Download PDF | Jonathan Riley Smith (auth.) The Knights Hospitaller In The Levant, C. 1070– 1309 Palgrave Macmillan UK ( 2012)
343 Pages
Explication and Acknowledgements
When I began research 50 years ago, the early history of the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem had not been seriously considered since the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.! My book? was intended to be the first in a series of volumes, each by a different author, covering the history of the Hospital from the eleventh century to the present. The other contributions were never written, but a revival of interest has led to more being published on the military orders in the last 25 years than had been in the previous 70. We are now better informed about the Order’s origins? and its roles as a military phenomenon, an international corporation, an economic powerhouse and a landowner in the West.* Some attention has been paid to its nature as a religious institution’ and the re-editing of the charters of the kings of Jerusalem and the letters of the twelfth-century popes has refined our understanding of its privileges.© New material has come to light on the conventual hospital.” The castles of Belmont, Bethgibelin and Margat have been excavated and Crac des Chevaliers has been re-surveyed.8 We know much more than we did about the Order’s headquarters in Jerusalem and in Acre, where a spectacular programme of excavation has revealed the central compound.’
After working for many years on other aspects of the histories of the crusades and the Latin East, I view the Hospital from a somewhat different standpoint than I did. I have decided, therefore, to reorganize my original book radically and to rewrite large parts of it. I have given it a new title, because I am offering more than a second edition.
Two major themes run through this account of the Order’s history in the central middle ages. The first is a tension, which was never resolved, between its commitments to nursing and to warfare. The Hospital was founded by Benedictines or their associates to care for the poor. Many of the brothers, who expressed very radical ideas about their relationship to their patients, found it hard to come to terms with the adoption of military functions and an internal crisis in 1171 was resolved only by linking nursing conceptually to warfare. This meant that the Hospitallers never embraced their military role as single-mindedly as did the Templars and the Hospital continued to share many features with more conventional religious institutes. The second is the effect on the Order of its development into a wealthy and powerful international corporation. Some contemporaries considered that it had betrayed its original ideals, but it showed itself to be innovative and adaptable, and it would never have been able to create its own state in the Aegean in the fourteenth century without the experience its brothers had gained of large-scale management.
I cannot avoid occasionally referring to sums of money, usually expressed in Saracen besants. The figures I give have some comparative value, but I recognize that without a means of conversion they are otherwise meaningless. Only a few examples of exchange rates survive,!° but it may be helpful to draw attention to the fact that in the middle of the thirteenth century, after a period of inflation, a mercenary knight in Acre had a basic stipend of c.120 besants a year."
I have tried to be consistent in my use of titles. The Hospitallers were not very systematic in this respect. They used the title of prior when referring to priests, local commanders and provincials. Capitular bailiffs could be entitled priors, castellans or commanders. It is noticeable, however, that the titles of officers fall into two categories, interchangeably applied to the same brethren. The first group — servus, minister, prior, magister, gubernator and preceptor or comandour or comendator — denoted the government of people and the second - procurator or procurator domus, dominus, bajulus, provisor - the management of property.
I distinguish the unavoidable use of ‘Hospital’, with reference to the Order, from ‘hospital’, with reference to the great hospital for the care of the sick poor, by employing a capital H in the first instance and a lower case h in the second. I have used the English form of Christian names and I have replaced the preposition ‘de’ or ‘von’ with ‘of’. I have employed a standard English system of transliteration for Arabic personal names, but places present more difficulties. The Western settlers had their own names for them and alternatives are to be found in Greek, Latin, Arabic, Turkish and Hebrew. I have followed common practice when referring to better-known towns, such as Tyre and Sidon, and I have retained the Hospitaller forms Margat for Marqab, Bethgibelin for Bait Jibrin/Bet Guvrin, Belvoir for Kaukab al-Hawa/Kokhav ha-Yarden and Belmont for Suba, but tourists may want to visit the lesser-known sites and I have decided to use with respect to them the names in the Hachette World Guides to The Middle East (Paris, 1966) and Turkey (Paris, 1970). I have adopted the forms that are most generally in use for places in Israel. I place in inverted commas the names given to villages that have not been identified.
The maps in the original book, on which I had tried to locate almost every Hospitaller estate in Palestine, Syria, Cilicia and Cyprus, were too cluttered to be helpful. I have decided to map only places referred to in the text, including the castles and commanderies in the Levant that housed communities of brothers.
