The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land (13 page)

The new order cemented its position by cultivating its own relic cult, destined to banish the sullied memory of the Holy Lance. Around 5 August a piece of the True Cross was unveiled. This relic, probably a rather battered silver and gold crucifix, was believed to contain a chunk of wood from the actual cross upon which Christ had died. It had apparently been hidden through generations of Muslim rule by Jerusalem’s indigenous Christian population. Seized upon by Arnulf and his supporters, this supposed remnant of Jesus’ life soon became the totem of the new Latin realm of Jerusalem, a symbol of Frankish victory and of the efficacy of the crusading ideal.

The last battle

Neither the patriarch nor Godfrey of Bouillon had much opportunity to relish their new-found status. In early August news arrived that al-Afdal had landed at the southern Palestinian port of Ascalon, having assembled an army of some 20,000 ferocious North Africans. The vizier was just days away from marching forth to reclaim Jerusalem for Islam. After all their trials and suffering, the Franks, beset by factionalism and woefully outnumbered, now faced the very real prospect of annihilation and the unravelling of their remarkable achievements.

Rather than wait to be besieged, Godfrey decided to risk everything on a pre-emptive strike against the Fatimids. On 9 August he left the Holy City, his troops marching barefoot as penitent soldiers of Christ, accompanied by Patriarch Arnulf and the relic of the True Cross. Over the next few days Godfrey managed to cobble together a grudging, last-ditch Latin alliance, which saw Raymond of Toulouse rejoin the fray. The massed ranks of the once great Frankish host had now been whittled down to an elite, hardened core of crusade survivors, numbering perhaps 1,200 knights and 9,000 infantrymen in total. This army marched south towards Ascalon on 11 August, but towards the end of the day they captured a group of Egyptian spies who revealed al-Afdal’s battle plan as well as the size and the disposition of his forces. Recognising that they would be outnumbered two to one, the crusaders chose to rely upon an element of surprise to even the odds. At dawn the next day they launched a sudden attack on the still-sleeping Fatimid troops, quartered before Ascalon. Overconfident, al-Afdal had failed to post sufficient watchmen, leaving the Franks free to scythe through rank upon rank of stunned Muslim troops. As Latin knights drove into the heart of their camp, seizing al-Afdal’s personal standard and most of his possessions, the battle quickly turned into a rout:

In a state of horrified shock, al-Afdal escaped into Ascalon and immediately set sail for Egypt, leaving the crusaders to crush any lingering resistance and mop up a lavish horde of booty, including the vizier’s own precious sword. The First Crusade had survived its final test, but the petty rivalry that had divided its leaders for so long now exacted a costly price. Terrified and abandoned, Ascalon’s garrison was more than ready to surrender that August, but they demanded to negotiate with Raymond of Toulouse, the one Frank known to have upheld his promises during the sack of Jerusalem. Fearful that the Provençal count might thereby establish his own independent coastal lordship, Godfrey interfered and negotiations collapsed. This squandered opportunity left Ascalon in the hands of Islam. In the decades to come a resurgent Fatimid navy proved able to defend this Palestinian foothold, leaving the nascent kingdom of Jerusalem dangerously exposed to Egyptian attack.

The return to Europe

After the victory at Ascalon, most crusaders considered their work to be done. Against all odds and expectations they had survived the gruelling pilgrimage to the Holy Land, secured the ‘miraculous’ reconquest of Jerusalem and repelled the might of Fatimid Egypt. Of the tens of thousands who had taken the cross years earlier, only a fraction remained, and now the vast majority of these looked to return home to the West. By summer’s end they had joined Robert of Normandy and Robert of Flanders in taking ship from Syria, leaving Godfrey with just 300 knights and some 2,000 infantrymen to defend Palestine. Tancred was the only major crusader prince to remain, his eyes open to the opportunity of establishing his own independent lordship in the East.

