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THE CRUSADES AND THE EXPANSION OF CATHOLIC
CHRISTENDOM, 1000-1714
‘A study that is both wide ranging and refreshingly insightful, which pulls together historical episodes that are often accorded insufficient attention and traces the fortunes of a developing political matrix in which piety and greed, loyalty and aggression, self-interest and faith, went hand in hand.’ Professor Peter Edbury, Cardiff University
The Crusades and the Expansion of Catholic Christendom is a fascinating and accessible survey that places the medieval crusades in their European context, and examines, for the first time, their impact on European expansion. Chronologically structured, John France provides a comprehensive overview of crusading from the development of a ‘crusading impulse’ in the eleventh century through to an examination of the relationship between the crusades and the imperialist imperatives of the early modern period. Conceiving of the crusades as a longrunning phenomenon, France provides a detailed examination of the First Crusade, the expansion and climax of crusading during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the failure and fragmentation of such practices in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Concluding with an assessment of the influence of the crusades across history, France notes that whilst continuities existed into the ‘Age of Discovery’ and beyond through the impulse to explore and seize territory, the motives behind post-Renaissance European expansion differed fundamentally.
Replete with illustrations, maps, timelines, guides for further reading and a detailed list of rulers across Europe and the Muslim world this study provides students with an essential guide to a central aspect of medieval history.
John France is Professor of History and Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Wales, Swansea. His previous publications include Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades, 1000-1300 (1999).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am deeply indebted to an enormous number of people who have helped me in the writing of this book. I have, at various times during its gestation, been awarded grants by the British Academy, by the Leverhulme Trust and by Swansea University. These provided me with opportunities to focus on the issues analysed here and the means to travel to many of the places discussed. Professor Jonathon Riley-Smith, Professor Norman Housley, Professor Jeremy Black and Professor Bernard Hamilton have provided me with much inspiration and I must also thank the latter for kindly reading and commenting on much of the text. My colleagues in the Department of History at the University of Swansea have been entirely supportive, and I must extend special thanks to Professor John Spurr, Dr Hugh Dunthorne and Mr Ifor Rowlands who all read substantial amounts of the text and offered their valuable comments. Professor Peter Edbury of Cardiff University was kind enough to read the whole text and to produce constructive criticisms which I value greatly.
| am also indebted to his colleague, Professor Denys Pringle, who has shared his unsurpassed knowledge of crusader monuments. Dr S. B. Edgington of Queen Mary, University of London was kind enough to make available to me her text and translation of Albert of Aachen, while Dr A. V. Murray of the University of Leeds provided very substantial bibliographic help. Professor John Pryor staged a remarkable conference at the University of Sydney on Crusader Logistics in the autumn of 2002, and I can only thank him and all those who participated in what was an immensely exciting occasion. Professor John Haldon of the University of Birmingham is another pioneer of the study of medieval military logistics to whom | am indebted. It is a tribute to the vibrancy of the study of medieval warfare that it has given birth to a society, De Re Militari and its own Journal of Medieval Military History. Many of the leading spirits in this group are people with whom I have had long contact, notably Professors B. S. Bachrach, Kelley Devries, Richard Abels and Clifford Rogers. In 2002, at a critical stage in the development of this book, I was privileged to attend the Kalamazoo Conference and meet up with them once more, and to make new friends, amongst whom I would like to mention Peter Konieczny, the able keeper of the De Re Militari Web-Site. Professors Jean Richard, Michel Balard and J. Y. Tonnerre haveall provided me with exciting ideas, as has Luis Garcia-Guijarro Ramos of the University of Huesca whose conferences have been as remarkable for their lively ideas as for their hospitality. I remain indebted to Yvonne Friedmann and Ronnie Ellenblum for much encouragement and help. I am intensely grateful for the advice and encouragement of all these people, but, of course, responsibility for the material is mine alone.
All scholars rely heavily on learned institutions and libraries, so this is an opportunity to thank, in particular, Professor David Bates and his colleagues at the Institute of Historical Research, the staff of the British Library and, above all, the staff of the library of the University of Swansea.
