Download PDF | (The Medieval Mediterranean 76) Conor Kostick - The Social Structure of the First Crusade (The Medieval Mediterranean) -BRILL (2008).
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A number of medieval historians were kind enough to share their thoughts on certain points featured in this book and for their communications I would like to thank Anne Duggan, S. B. Edgington, John France, Bernard Hamilton, Natasha Hodgson, A. V. Murray and Leena Roos. Sini Kangas was particularly supportive and brought her extensive knowledge of the First Crusade to bear on the early drafts of some of the chapters.
The formulations in this book have benefited greatly from their having been discussed with my colleagues at ‘Trinity College Dublin; my thanks are due to Terry Barry, Léan Ni Chléirigh, Peter Crooks, Séan Duffy, David Green, Katherine Simms and all those who attended the seminars at which some of the ideas in this book were first presented. Most heartfelt thanks are especially due to Christine Meek, whose extensive bibliographical knowledge was extremely helpful and who was very generous with her time.
It has been a great pleasure to work with such efficient, friendly and supportive librarians as Anne Walsh and Mary Higgins at the Library of ‘Trinity College Dublin. Alas, since I wrote the preceding sentence Anne passed away: this book is dedicated to her memory.
Much of the research for this book was conducted while I was a post-graduate scholar of the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and the Social Sciences and I am very grateful for their assistance.
I was fortunate in growing up in a household where medieval history was frequently a topic for discussion, a topic informed by my father’s extensive and scholarly book collection, much of which has stealthily been transferred over the years to my own bookshelves. ‘The impact on this book of conversations with my father, Gerry Kostick, and especially my brother, Gavin Kostick, has been considerable.
‘Two other non-medievalists who I am keen to acknowledge here for their moral and intellectual support are my old comrade Andy Wilson and my partner Aoife Kearney.
Finally, I turn to I. S. Robinson. If I were to do justice to the kindness, intellect, erudition and generosity of my former supervisor this acknowledgement would both embarrass him and sound distinctly like this was a work of medieval hagiography. I therefore confine myself to saying that no scholar could have wanted for a better mentor.
INTRODUCTION
In 1096, tens of thousands of people of all backgrounds left their homes in Europe to march to Jerusalem and capture it for Christianity. Among them were many thousands of knights. These professional warriors lived for the chase; if they were not at war they were at the hunt and the horse that they rode not only gave them military prowess but a social status that was significantly more prestigious than the lowly footsoldiers who were marching in great bands, stave in hand, unstrung bows over their shoulder.
Even greater throngs of more lowly non-combatants tried to keep pace with those trained for war. Farmers sold their lands and tools, except for a plough and a few animals. Hitching a cart to their oxen, they placed their remaining possessions in the vehicle, put their children on top and set out determinedly for the Holy Land. Serfs too, with little more than a few coins, dependent upon charity, the bounty of God, ran from the prospect of lifelong toil for their social superiors and, arming themselves with crude weapons, obtained freedom in the ranks of the army of God. Among the crowds were women, also present in their thousands. The presence of so many women dismayed the senior clergy, but popular preachers distributed alms to them, so that they could find husbands and protectors. Some women, though, had the temerity to dress as men and cast off the role that had been assigned them from birth.
As the great armies snaked their way along the old Roman roads, elderly men, monks, nuns, artisans and peasants joined the expedition. The poor escorted the princes and the glittering knights, who in turn felt some responsibility for the protection of the defenceless. And they died in great numbers. Ships full of pilgrims sank in the Adriatic. Strageglers left trails of dead across hundreds of miles, especially once the pilgrim armies were south-east of the Alps and could no longer count on the sympathy of Latin Christian towns. Once in Muslim territory, enormous numbers of non-combatants died, both by the sword and from the hardship of desert, mountain and disease.