Few, if any, crusaders returned to Europe laden with riches. The plunder amassed at Jerusalem and Ascalon seems to have been swiftly consumed by travel costs, and many reached their homelands in a state of near-penniless destitution, afflicted by sickness and exhaustion. Many carried with them a different form of sacred ‘treasure’–relics of the saints, pieces of the Holy Lance and the True Cross, or simple palm fronds from Jerusalem, the badge of their completed pilgrimage. Peter the Hermit, for one, reached France with relics of John the Baptist and the Holy Sepulchre itself, and duly founded an Augustinian priory near Liège in their honour. Almost all were assured a degree of renown for their exploits, and it became common for these crusaders to be celebrated with the nickname ‘
Hierosolymitani
’, or ‘travellers to Jerusalem’.

Of course, there were hundreds, even thousands, of Franks who did not return to a ‘hero’s welcome’ those who, like Stephen of Blois, had abandoned the expedition before its completion and thus failed to fulfil their pilgrim vows. These ‘deserters’ were greeted by a withering tide of public opprobrium. Stephen was openly chastised by his wife Adela. He, and many like him, sought to overcome the stain of this ignominy by enlisting in a new venture–the 1101 crusade. Since 1096, Pope Urban II had been encouraging waves of Latin reinforcements to set out for the Levant. Urban died in the summer of 1099, just before news of Jerusalem’s capture reached Rome, but his successor, Paschal II, soon took up the call, promoting a large-scale expedition to bring military aid to the nascent Frankish settlements in the East. Buoyed by tales of the First Crusade’s victories, this campaign enjoyed extraordinary levels of recruitment, drawing upon the ranks of the disgraced and thousands of new enthusiasts. Armies that at least matched the size of those amassed in 1096–7 marched to Constantinople, where they were joined by the veteran prince Raymond of Toulouse, recently arrived in Byzantium to renew his alliance with Emperor Alexius.

Despite its apparent martial strength, the 1101 crusade proved to be a shocking debacle. Forsaking the advice of both Stephen of Blois and Raymond of Toulouse, this expedition ignored the need for unified action. Instead, no fewer than three separate armies set out to cross Asia Minor, and each met its doom at the hands of a potent coalition of local Seljuq Turkish rulers, now only too aware of the threat posed by a crusader invasion. Having vastly underestimated the scale of enemy resistance, the 1101 crusaders were wiped out in a succession of devastating military encounters. Of those few who survived, only a handful, including Stephen and Raymond, limped on to Syria and Palestine, and even then they achieved nothing of substance.
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Perhaps surprisingly, these reversals did little to dampen enthusiasm back in Latin Europe for the notion of ‘crusading’. Indeed, many contemporaries actually argued that the failure of the 1101 campaign, supposedly born out of sinful pride, simply served to reinforce the miraculous nature of the First Crusade’s achievements. And yet, despite papal attempts to experiment with this new form of sanctified warfare and to associate the memory of the First Crusade with different theatres of conflict, the start of the twelfth century was not marked by an explosion of crusading enthusiasm. In fact, it would be decades before the Frankish West roused itself to launch expeditions in defence of the Holy Land on the scale of those witnessed between 1095 and 1101. This left the Latins who had remained in the Levant after Jerusalem’s conquest dangerously isolated.

IN MEMORY AND IMAGINATION

The success of the First Crusade stunned Latin Christendom. For many, only the hand of God could explain the crusaders’ survival at Antioch and their ultimate triumph at Jerusalem. Had the expedition been thwarted in the Near East, the very notion of crusading would probably have fallen into abeyance. As it was, the victory fired enthusiasm for this new form of devotional warfare for centuries to come, and the First Crusade became perhaps the most widely recorded event of the Middle Ages.