One cannot exaggerate the importance of the subject chosen for research leading to a PhD dissertation. Students need projects which everyone agrees ought to be undertaken and for which the materials are accessible, and many promising young historians have come to grief because unsuitable topics were suggested to them by their supervisors. My first expression of gratitude, therefore, must be to Otto (R. C.) Smail of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, who provided me with the ideal topic. I must also mention Lionel Butler, who spent a lifetime at work on the Knights Hospitaller on Rhodes, although he died before publishing anything substantial on them. He persuaded the publisher Macmillan to commit itself to a four-volume history of the Order, for which he would provide the second volume and perhaps the third. When he heard of me he realized that here was someone who could write the first. And so I found myself in the extraordinarily favourable position of having a book based on my dissertation commissioned long before I had completed my doctorate.
The preface to the original book contains other expressions of gratitude. I would like to record again the debt I owe to Anthony Luttrell. Dr Luttrell, who knows more about the sources for the history of the Order than any living scholar, read and commented on a draft of this book. His knowledge and expertise, which he generously shared, was especially valuable to someone like myself who had strayed into other fields of history in recent decades and was not au fait with all the latest research. I owe more than I can say to my research students, who contributed to my understanding of crusading and the settlements in the Levant. They are Thomas Asbridge, Bruce Beebe, Judith Bronstein, Marcus Bull, Cassandra Chideock, Nicholas Coureas, Claire Dutton, Peter Edbury (whose official supervisor was Butler), Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Norman Housley, Michael Lower, Joyce McLellan, Christoph Maier, Christopher Marshall, Marwan Nader, Gregory O’Malley, Aphrodite Papayianni, Peter Pattinson, Nicholas Paul, Jonathan Phillips, William Purkis, Rebecca Rist, Jochen Schenk, who has been particularly helpful about confratres, Elizabeth Siberry, Caroline Smith, Julie Taylor, Susanna Throop and Steven Tibble. I should add to the list some American students to whom I acted as adviser —- Deborah Gerish, Christopher Libertini, Jennifer Price and Myra Struckmeyer — and Axel Ehlers, Sarah Lambert, Tom Licence and Gerard Sheehan, who studied for the MA or MPhil and went on to work in related fields.
My son Tobias provided additional insurance by storing all back-up copies of my drafts on his computer. I would like to thank Professor Ronnie Ellenblum for allowing me to employ the expert cartographers in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem to draw the maps. I am grateful to my publisher Palgrave Macmillan for agreeing so promptly to the new book’s publication and to Jenny McCall, Clare Mence and Eric Christianson for overseeing its production.
Prologue
In ipsa...montium summa eminentia...sita est civitas illa Iherusalem, que universis per orbem urbibus et locis sanctior habetur et eminentior, non quia a se vel per se sit sancta, sed quia ipsius dei et domini nostri TIesu Christi eiusque pie genetricis presentia et patriarcharum, prophetarum atque apostolorum necnon et aliorum sanctorum inhabitatione, doctrina, predicatione, martirio fuerit illustrate.
— Theoderic
An Authentic Religious Order
Military Orders are orders of the Catholic Church, the brothers (and occasionally sisters) of which are professed religious, subject to the usual obligations of, and constraints in, canon law, except that some of them had the right and duty to bear arms. Historians of mainstream religious life have not shown much interest in these orders, in spite of their wealth and political significance and the importance the Church attached to them. Although they flitted in and out of the great French compilation Abbayes et prieurés de l’ancienne France, they made no appeatance in Laurent Cottineau’s inventory of monastic and religious houses and they had to be added, at Neville Hadcock’s insistence, to Dom David Knowles’s gazetteer of medieval English religious communities.!
The indifference must be due partly to distaste, but historians have not found it easy to place the military orders in a recognizable category. Kaspar Elm and Christian Vogel have described them as ‘self-standing orders of conversi’,* but this ignores the fact that the conventual brothers behaved like choir-monks. Alan Forey and Anthony Luttrell have stressed their ‘layness’,? although that very ambiguous word has to be used with great care. Giles Constable has pointed out that the brothers were certainly regarded by their contemporaries as both religiosi and regulares, but he has added that they were not rated highly in this respect and that there was confusion in the twelfth century whether they should be treated as monks or canons. He has concluded, as have many others, with the opinion that a military order was sui generis.