It was an extraordinary, unprecedented, moment in human history; one whose repercussions are still with us, like the distant ripples of a once powerful tidal wave. What did they think they were doing? Is it possible to draw close enough to these people that we can have some understanding of their actions, their motives, their hopes? Was it all, like Edward Gibbon believed, a monumental act of folly? Did their shared goal mean that they had a common understanding of what they were doing: the lord of four castles from France, with the servant from Germany? The aristocratic lady, a descendent of Charlemagne, with her cook? How did they organise themselves? Did the expedition always follow a course set by the princes? What happened when people of that era were thrown together in the face of annihilation, but with the prospect of eternal salvation in their grasp? Did they maintain the social norms they were accustomed to? Or did propriety break down?
These are hard questions to answer for an enterprise that took place nearly a thousand years ago. Thus, even though the extraordinary nature of the First Crusade has attracted an immense amount of investigation and attention, both of a popular and academic nature, there is still much to be said, and much that will never be known. Even to approach tentative answers to such issues requires that a more fundamental set of questions be examined. When, for example, the sources talk of ‘knights’, what do they mean? When they refer to the ‘poor’, who, exactly, are they talking about? Like an astronomer who finds they need to master particle physics to explain celestial phenomena, the historian who wishes to discuss social dynamics has to involve themselves in the minutiae of contemporary language.
The contemporary accounts of the First Crusade, by eyewitnesses and those alive at the time, provide answers to the questions above, providing it is understood what they mean when they employ terms like milites, pauperes, minores or tuvenes. What such terms meant at the time of the First Crusade is not, however, particularly well understood. In part this is because of the intrinsic obscurity of the subject, but it is also because none of the great social historians of the medieval period devoted a major study to the crusades. Instead, figures like Georges Duby, Rodney Hilton, Abram Leon, and Perry Anderson have left fragments of analysis: throwaway remarks, often rich in potential, but not elaborated. This has been a loss not just to those interested in questions concerning social structure, but also to the study of the crusades in general.
Even very basic features of the First Crusade, such as its social composition, have yet to be rigorously analysed. It is surprising to find very eminent crusading historians, sure-footed on their own terrain, stumbling as soon as they discuss the social structure of the movement.
Jonathan Riley-Smith, for example, when he turned to the subject, argued that the Christian forces of the First Crusade ‘can be divided into three classes, the principes or maiores, the minores or mediocres and the plebs or populus.’' He defined minores as the ‘great lords, castellans and petty knights’ beneath the ranks of the senior princes and repeatedly utilised the term muinores for a sustained investigation of those of the nobility on the First Crusade who were just below the level of the senior princes.
This portrayal of the social structure of the First Crusade is rather eccentric in its definitions. In particular, none of the crusading sources uses minores in the manner described by Riley-Smith. In fact, in the early crusading sources the term minores is typically used to indicate commoners, often by coupling the term with maiores to indicate the entirety of society, the great and the small.” Nor do the other terms used to dissect the social structure of the First Crusade by Riley-Smith fit his purpose. Mediocres has a limited and specialised use in the sources, not for those knights below the rank of the senior princes but, depending on context, for either footsoldiers or for the lowest social orders.’ Principes and maiores very often were not synonymous, with the former usually a very narrow elite within the broader grouping of nobles encompassed by mazores.* Furthermore, plebs and populus were used, in the main, to indicate the entire body of Christian forces, not a subgroup unless qualified by an appropriate adjective. If Riley-Smith’s intention was to indicate the lower social orders by these terms, then more appropriate would have been vulgus, pauperes, egent, or minores, to mention only the more frequently used contemporary terms. Again, the extremely prominent historian of medieval Germany, Karl Leyser, in discussing the question of supplies and the First Crusade, conflated the pauperes, the poor, with the very different social group, the pedites, the footsoldiers.’
A detailed analysis of the structure of First Crusade from a social perspective has, therefore, something of value to offer those studying the subject from a variety of points of view, as well as to those readers simply interested in deepening their understanding of the crusade. The ambition of this book is to supply the groundwork that in so many other areas of history is taken for granted, even by those who would not focus their work on social dynamics. In other words, to achieve as much clarity as possible as to which social groupings were present on the Crusade, in what proportions, and with what structural tensions between them.
This book has not been written to address the question of ‘motivation’ of the crusaders. But as a secondary consequence of striving to achieve clarity on the issue of social structure, it does have something to offer on that issue and the matter is discussed further in the conclusion.