Finally, I would like to thank Victoria Peters and Philippa Grand of Routledge who have worked so hard on my manuscript and licked it into shape.
IN THE BEGINNING
The ‘Expansion of Medieval Europe’ is a recognised topic amongst historians of the medieval period. But this raises the difficult question of what the term Europe meant to medieval people, particularly at the beginning of our period. We tend to envisage Europe as a geographic zone, partly because we have a very wide knowledge of the rest of the world which was not shared by people around the year 1000. Our twenty-first century view is rather different from that of the Greeks and Romans who invented the term, and even now there is by no means unanimity on what countries and peoples should be included. Europa remained in the vocabulary of learned men in the early Middle Ages because of their education in Roman literature, but it was rare and only revived towards the end of the eighth century as a description of the dominions of Charlemagne in all their diversity. The Regensberg annalist identified imperium and Europa when he spoke in 888 of the break-up of ‘Europe or the kingdom of Charles’. The word was used in this sense by the Ottonian dynasty of Germany in the tenth and eleventh centuries.
A famous sequence of manuscript illustrations dating from the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries proclaims the supremacy of either the Emperor Otto II (973– 83) or Otto III (983–1002) by showing a series of figures representing variously Francia, Italia, Germania, Alamannia, Gallia, Roma and Sclavinia performing homage.1 But although we tend to use the term European in a geographic sense, we are also aware that it implies much more than this – it is shorthand for a shared historical experience and a powerful sense of a community of culture. It is important to recognise that this sense of cultural community is much older than our sense of belonging to a geographic zone. It is out of this that our present identity has sprung. Around the year 1000 ‘Europe’ was a rare term and it is doubtful whether anybody felt it to be a part of their identity. But there was a sense of a wider community to which the elites of the peoples in part of our Europe felt they belonged.
Rodulfus Glaber, writing across the period c.1023 to 1047, felt he was part of the ‘Roman’ world, but this was clearly not the empire of the Ottonians because he was devoted to the cause of the Capetian dynasty which ruled much of what we call France. What is particularly interesting about this writer is that he set himself to write a history of ‘our continent this-side-the-sea’. He never defined this more precisely, but his writing was informed by a deep and explicit hatred and contempt for Greeks, pagans and Moslems. Glaber was consciously identifying what he called ‘our continent’ with that part of Christianity which looks to Rome.
This was probably because he had been brought up in the milieu of the great abbey of Cluny which enjoyed a close special relationship with the Roman See, and sat at the heart of a network of monasteries and personal connections which spanned the lands most closely integrated into Roman Christianity. Early in his book Glaber embarked on an interesting excursus in which he debated why it was that Christianity was expanding in the west and north, and not in the place of its birth, the east.2 In effect, Glaber’s ‘continent this-side-the-sea’ is a religious and cultural construct (and certainly not a primarily geographic one) which can be termed the ‘Catholic core’, the zone of unequivocal acceptance of the final authority of Rome in spiritual affairs comprising what is now southern England, France, Germany and much of Italy. That is what matters to him and all else is outside. The primacy of cultural identity should not surprise us.