One great mind of the thirteenth century gave some thought to their status. In the ‘Secunda Secundae Partis’ of his Summa Theologica, the Dominican Thomas Aquinas wrote a long section on the contemplative and active forms of the religious life, in which he set out to answer the questions whether any religious community that did not contain contemplatives and was committed instead to works was worth the name and whether religious institutes that fought, preached and engaged in pastoral activities should be treated in the same light as monastic ones.*
He was writing this section of the Summa in 1271-72 when he had been sent back to Paris by his superiors to deal with a growing threat to the Dominicans.° The French bishops, maintaining that the religious life had been created for contemplatives and that the mendicant orders were not therefore authentic, were protesting against the friars’ exempt status and their right to preach and hear confessions. They argued that the friars had privileges which enabled them to usurp the rights of the bishops and clergy and that they should not be allowed to exist.
There was the same fierce denunciation of the freedom of the military orders from episcopal control,’ to which was added criticism of their performance in the East and talk of merging them, as we shall see.® Their validity as religious orders must also have been questioned, because in 1308 King Philip IV of France maintained that the Templars were subject to royal jurisdiction because they were knights, not religious.’
Thomas defended the role and status of the military orders by answering the charges that fighters could not attain any state of penitence or perfection, that religious should not fight and that warfare was inherently unjust. He replied that the brothers-at-arms expressed love of neighbour in their defence of the commonwealth. They could, of course, lead penitential lives; one had only to consider those laymen enjoined by their confessors to fight in aid of the Holy Land. The efforts of others to reach a state of perfection, moreover, depended on a security that the brothers could provide. While it was forbidden for religious to fight for any earthly purpose, they could make war in obedience to God, the authority of which was mediated not through any prince but through the Church.!° Having disposed of these objections, Thomas then dealt in turn with preaching, hearing confessions and scholarship, the functions about which the mendicants had been challenged.
He was using the example of the military orders to strengthen the argument for the validity of the mendicant way, because if the military form of active religious life was authentic, the value of the friars’ pastoral work and scholarship could not be questioned. He was making a case, of course, but his arguments seem to have struck home. Use was made of them by his confrére Humbert of Romans! and in 1308 the Paris masters, rejecting King Philip’s opinion that the Templars were secular, declared that a knighthood established to defend the faith constituted a legitimate religious order and its brothers, having taken the vows demanded by the Church, were, like all religious, exempt from the royal courts.!”
The attacks on the military and mendicant orders show that their status was as confusing to contemporaries as it is to us, with the difference that we no longer remember that the Dominicans and Franciscans were challenged in the same way as were the Templars and Hospitallers. Nevertheless, Thomas Aquinas, the popes and the vast majority of contemporaries were convinced that the brothers of the Hospital were as authentically religious as were the members of any other officially approved institute.
Thomas treated the military orders in the context of crusading, but it does not follow that the brothers were technically crusaders. I used to argue that they were not, but Iam now more inclusive. I divide crusaders into two types: lay men and women, who took the cross on a temporary basis for individual crusades, and the brothers-at-arms, who made vows of profession and were therefore permanently committed to the defence of Christians and Christendom.'? The vows of all those engaged in crusading were symbolized by the wearing of crosses, either on everyday clothes or, in the case of the members of the military orders, on their religious habits.
The military orders are also commonly associated with chivalry, but it is misleading to refer to the Hospital of St John as an order of chivalry or to confuse it with the secular monarchical orders that began to emerge in the fourteenth century. Chivalric ideas, such as they were, were incoherent, but in broad terms they represented a ritualization of warfare, fought by a martial caste characterized by wealth and by a lineage that in each case was identified and authenticated by the use of a recognized coat of arms. Few of the attributes associated with a chivalrous knighthood had anything to do with the Christian religion. They were much more ancient and were to be found in many different cultures. Being in many respects a parody of Christianity, with its own scriptures, liturgy and iconography,'* chivalric practice, such as it was, absorbed from the Christian religion those ideas that it considered to be compatible, while it downplayed or ignored those that were not.