A certain methodology arises from the nature of the subject matter. Once the question has been posed, ‘what was the social structure of the First Crusade?’, the basic approach suggests itself. The sources for the First Crusade have to be dissected and the material poured over with respect to their evidence concerning the full range of the social orders present on the crusade. The accumulated evidence then has to be reassembled, prosopographically, to provide as coherent and accurate account as possible of the social groupings under examination. While it is possible to gather a fairly wide annalistic body of evidence for the extent of plagues and famines around the time of the preaching of the First Crusade and use this to supplement the discussion, especially with regard to pauperes,° the foundations of the study therefore have to rest on a close reading and understanding of the sociological outlook of the longer sources.
With regard to sources, something of a constraint is forced upon the historian who wishes to examine the social dynamics of the First Crusade. There needs to be sufficient material in the source to provide an understand the sociological perspective of the author. In what manner are the key terms being used? How fixed are they? Do they echo classical or biblical language? ‘To what extent can they be trusted as labels for specific social classes? Shorter chronicles, letters and charters are unsuited to an analysis of their philosophical and theological standpoint. Verse sources present the problem that their vocabulary is constantly subordinated to metre. Therefore the more substantial early narrative histories of the First Crusade form the core subject matter of this study.
The first two chapters of this book examine the work of eight medieval historians, either participants on the First Crusade, or near contemporaries. For the reader wishing to rush ahead to the narrative of events or the discoveries here with regard to the social status of those present on the crusade, these opening chapters will seem rather slow. But quite apart from the indispensability of treating the sources with respect, there is something intrinsically interesting about deepening our understanding of the outlook of those who provided the accounts from which we gain an insight into the past. This book is as much a study of the sociology of these eight medieval writers as it is an account of the social structure of the expedition itself
The accounts studied in depth here are first of all those of the four eyewitness: the anonymously authored Gesta Francorum; Peter Tudebode’s variant of the same; Raymond of Aguilers’s Historia Francorum and Fulcher of Chartres’s Historia Mierosolymitana. In Chapter ‘Two, four more histories are examined, all written in the decade following the capture of Jerusalem. There exist three histories written around 1108 that are similar to one another, in that they are all the work of northern French monks and are all reworkings of the Gesta Francorum. Distinctly different from these works is Albert of Aachen’s extremely well informed LMistoria Therosolimitana, a history rich in social content and unique in perspective.
Modern historians have tended to neglect the three French works: the Historia Mierosolymitana of Baldric of Dol; the Historia Iherosolimitana of Robert the Monk; and (to a lesser extent) the Gesta Det per Francos of Guibert of Nogent. This is because the texts of the eyewitnesses have to be preferred over the later works, especially given that as they rewrote the story of the First Crusade, these monks sometimes distorted historical information in order to provide edifying examples for their readers. But for the social historian such reworkings are something of a treasure trove, for, at the very least, they indicate how a French monk of the ttme understood the Gesta Francorum. To take one of very many examples, the crusading army at Antioch won a victory against a sortie from the city, 6 March 1098, soon after which the Gesta Francorum reported that ‘our men’ went to where the citizens had buried their dead, dug them up and cut their heads off’? Robert the Monk’s version of this incident, instead of using the vague term nostri, specified it was the zvenes of the Christian army who did this.? When these monastic historians enriched their text with such details, it cannot necessarily be invoked as evidence for what actually happened, especially if the amendments disagree with the eyewitness, but such alterations do provide powerful evidence for how near contemporaries understood the social content of their fons formalis.
These eight works provide, therefore, the bulk of the material for this study.
In weighing up the social perspective of these authors, particularly in placing their thought into context, the possibilities available to the historian have undergone something of a minor revolution since research for this book began. At the start of the new millennium, in order to understand the context for a distinctive phrase, for example, Guibert of Nogent’s homines extremae vulgaritatis, scholars would either rely on definitions provided by earlier generations who devoted a lifetime of study to Latin, such as those in Du Cange’s monumental Glossarium mediae et mfimae Latinitatis, or would be obliged root around among microfiches and indexes without ever being fully satisfied that perhaps a key tome had been left unturned. ‘Today, an enormous amount of classical and medieval material has been digitised and put on to databases, allowing searches to take place in minutes that would previously have taken years. In Dublin, for example, in 2006 Dr. Katherine Simms made available her database that catalogues the themes of Gaelic bardic poetry. ‘This allows researchers not only to search by opening lines, geographical area, key names, meter and period, but the poems have all been categorised as to whether they are petitions, elegies, apologies etc.’ This particular database is freely available as are several other important ones, especially for the classical era.