The peoples of the ‘Catholic core’ were cut off from the rest of the world by the Atlantic to the west, the pagan peoples of the steppe fringe to the north-east and Islam to the east, although its authorities allowed pilgrimage to Jerusalem. In these circumstances their intelligentsia were heavily dependent upon classical writings for geographic knowledge. The ancient world had quite substantial knowledge of the world beyond the Mediterranean. Greek and Roman traders found their way to India, the islands of the Altantic, the Far East and perhaps even ventured down the African coasts. However, the best of their geographic treatises were written in Greek, which was distinctly inaccessible even to most scholars before the later Middle Ages. The very important work of the second century author, Claudius Ptolemy, only became known in the fifteenth century. A great deal of the knowledge of the ancient world was transmitted to the Middle Ages via compilations made in the late Roman period like that of Martianus Capella which contained rather poor geographic material elaborated with fabulous stories of monsters and wonders. The learned tradition was, therefore, confused from the start, the more so because it was handed down in compressed form by writers like St Isidore whose Encyclopaedia had an enormous circulation in the Middle Ages. Most of the intelligentsia seem to have inherited from his works and those of others the idea that there were three continents, Asia, Africa and Europe, clustered around the Mediterranean. This gave rise to the ‘T-O maps’, schematic representations of the three continents which were produced throughout the Middle Ages. This was clearly the basis of William of Jumièges’ attempt to describe Europa: ‘Asia reaches from the south through the east to the north, Europe from the north to the West and Africa begins and stretches from the West to the South.’3 William repeats the usual belief that Asia was as big as Africa and Europe combined. Rabanus Maurus in his Commentariorum in Genesim repeated Isidore’s De Natura Rerum in putting the boundary of Asia and Europe at the river Tanais, meaning the river now called the Don. Bede certainly understood that the world was round and that this affected the tides and seasons. He was exceptionally curious and observant and others wrote as if the earth was flat.
The Christian religion imbued its followers with a strong sense of the old Mediterranean world, and the popularity of pilgrimage to Jerusalem provided some real geographic information for those who went on it. Sailors who traded with the Greeks and Muslims would have had a similar pragmatic lore. But there was no study of geography and no established body of erudition into which this could be fitted. Furthermore, the biblical assertion that Jerusalem was the centre of the world confused any assimilation of such pragmatic knowledge.4 In these circumstances even intellectuals believed in wonders and monsters lurking beyond the horizon, an uneasy mix of imagination and half-digested classical knowledge that made ‘Gog’ and ‘Magog’ figures of reality in some fantasy-land. In the twelfth century confused stories about a Christian ruler in Central Asia gave rise to the legend of ‘Prester John’, but the hope of an ally against resurgent Islam led to hopeful stories and legends, so that eventually he became identified with the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia. In the High Middle Ages this compound of classical knowledge, theological ideas, observation and speculation became embodied in mappa mundi, schematic representations of the world based on the ‘T-O maps’ and embodying these assorted ranges of knowledge. For the most part these portrayed the world as a disc, and although some scholars thought the world a sphere, the likelihood is that most did not. Geographical knowledge improved with the passage of time, but only slowly.
Very few medieval people identified with the term Europa. The aristocratic elite as a whole would have felt little need because it was not until the later eleventh century that the world outside made much impact upon their concerns. They would probably have reacted with hostility to any idea of a different or dissident religion if it had imposed itself as a reality upon them, but for most it did not. Sharp consciousness of the wider world was limited to a very few amongst the clergy, and was particularly evident at the papal court. The papacy had pretensions to rule the whole Christian Church and, more immediately, was in constant contact with Catholics living under Islamic rule in Spain and North Africa. In a letter of 1098 concerning the Spanish diocese of Jaca, Urban II remarked that ‘In our days the Turks in Asia and the Moors (Mauros) in Europe defeated Christian peoples and captured the cities of their religion.’ It was only in the twelfth century that such distinctions became widely diffused as a result of the crusades, so that William of Malmesbury spoke of the First Crusade as an ‘Asiatic expedition’. But Europa was a vague geographic expression and one that embraced peoples with whom those who occasionally used it would have felt little in common.
There was a geographic dimension to identity. Some of those in what we now call France would have objected to the notion that Gallia was part of the Empire, but others would not have. In the twelfth century the counts of Hainault did homage to both the German emperors and the French kings with little sense of incongruity. Far more important in fixing identity was religion and the culture inseparable from it. This was more than simply a matter of accepting the primacy of the Roman See. The churches obedient to Rome had preserved much of the Latin culture of the Roman Empire. The church was the only literate institution, though many nobles could read and some could write. Its higher ranks were colonised by the elite which thus had a clerical wing. The power and presence of the clergy was enormously enhanced because authority in the Church was transmitted from generation to generation by election. This meant that churches enjoyed continuity of policy and development rare in the lay world where wealth and power were transmitted by the random process of inheritance. The Church under Rome was, therefore, an institutionalised cultural unity, intimately integrated into the power structures of the medieval west. When the crusaders arrived in the Middle East the Arab-speaking world called them franj, meaning ‘Franks’ from the name of the dominant group in the ‘Catholic core’. Many of them also saw themselves as Franks but the specific notion with which they all seem to have identified themselves was ‘Christendom’.