The brothers of the military orders had been born and raised in a society which increasingly prized lineage and was in the process of replacing dubbing to knighthood by noble birth as the qualification for the bearing of arms. Nobility became, indeed, a necessary condition for entry into religious houses of many different kinds,!° including, of course, admission to the higher ranks in the Hospital, although the elaboration of the criteria for entry, including proofs of armorial quarterings, emerged much later in the Order’s history than is often supposed. But the fact that the Hospital was a true religious order, the brothers of which were expected to live penitential lives, should warn us against any assumption that it was strongly influenced by contemporary chivalric culture. The earliest Hospitallers had rejected in the strongest terms the secular world’s trappings and many of its values. Their imagery was biblical and their language was theological. The ethos of their successors remained a profoundly Christian one, informed by the Gospels, the teaching of the Church and canon law. The influence of chivalry on them cannot be ignored - Arthurian romance pervades the crusade treatise written by the English Hospitaller Roger of Stanegrave in the 1330s!” — but it was always to be more superficial than real.
Background
The hospice that was to develop into the Order of St John had been caring for pilgrims for over 20 years when the city of Jerusalem fell to the Christians on 15 July 1099. Its work may already have been appreciated in the West, but it would never have become so well known had not crusader Jerusalem attracted so many pilgrims. The community that served in the hospital was soon taking a leading role in the settlements established in the wake of the First Crusade, the success of which validated a war-theology that came to justify the type of religious profession adopted by the brothers in the course of the twelfth century. A movement for Church reform that was sweeping the West favoured the development of new forms of religious life and the economic and educational transformation of Western Europe meant that institutions, such as the Hospital, could function at an international level for the first time in six centuries.
Pilgrimages [Jerusalem] is held to be holier and more eminent than any other city or place in the world, but not because it is holy in itself or for itself. It is holier because it is illuminated by the presence there of our God and Lord Jesus Christ himself and of his loving mother, and by the lives, teaching, preaching and martyrdom of the patriarchs, prophets, apostles and other saints who lived there.!®
For the writer of this passage, a German monk called Theoderic who visited Jerusalem in the early 1170s, the terrestrial city he saw was obviously not the heavenly one described in scripture by visionaries like Ezekiel and St John and approached only through contemplative prayer. Nevertheless, it had proved itself to be the focus of divine interventions in human history and it housed unsurpassable relics: the summit of Calvary, on which Christ had been crucified, and the remnants of the rock walls and floor of his cave-tomb, the Holy Sepulchre, in which, in some extraordinary burst of energy, he had been restored to life.
An obsession with the Holy Places was one of the marks of the age, in which a pilgrimage was for most people a natural expression of piety and sorrow for sin, but, unlike the many shrines that attracted the devout because of the wonders performed by the saints they represented, Jerusalem was not usually a goal for those seeking miraculous assistance.!? The journey was made out of devotion and for forgiveness, and the pilgrims were, broadly speaking, of three types. The first were those performing a penance imposed on them by a confessor. The second, often hard to distinguish from the first because there was a penitential element in their journeys as well, were those engaged in what was called a peregrinatio religiosa, an act of devotion undertaken voluntarily and perhaps as a result of a vow. The third were those who were going to Jerusalem to live there until they died, because the special position of the city in the geography of providence meant that it was a place in which devout Christians wanted to be buried. It was to be there, after all, that the final acts in this dimension - the appearance of Anti-Christ, the return
of the Saviour, the earliest splitting of tombs and the reassembling of bones and dust in the General Resurrection — would take place.”°
In 1009 Christ’s Tomb had been levelled almost to the ground on the orders of al-Hakim, the Fatimid caliph of Egypt, who had set upon Christians in a persecution that only ended in 1017. The news interrupted a flow of pilgrims from the West that seems to have been on the way to becoming a flood in the last decade or so of the tenth century, but the stream was bound to swell again, and from the mid 1020s onwards there was hardly a year in which pilgrims cannot be identified, although there were periods when enthusiasm seems to have reached fever pitch: the 1030s, because 1033 was believed to be the thousandth anniversary of the crucifixion; the 1050s, by which time the shrines in Jerusalem had been partially restored by the Byzantine emperor; the early 1060s, when it was thought that Easter Day 1065 was going to fall on exactly the same date as it had in ap 33 and that this presaged the end of the world; and the 1080s and early 1090s, although conditions must have deteriorated as Asia Minor was swept by marauding nomadic Turks and Palestine was disputed by the forces of the rival caliphs of Baghdad and Cairo.”!
