire following, including all the women and children, numbered only about twenty thousand.
4
The other original sources are equally absurd.
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The best modern estimate is that around 130,000 set out for the Holy Land, of which about 13,000 were nobles and knights
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accompanied by perhaps 50,000 trained infantrymen and 15,000 to 20,000 noncombatants, including clergy, servants, and the usual camp followers.
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The rest were peasants and villagers who had been swept up in the excitement. These numbers are at least compatible with the estimates that, having suffered huge losses along the way, about 40,000 Western Christians lay siege to Nicaea in June 1097 and that 15,000 reached Jerusalem in 1099.
8
Whatever their numbers, the First Crusade was composed of three primary elements. First came the
People’s Crusade
—the main body led by Peter the Hermit, with an advance party led by Walter the Penniless. Several later-leaving groups also were associated with the People’s Crusade but are more appropriately treated separately as the
German Crusade.
One of these groups was led by a priest named Volkmar; another was led by Peter’s disciple, a monk named Gottschalk. The third was recruited by a minor Rhineland nobleman, Emicho of Leisingen (or Leiningen) and probably was not associated with Peter’s expedition. Aside from the fact that those involved in these groups were mostly Germans rather than Franks, a major reason to examine these three groups separately from the People’s Crusade is that they committed a series of Jewish massacres along the Rhine River in preparation to going east. All three were, in turn, annihilated when they tried to force their way through Hungary. Not long afterward, those participants in the main body of the People’s Crusade who had managed to reach Constantinople were killed after they crossed into Turkish territory.
The success of the First Crusade was achieved by the companies of well-armed, well-trained knights who left several months to a year later than the groups involved in either the People’s Crusade or the German Crusade. These battalions often are identified as the
Princes’ Crusade,
because that’s who organized and led them; the leaders of three of the five major contingents were the sons of kings.
The pope had set August 15, 1096, as the departure date so that the crops would have been gathered along the routes east. This was crucial since medieval armies of necessity lived off the land, it being impossible to transport sufficient supplies of food and fodder very far overland. All of the groups setting out, including the People’s Crusaders, were prepared to pay for supplies, but if the locals were uncooperative, armies had no choice but to take what they needed, which easily and often turned into looting and worse.
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Availability of supplies also was the reason that the crusader contingents followed several different routes in an effort not to overload local capacities.
All the crusader groups planned to meet at Constantinople, where they expected that they would join forces with a Byzantine army and that this combined force would be under the command of Emperor Alexius Comnenus. As it turned out, Comnenus neither took command nor provided significant Byzantine forces, and the westerners had to go it alone.
THE PEOPLE’S CRUSADE
Many myths surround the People’s Crusade. Based on Ekkehard of Aurach’s account, many modern historians have claimed that Peter could so easily arouse ordinary people to go on a Crusade because economic conditions in Europe were dreadful at this time,
10
an argument frequently extended to explain why younger sons of the nobility were eager to go as well.
11
Not so. The Crusades were possible only because this was not a period of economic hardship but rather a boom time of rapid economic growth,
12
which explains why even the People’s Crusade was relatively well funded, not only by participants, but by sympathetic donors. Despite being known as Walter the Penniless, he and his followers were able to pay for their supplies all the way to Constantinople. It was lack of discipline, not poverty, that produced episodes of pillaging by Peter’s contingent. He set out with an adequate treasure wagon, and many, perhaps most, of his followers had funds of their own.
13
That brings us to the second myth: that Peter’s followers were overwhelmingly made up of the dregs of society—an utterly impoverished and hopelessly ignorant, “ramshackle horde,”
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mostly “drawn from the lower classes.”
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That charge also goes back to early chroniclers: Ekkehard dismissed Peter’s followers as chaff, and Guibert of Nogent did as well.
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According to Albert of Aachen, Peter’s contingent included “all the common people, the chaste as well as the sinful, adulterers, homicides, thieves, perjurers, and robbers.”
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In reality, these views merely reflected the snobbery of the times. The worst that can be said of these people is that they were commoners and that they probably sold everything they had in order to finance their participation.