Configuring the memory of the crusade in Latin Europe

The work of memorialising the crusade began almost immediately, as a number of participants sought, in the first years of the twelfth century, to document and celebrate the campaign. The most influential of these, the
Gesta Francorum
(the
Deeds of the Franks
), was written in Jerusalem around 1100, most likely by a noble-born southern Italian Norman crusader of some education. While this account does appear to have been informed by the personal experiences of its anonymous author, it cannot be regarded as pure eyewitness evidence, akin to the likes of a diary. Instead, the author of the
Gesta Francorum
adopted a new approach to the recording of the past, one that was just starting to emerge in medieval Europe as an alternative to the traditional year-on-year chronicle. Distilling the experiences of thousands of participants into a single, overarching narrative, he constructed the first
Historia
(narrative history) of the crusade, recounting a tale of epic scope and heroic dimensions. Other crusade veterans, including Raymond of Aguilers, Fulcher of Chartres and Peter Tudebode, drew upon the
Gesta Francorum
as a kind of base text around which to construct their own narrative accounts–a form of plagiarism commonplace in this era. Modern scholars have turned to this corpus of evidence, and to the letters written by crusaders during the campaign, to recreate a Latin perspective of the expedition. And by cross-referencing this close testimony with non-Frankish sources (by Muslims, Greeks, Levantine Christians and Jews), they have sought to build up the most accurate possible picture of what really happened on the First Crusade–what might be termed an empirical reconstruction.
⁴⁵

In the first decade of the twelfth century, however, a number of Latins living in Europe set out to write–or more accurately to rewrite–the history of the crusade. Three of these–Robert of Rheims, Guibert of Nogent and Baldric of Bourgueil–were particularly important because of the widespread popularity and significance of the accounts they authored. All three were highly educated Benedictine monks living in northern France, with no first-hand experience of the holy war outside Europe. Working almost simultaneously, but apparently without any knowledge of the other two, each of these three monks composed new accounts of the First Crusade, using the
Gesta Francorum
as the basis for their work. According to their own words, they took on this labour because they believed the
Gesta
was written in a ‘rough manner’ that used ‘inelegant and artless language’. Yet, Robert, Guibert and Baldric went far beyond simply polishing the
Gesta
’s medieval Latin. They added new details to the story, sometimes gleaning this information from other ‘eyewitness’ texts, like that of Fulcher of Chartres, elsewhere drawing from the oral testimony of participants or perhaps from their own imaginings. Crucially, at a fundamental level, all three also reinterpreted the First Crusade.

Robert of Rheims, for example, utilised a far richer and more learned palette of scriptural allusion than that employed in the
Gesta Francorum
. He used these quotations from, or parallels with, the Old and New Testaments to position the crusade within a better-defined Christian context. Robert also emphasised the expedition’s miraculous nature, arguing that its success was not achieved because of the efforts of man, but through the divine agency of God’s will. In addition, Robert recast the whole story of the crusade. The
Gesta
preserved only an oblique reference to Urban II’s preaching of the campaign and was structured so as to present the siege and conquest of Antioch as the pinnacle of endeavour, covering events at Jerusalem almost as an afterthought. By contrast, Robert began his history with an extended account of the pope’s sermon at Clermont (which Robert claimed to have witnessed in person) and placed far greater stress upon the Holy City’s capture. In this way, he portrayed the expedition as a venture instigated, directed and legitimated by the papacy, and affirmed that the crusade’s ultimate goal was Christendom’s repatriation of Jerusalem.

Of course, Robert’s history did not alter the events of the First Crusade in any material sense; neither did the accounts penned by Guibert and Baldric. But their work is of fundamental importance to the understanding of the crusades as a whole, because, in comparison to texts like the
Gesta Francorum
, it was read far more widely by medieval contemporaries. As such, these Benedictine reworkings served to shape the way people recalled and thought about the crusade in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Robert of Rheims’ history was especially admired–the equivalent of a medieval bestseller among the learned elite. It was also used as a source for the most famous
chanson de geste
(epic poem) about the expedition, the
Chanson d’Antioche
, whose 10,000 lines of Old French immortalised the crusaders as legendary Christian heroes. Written in the popular
chanson
form–which fast became the most widely disseminated means in western Europe of recounting ‘historical’ events–the
Chanson d’Antioche
was designed to be recited publicly in a vernacular language familiar to a lay audience. As such, it too did much to mould the prevailing memory of the First Crusade in Latin Christendom.