The journey overland could be made surprisingly quickly. It took just over five months from western France. The final stretch - down the Syrian and Palestinian coasts, by way of Latakia, Tripoli, Caesarea and Ramle to Jerusalem — was considered to be dangerously bandit-ridden and the atmosphere in Jerusalem could be unpredictable. Western priests, who were not familiar with the Muslim dhimma law that prohibited Christians and Jews from practising their religion openly, could get into trouble.?? Nothing, however, could dampen a growing enthusiasm, which was fuelled by European cult centres that displayed collections of relics associated with the Holy Places. The measurements of the aedicule, the free-standing chapel enclosing the Holy Sepulchre, paced out by Abbot Wyno of Helmarshausen on the 1033 pilgrimage, were used to build the Jerusalem church at Busdorf near Paderborn. Many other Western churches were dedicated to the Sepulchre, often being founded by pilgrims, and the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem was given proprietary rights over several of them.”%
The occupation of Jerusalem and the Holy Land by westerners after 1099 and the increase in sea-traffic eased travel conditions for pilgrims, although the roads through Palestine remained unsafe for decades. The loss at Eastertide 1119 of hundreds of men and women on the desert journey between Jerusalem and the Jordan is supposed to have inspired the original Templars.?4 Some people still travelled overland, but most were now coming by sea, voyaging in the spring or autumn. Many were staying for a full year, visiting other shrines as well and even contributing in some way - especially through labour on fortifications — to the defence of the new settlement.”
While in Jerusalem they wanted to visit locations firmly identified with scriptural events, at which they could pray in sympathetic surroundings and in the knowledge that their devotions would be reinforced by the prayers of the religious serving the site concerned. To meet these expectations, the Latin Church, in association with the crown, embarked on an ambitious programme of restoration
and beautification, characterized by the adaptation or rebuilding of many of the most important shrines in and around the city. The most striking evidence for this is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre itself, in which the locations of Christ’s death and resurrection were physically related to one another for the first time under a single roof in an enormous, sumptuously decorated building, which had the familiar elements of great European road-churches, including an ambulatory. The decision to unify all the elements described in the Gospel narratives — an expression of one of the most astonishing conceptions in the history of Christian architecture —- meant that an enclosed stage-set had been created in which pilgrims going from one shrine to another would no longer be distracted by having to cross an open court. Recollection (that focusing of the mind) could be more easily maintained, while everything that would contribute to a favourable ambience could be controlled. It is indicative that the choir, from which rose the solemn intercessions of the Office, was placed right in the centre of the church: east of the Sepulchre, north of Calvary, south of the Christ’s Prison and west of the Grotto of the Cross.76
The cost of restoring the Holy Places must have been a heavy burden, but the building programme demonstrates how sensitive the Latin Church was to the pilgrims’ needs and predispositions.?” We will see that the Hospital of St John made a significant contribution to the creation of this ‘pilgrim-friendly’ Jerusalem.
The loss of the city in 1187 did not mean an end to western pilgrimages. Jerusalem was reoccupied by the Christians only between 1229 and 1244, but the Muslims usually allowed visitors.”* Acre, the main port of entry and now the chief city of the kingdom of Jerusalem, continued to be an important pilgrim town. Many of the priests, canons, monks and nuns who had staffed the Holy Places were now gathered there and pilgrims could gain indulgences visiting the buildings that housed the exiled communities of the Holy Sepulchre, St Samuel of Montjoie, St Lazarus of Bethany, St Mary of the Valley of Jehoshaphat, St Mary of the Latins, St Anne, Bethlehem, the Templum Domini and many others, including, of course, the Hospital of St John.??
Pilgrimages appealed to women as well as to men, to the old as well as to the young, to the poor as well as to the rich and to the sick as well as to the healthy. But the journey to Jerusalem was expensive — especially once pilgrims were travelling by sea — and exhausting, particularly for those whose poor medical condition was aggravated by the penances imposed on them by their confessors or undertaken by them voluntarily. It is not surprising that many pilgrims were impoverished and in a poor condition once they reached Jerusalem. It was these — the poor and the sick - who were cared for by the Hospitallers of St John.
The Levantine settlements
The crusaders who left Europe in 1096 assumed that they would join a great army that would be assembled by the Byzantine emperor Alexius I to restore Jerusalem to his empire.°° In the end they had to take the city without Byzantine assistance and by the mid-1120s they themselves ruled almost the entire coast from the borders of Egypt to the Gulf of Alexandretta. Maritime traffic became more secure, because the Egyptian galley fleet, the only really effective weapon at the disposal of the Fatimid caliphs, was deprived of ports to take on water and did not have the range to operate effectively against the Mediterranean shipping lanes.*! After the catastrophic loss of territory that followed the Battle of Hattin in 1187 the settlers were confined to the coastal strip, but their presence in the region was augmented by the occupation by Westerners of Cyprus in 1191 and of much of Greece and the Greek islands after 1204. And an Armenian kingdom in Cilicia had come so strongly under Western influence that it is also treated as though it was another Latin state.3?