The two databases used most heavily in this study are the online versions of the Patrologia Latina and the scriptores series of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. These are immensely useful resources, invaluable for this kind of study. Additionally, the French Government has rather generously made the important crusading collection Recueil des Historiens des Crotsades accessible for free.'° With the assistance of these huge resources and databases it has proved possible to say something about each of the author’s distinct sociological perspectives.
The main body of this book consists of a discussion of the material gleaned from these sources, assembled around the significant social groupings. Insofar as this book offers an original interpretation of the narrative of the Crusade, this appears mainly in Chapters ‘Three and Four. In particular, although the case has previously been made that as the expedition stalled from July 1098 to May 1099, it was popular pressure that provided the impetus to drive the movement towards Jerusalem,'' Chapter Four the role of the poor of the Crusade is examined in great detail and it is demonstrated that their self-conscious activity played a significant part in the subsequent outcome of the expedition.
Issues concerning knighthood and chivalry have proved to be a major interest right across the medieval era. By the time of the First Crusade the term muilites was beginning to be applied not simply to the common soldier, but more and more to that distinct social group, the warrior members of the nobility. This is not to say that a knightly class emerged around the time of the Crusade. Analysis of charters, especially that done by Georges Duby for the Maconnais, suggests that in parts of France, at least, they were a distinct social grouping from around the year 1000.'* Chapter Five demonstrates, albeit with important qualifications, that by the time that the early historians of the First Crusade were writing (c. 1100-1110) the term miles was often being used to indicate a knight, someone with a distinctly noble status, and not simply a soldier. The more interesting material concerning the class below that of the knights, the pedites, footsoldiers, namely their juxtaposition with the mulites, has not warranted a separate chapter, but is included in Chapter Five.
In sifting the information about social groupings it becomes clear that an entirely unrecognised strata of person was present on the First Crusade, not only present, but playing a key role as the ‘shock troops’ of the movement: first into battle, first on to the walls of a besieged city, rash, impetuous and thirsty for fame. This stratum, in essence senior nobles who had yet to establish families or careers, were termed by the sources zuvenes and they have been invisible for centuries due to the fact that the term is also, and more commonly, employed simply for youths. Chapter Six discusses this term, along with the complexities of the issue. The discussion of the zwvenes of the First Crusade is worth pursing in its own right, but it also enriches the discussion about the motivation of the crusaders and this aspect of the material in Chapter Six is referred to in the conclusion.
Chapter Seven examines the vocabulary of the sources with regard to the magnates. Although writers of this era could often be very crude in their depiction of society, splitting it into just two groups say, rich and poor, closer inspection reveals a very rich appreciation by them of the different layers of the nobility. Albert of Aachen, whose near contemporary history makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of the Crusade, wrote at various times of nobiles, magni, maiores, optimates, primores, potentes, principes, proceres, capitales, capitanet and domini. Are these terms synonyms? Or did their employment reflect different grades and status among the elite? The results of this investigation assist in understanding how the Crusade was lead, the subject of Chapter Eight.
Finally, Ghapter Nine examines the role of women on the First Crusade. Strictly speaking the women present on the expedition were not a separate social grouping, rather they were a component part of each stratum, a vertical slice through the social structure of the expedition rather than a horizontal one. Nevertheless, they were treated by the sources as a distinct group and played an interesting role on the expedition, both in deed and in their obtaining the unsympathetic attention of the sources. One important issue dealt with in this chapter 1s whether the women who joined the First Crusade came as prostitutes, or was their motivation more spiritual, did they come as pilgrims? This book argues for the view that they saw themselves, in fact, overwhelmingly as pilgrims.
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