Jerusalem or Bust? The problems of the First Crusade

Article and additional research by Jacob Harrison-Beaumont. Edited by Linley Wareham.

Ask anyone with any vague historical knowledge about the First Crusade and they will invariably tell you that it was a military expedition to recover the city of Jerusalem from the Muslims (they might also go on to talk about Holy War, subsequent crusades, jihad and maybe even more recent events if you let them). However, this interpretation of the First Crusade is very teleological. Yes, the First Crusaders did take the city of Jerusalem in 1099, but this was not a foregone conclusion, and it shocked both the Christian and Muslim worlds. It is, in fact, very likely that the original aim of the First Crusade was merely to provide military assistance to the Byzantine empire, but that events spiralled out of hand, and due to a tremendous amount of luck the Crusaders found themselves masters of the Holy Land. This article attempts to highlight some of the problems in viewing Jerusalem as the inevitable end point of the First Crusade.

To begin with, one of the main problems with studying the First Crusade is that almost all of the surviving sources were written after the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The earliest text, the Gesta Francorum (an anonymous text most likely written by a Southern Italian Norman knight who participated in the Crusade) dates to a few years after 1099. As all the sources come from after the successes of the First Crusade, they portray the whole expedition with the goal of capturing Jerusalem, irrespective of what its true intentions were. Another problem lies in the fact that, other than the Gesta, all the contemporary sources for the Crusade were written by men in religious orders, many of whom did not even take part in the Crusade, but relied on secondary accounts. Since the writers’ backgrounds were different to those who were the principal actors in the story of the First Crusade, those who fought (from the nobles all the way down to armed peasants), the picture they paint is not a complete one. This is not to say that for many participants the First Crusade was not a religious experience (or that there weren’t monks and priests who bent the rules and did fight), but it would be difficult for men who have dedicated their lives to God to not blur the boundaries between a divine and a mundane experience. The accounts of the First Crusade are predominantly those which have been coloured with this interpretation of the world.

A final problem with the contemporary texts is a problem of language. To us, the word ‘Crusade’ has a myriad of different connotations, both good and bad, and it has been used to describe a number of different events throughout history. However, the word only came into common usage several hundred years after the First Crusade. The context we place on the word almost implicitly implies Jerusalem as an end goal, distorting how those at the time perceived what they were doing. The contemporary terms included iter (journey) and the crusaders themselves were seen as milites Christi (soldiers of Christ). Another term used for the crusaders was peregrinus, which means traveller, or more commonly, pilgrim. That the crusaders were viewed as pilgrims suggests a different take on events. Pilgrims were not supposed to bear arms on their journey, almost suggesting that the journey to Jerusalem itself should or could be a peaceful one. But this again could just be wishful thinking on the part of the men writing these events down.

The speech of Urban II at the Council of Clermont in 1095 has been seen by many contemporary and modern writers as the starting point of the First Crusade. Of all the contemporaries who mention the Council, possibly only one, Fulcher of Chartres, was actually present. The earliest extant writings about the Council were produced at least five years later, after the Crusaders had captured Jerusalem. As a result, there exist many different versions of what Urban actually said at Clermont, all of which would have been influenced by the subsequent successes of the First Crusade. The Chroniclers did as writers stretching back to Thucydides had done, that is to ‘make the speakers say what was in [the writer’s] opinion demanded of them by the various occasions, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said’, in this case; write the oration which launched the re-conquest of the Holy Land.

Is it possible to see past the teleology of the chroniclers to Urban’s actual intentions at Clermont? He was undoubtedly influenced by various concepts – pilgrimage, the Reconquista in Spain, Augustine of Hippo’s ‘Just War’ and feudalism – but was an armed recovery of Jerusalem his intent? Fulcher of Chartres makes no mention of Jerusalem in his version of the speech, although other authors (who were not present at the Council) do. The Gesta sums all of Urban’s efforts with a few quotes from the Bible. The small size of the Gesta account is no doubt because the author was not that competent a writer, and so would not fill in the blanks as other authors would. The differing versions of the speech do have one thing in common, that there should be a military journey to aid Eastern Christians. Could it therefore be that Urban’s original intent was for a military expedition to aid the Byzantine empire? In the previous twenty years Byzantium had lost all of Anatolia and some of Syria, including Antioch, to the Seljuk Turks. As a result the Byzantines had become immensely reliant on mercenaries and the Byzantine emperor, Alexius I, had recently sent numerous requests for aid to various nobles in Western Europe, as well as sending ambassadors to the Council of Piacenza earlier in 1095. Indeed, this explains some of the confusion amongst the Crusaders over who would lead them after they arrived at Constantinople.