The first settlement to be established was the county of Edessa, which straddled the River Euphrates, stretching from the fortresses of Gaziantep and Ravanda in the west to an indeterminate frontier in the east. Edessa was 260 kilometres north-east of Antioch and 72 kilometres east of the Euphrates, a Western salient in an area that had for centuries been borderland between Muslims and Greeks. The countryside was fertile, but was exposed to assault and the European settlers were confined to isolated fortresses. The counts tended to get on well with their subjects, who were mostly indigenous Jacobite and Armenian Christians.*?
Between the county and the sea lay the principality of Antioch. Its control over Cilicia to the north west was spasmodic, but it came to hold the Syrian coastline as far south as Baniyas and the neighbouring castle of Margat. It extended inland to Maras and Azaz in the north east and, with its frontier skirting Aleppo, which always remained in Muslim hands, to el Atharib and Maarret en Numan in the south east. Most of the inhabitants were Greeks, whom the Byzantine government in Constantinople regarded as its subjects. Since Western occupation challenged Greek as well as Muslim interests, the princes faced potential warfare on two fronts for most of the twelfth century.
South of Baniyas, one entered the county of Tripoli, with a mixed indigenous population of Christians, Druses and Muslims. It stretched east to Barin and Crac des Chevaliers and down the coast to Jbail, beyond which was the kingdom of Jerusalem proper. This began at the Nahr el Kelb, just north of Beirut. At its greatest extent its frontiers ran to the east of the Sea of Galilee and south to the Gulf of Aqaba and to Darom on the Egyptian frontier.
The European colonists who migrated to the region never comprised a majority of the inhabitants - most remained indigenous, whether Christian, Muslim or Jewish — but they established villages of European types and lived in the towns as traders and artisans. Their rulers did not dismantle the administrative machinery they found, based as it was on a relatively advanced monetary economy, but overlaid it with Western institutions.
In spite of the loss of much of the interior to the Muslims in 1187, changes in the late twelfth century to the Asiatic trade routes redirected the bulk of the commerce in oriental spices from Egypt to Palestine and Syria, the chief ports of which — Acre, Tyre, Tripoli and Magaracik — were in Christian hands. Acre came to rival and even overtake Alexandria as the chief market on the eastern Mediterranean seaboard. But the trade routes were to change again from the 1260s and the local economy
was to decline at precisely the moment when two new forces, the Mamluk government of Egypt and the Mongols, were battling for mastery of the region.
Although the growth in the volume of trade benefited everyone, including the great religious institutions, the settlements suffered from two major problems. The first was the chaotic nature of their politics. Antioch and Tripoli were torn apart by a succession dispute in the early thirteenth century, after which the prince-counts in Tripoli retained only vestiges of authority in Antioch itself.*4 Royal power in Jerusalem, which had been quite effective for the first three quarters of the twelfth century, weakened thereafter, being undermined by the succession to the throne of women for whom husbands had to be found, by conflicts between rival claimants or with absentee rulers and by the dominance for much of the thirteenth century of a litigious noble class, intent on maintaining what it perceived to be its rights.*5
The second was the precarious nature of the settlement. The crusaders’ invasion of Syria and Palestine in 1097-99 had come as a shock to a region which for 50 years had been a battleground fought over by the Seljuq Turkish sultanate, governing on behalf of the Sunni ‘Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, and the Fatimid caliphate in Cairo, which was a centre of vigorous proselytizing Shi‘ism. Both sides had been gravely weakened, however, by the deaths of dominant political figures in the early 1090s and the Seljuq sultanate had disintegrated into principalities in which pretenders and members of the dynasty fought each other for power. Although none of the crusaders knew it, they were marching towards a door that had swung wide open.*°
Some Christians thought euphorically of carrying warfare further into Islamic territory, but this was fantasy. After some desperate counter-attacks the initial reaction of most of the neighbouring Muslim statelets had been to reach a modus vivendi with the new settlers,?” but the idea of jihad was vigorously promoted in the enthusiasm that accompanied the first significant Muslim reconquests, involving the destruction of the county of Edessa, in 1144. Jihadism was to be brilliantly exploited after the failure of the Second Crusade to take Damascus in 1149. The twin themes of jihadist rhetoric — the obligation to reconquer the Levantine coastlands, and especially the city of Jerusalem, and the conviction that this could only be achieved through Muslim religious and political unity — were taken up by Saladin in a propaganda and military campaign that culminated in his reoccupation of Jerusalem and most of Palestine in 1187.°°
The first 40 years of the thirteenth century were relatively peaceful. Saladin’s Ayyubid descendants recognized that the economic prosperity of the districts under their control depended on the Christian ports. It was only when the Ayyubid rulers of Egypt were overthrown in 1250 by their own Mamluks, specially trained slave-soldiers from beyond the frontiers of Islam, that the situation was transformed. There was an upsurge of jihadism and the methodical approach of the Mamluk sultans to the reconquest of the coast was rewarded when the Westerners were finally expelled in 1291.°%?