The idea that Urban wanted to send troops to aid the Byzantines also fits in well with other aspects of the narrative. Jerusalem had been in Muslim hands for over four and a half centuries, and pilgrims from the West had been able to access the city largely unhindered over this period. However, the region had become much less stable after the Turkish invasion. The safe land route from Constantinople to Jerusalem was no more. Perhaps Urban’s plan was that the road should be restored to pilgrims by assisting the Byzantines in driving out the Turks, and restoring peaceful relations with the Muslim emirs of Syria and Palestine. For Urban to really consider the conquest and control of territory two thousand miles away suggests either an optimism verging on the insane, or a deluded mind. The idea of the Pope sending military aid to the Eastern emperor also fits well with papal claims that Constantine had gifted them the Western half of the Roman empire as it was reminiscent of when the Eastern and Western Roman emperors would provide military aid to one another. A complete Christian recovery of the Eastern Church, and the restoration of the patriarchs in Jerusalem and Antioch would only really serve to cause more problems for the papacy (which had trouble enough with only one Patriarch, that of Constantinople).

Perhaps the greatest problem with Urban’s speech at Clermont is that only an infinitesimal fraction of those who took part in the First Crusade actually heard it. Most of the promulgation of the crusade was the result of preachers, many of whom may have only heard second or third hand about Urban’s speech. It is these men, such as Peter the Hermit, who inspired the vast numbers of peasants of the Peoples Crusade to leave their farms and walk to what would be for many a violent death in Asia Minor at the hand of Turkish armies. It was preachers such as these who had inspired the thousands of pilgrims of the Great German Crusade some thirty years before. These preachers also played a role in making soldiers, knights and lords take up the Cross, often in large ceremonies making use of religious theatrics and rousing sermons to bring the participants to emotionally charged states. Indeed, at one such occasion, at the siege of Amalfi in 1096, so many soldiers joined up with the passing crusaders that there were not enough men left to carry on the siege. It is possible that the idea that the Crusade should have Jerusalem as its objective resulted from the influence of these preachers, who perhaps would not have Urban’s greater knowledge of world affairs. Indeed, after the Crusader’s had captured Antioch in June 1098 they did not immediately carry on to Jerusalem until the first half of 1099. The nobles were content to capture territory around Jerusalem, but the lower orders felt uneasy and eventually forced the Crusade to Jerusalem. Perhaps then, the desire to recover Jerusalem was the aim of the peasant and the foot soldier, based on their understanding of the Bible, sermons, and their conception of the world, rather than the desire of Popes and Princes, who had much greater, more worldly concerns.

In the end, all our opinions of the First Crusade have been coloured by its successes. It would take another century before a similar expedition could be launched without Jerusalem as the necessary target. By then it was quite acceptable for a crusade to be waged against fellow Christians. Had Urban known that the expedition he launched in 1095 would lay the groundwork for the sack of Constantinople and the destruction of the Byzantine empire by the Fourth Crusade, would he have still made his speech? I’d like to think that he would be horrified by the consequences of his actions, but it is possible he would be pleased. After all, what better way to help the Greeks than to bring them under the jurisdiction of Rome?

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Several of the accounts of Pope Urban II’s speech can be found on the Internet Medieval Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html, as can an account of the Great German Pilgrimage: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/1064pilgrim.html

For much more in depth reading on the question of whether there were any crusades at all, I strongly recommend Christopher Tyerman’s The Invention of the Crusades (Basingstoke, 1998).

And for all those studying history who haven’t read it, I cannot recommend Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War more highly. Though Herodotus gets all the attention, Thucydides is much more deserving of the title ‘Father of History’. An online version can be found here: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7142 .

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