At any rate, generations of Christian settlers lived with the prospects of Muslim invasion from without and peasant revolt within. Their castles, which are now
so much admired, are a collective testimony to fear. Designed by men who knew that they could be faced by obliteration, they were built to give onlookers a sense of potency that was to a large extent phantasmagorical.
Crusading
The threat to the settlements was one of the reasons why crusading continued to appeal.
The men who survived the First Crusade and returned to Europe were convinced that they had taken part in an epic which was at the same time a miracle. They had fought a three-year campaign without provisioning or proper leadership, deprived of horses and pack animals, and encumbered by a large number of non-combatants. They had been forced by circumstances to take extraordinary risks over and over again, and yet had seized Jerusalem, over 3000 kilometres from home. The only explanation for their extraordinary achievement that made sense to them and their contemporaries was that they had been guided by a divine hand.*°
The idea that crusading was an inspired enterprise fixed itself indelibly in the minds of Western Europeans. The needs of the Latin East generated further crusades in 1107, 1120, 1129, 1139, 1147 (the so-called Second Crusade), 1164, 1177, 1189 (the Third Crusade), 1197, 1202 (the Fourth Crusade), 1217 (the Fifth Crusade), 1228, 1239 (the Barons’ Crusade), 1248 (the First Crusade of Louis IX), 1269 (the Second Crusade of Louis IX), 1287, 1288, 1290 and 1310. Most of these were unsuccessful, but the greater the failure the more enthusiastic the public became. Convinced by the preachers’ interpretation of God’s intentions in crusading, they attributed any set-backs to the sinfulness of the crusaders themselves, who had shown that they were his unworthy instruments.
The enthusiasm for crusading was not fully shared by the brothers of the military orders, as we shall see. They knew that what the western settlements in the Levant really needed was a permanent defensive capability. Crusades were spasmodic injections of armies that at best would extend the territory under Christian control, without providing the original defenders with the means to hold it, and at worst would aggravate the Muslims.
On the other hand, the military orders would never have come into existence without the crusades, because crusading authenticated the idea of penitential warfare. When in the early 1080s Pope Gregory VII and his supporters had made the unprecedented appeal for war ‘for the remission of sins’, they had apparently believed that personal engagement in a just cause was so meritorious that the danger involved could be treated as a penance. It cannot have been easy for them to describe the inflicting of pain and loss of life on others, with the consequential distortion of the perpetrator’s internal disposition, as a penance simply because he was exposing himself to danger, however much he might have been motivated by love of God and however unpleasant the experience might have been for him. When the First Crusade was preached ten years later, Pope Urban II gave the idea a context in which it could be presented more convincingly, because he associated the forthcoming military campaign with the most charismatic of all traditional
penances, the pilgrimage to Jerusalem. The dangers of war, therefore, gave added value to the penitential merit gained by a crusader as a pilgrim.*!
This explains why care was taken to give all crusades, which were fought on many fronts and against many different enemies, pilgrimage credentials. Preparations for them were always marked by acts of penitence and when not in armour crusaders were supposed to dress simply as pilgrims.’ It was reported that most of those who left Jerusalem for home at the end of the First Crusade replaced their weapons with the palm fronds that were the evidence that they had completed their pilgrimage,*? notwithstanding the fact that the return journey, at least in its initial stages, must have been as dangerous as the crusade itself had been.
It would be hard to exaggerate how revolutionary was the notion of crusading. A contemporary exclaimed that ‘God has instituted in our time holy wars, so that the order of knights and the crowd running in their wake...might find a new way of gaining salvation.’** If the First Crusade had failed it is likely that senior churchmen would have arisen out of the shadows to condemn it, but with its triumph doubts about penitential warfare evaporated. Contemporaries described it in terms which until then had been customarily applied only to monks and the monastic profession — the knighthood of Christ, the way of the cross, a journey to the heavenly Jerusalem, spiritual warfare — while in monastic commentaries the association of war and penance was given coherence and intellectual weight. The crusaders, moved by love of God and their neighbour, leaving behind wives, children and earthly possessions, and adopting temporary poverty and chastity, were described following the way of the cross. One writer compared the liberation of Jerusalem to Joseph of Arimathea taking Christ down from the cross.*
It was for this reason that participation in the First Crusade was considered to be in some sense an alternative to entry into the religious life. Contemporaries portrayed the army on the march as a nomadic abbey, its days and nights punctuated by solemn liturgy, its soldiers dedicated to austerity and brotherhood — ‘just as in the primitive church, nearly all things were shared in common’*” - and enduring a religious exile — temporary it is true —- which led, as one writer put it, ‘not [to] a military but a monkish life as far as frugality was concerned’.*8 A century and a half later, the preacher Humbert of Romans maintained that necessary for a crusader were confession, contrition, good counsel, advice from the wise, the disposition of house and goods before departure, the making of a will, the restitution of goods that were not one’s own, reconciliation with adversaries, constancy of purpose, the comfort of the saints and the assistance of Christian brothers, abstinence from all sin, a speedy penitence from any sin committed through human frailty while on the march, zeal in punishing any evil in the army and a preoccupation with the sacred.* It is notable how similar many of these conditions were to the obligations required of someone entering a religious community.
Penitential language reached a peak when Western Christendom was in a state of shock over the loss of the city of Jerusalem in 1187 and the tone was set by a papal general letter, which proclaimed a new crusade as an ‘opportunity for repentance and doing good’.5° Thirteenth-century preachers described crusades as superlative pilgrimages because of the severity of the penance involved.
An example of how widely the crusade had come to be seen as a model penitential exercise is a Lenten sermon preached, probably by a Dominican, on 28 March 1283 to an English community of Benedictine nuns at Elstow, near Bedford. The preacher’s audience would, of course, never become crusaders, but he used crusade imagery, particularly that relating to the cross, to develop the theme that those who ‘assumed the cross of penitence’ during Lent were themselves true pilgrims, seeking the heavenly kingdom and eternal life with God.‘!
The conviction that warfare could be penitential laid the ground for the establishment of the military orders in an age in which an instinctive response was to monasticize any action by laymen that was perceived to be good. A penitential existence was the sine qua non of the regular religious life, as we have seen, and although the unprecedented appearance of professed religious dedicated to the exercise of arms attracted fierce criticism from some,* it must have seemed to many less startling than it actually was, given the evident needs of the Holy Land.
Church reform
Crusading was as much a product of the eleventh-century Church Reform Movement as were the new varieties of religious life that were a feature of the decades on either side of 1100. The military orders were generated by the same movement that gave birth to Cistercians, Carthusians, Premonstratensians, Augustinians, Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites.°4 The Church was engaged in an intense and self-conscious drive for moral, pastoral and institutional renewal.°* Western Christianity had been dominated by Benedictinism for centuries, but there was now a desire for more choice in the kind of professed life open to devout men and women, whether coenebitical or eremetical, contemplative or pastoral, hospitaller or military. And because of growing wealth, the spread of education, advances in technology, including shipping and other forms of transportation, the development of banking and the appearance of new techniques of management, it was becoming possible to envisage and experiment with governmental systems on an international scale. This helps to explain the appearance of orders of the Church, including the military ones, that transcended diocesan boundaries and were dependent on resources generated a very long way from their main centres of activity.
The reformers were acutely aware of the sinfulness that they perceived to be encompassing them. In one response, the battle against sin was to be a private one, fought in an enclosed and contemplative environment. In the other, prayer was to precede a public confrontation with sin, either through pastoral care and works of mercy or through the bearing of arms. The perception that Christian love could be shown as much in the use of force as in medical care was manifested in the transformation of the Hospital into a military order, although that process was not an easy one, as we shall see.
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