For an anonymous knight from South Italy who went on the First Crusade the Turks were ‘enemies of God and holy Christendom’.5 This was a term with a great future, which would be reiterated time after time and represented an identity, at first only for those of the ‘Catholic core’ but increasingly, as its ideas and institutions took hold elsewhere, for other peoples as well. For Christendom, Glaber’s ‘continent this-side-the-sea’, excluded not only those Glaber portrayed as of other faiths and cultures, the Greeks and the Muslims, but also areas which were at least in part Catholic and owed obedience to the Holy See, yet which were different and clearly regarded as such: these were the lands of the ‘Catholic fringe’. Prominent amongst these were the newly converted lands of what is now called Central Europe. Poland, Bohemia and Hungary had all adopted Latin Catholic Christianity by the year 1000, but the process was recent and they were all to some degree influenced by Byzantium and her, as we say, Orthodox Church. Glaber welcomed Hungary into the Catholic fold, but he and others would long continue to see it and the other newly converted lands as being different, though all became more integrated in the course of the twelfth century.
Hungary and Poland also had to watch developments on the great Asiatic steppe and this influenced their political priorities and even their social institutions. To the north were the Scandinavian lands which, at the time Glaber was writing, were only just becoming Catholic. By the year 1000 the people of western Scandinavia had explored the islands of the North Atlantic, settled Iceland and Greenland, and had reached ‘Vinland’, which can now be certainly identified as America. By the early twelfth century Catholic Christianity was clearly triumphant amongst them, but native paganism had offered a vigorous resistance. Their Atlantic expansion filtered only slowly into the wider consciousness of the peoples of the ‘Catholic core’ amongst whom it became assimilated to ancient knowledge of islands in the Atlantic. These older stories had already inspired Irish monks, notably St Brendan, to seek solitude out in the Atlantic, and their Lives spread this knowledge widely.6 The eastern Scandinavians had penetrated the river valleys of the western steppe lands and established strong trading connections with Byzantium and the Caliphate. Their settlements in this area became the nuclei of ‘Rus’, whose peoples would later adopt Greek Christianity. Then there were the Celtic lands of the British Isles. Wales and Ireland had been Christian at least as long as France and certainly longer than Germany. The Irish converted the Scots and the northern English, and even profoundly influenced the Franks. But the churches of these areas were viewed with suspicion because Celtic Christianity had once sanctioned divergent religious practices that lingered on.
There was no such thing as a ‘Celtic Church’, but the churches of Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Brittany had much in common. Moreover, although the Celtic lands and those of new conversion were very different from one another, they were alike in having much less developed economies than the ‘Catholic core’. There was, of course, diversity within the core itself, but the economies of the lands within it were dominated by grain production made possible by a settled peasantry tied to the land. There were major areas of pastoral farming and huge marginal zones, but these were being colonised by a disciplined peasantry in the service of the elites. Everywhere ‘Lordship’ was emerging as the key social, economic and political institution. This was the result of what elsewhere were regarded as governmental powers, like taxation and jurisdiction, being annexed to private landholding. This pattern of exploitation imposed itself on and shaped the peasant communities who increasingly lived in its shadow. In particular, proprietorial ruthlessness forced the peasantry to be both productive and progressive. This was the motor of the economy of the ‘Catholic core’, but it had only just begun to establish itself in the lands of the ‘Catholic fringe’ where society remained tribal. The elites of the fringe were not as yet so focused on possession of land as those in the core areas where land ownership gave stability to political authority of all kinds and was inseparable from it. Social and economic development was a powerful strand in the commonality of the ‘Catholic core’. And these lands of the fringe were different from those of the ‘Catholic core’ in another respect: they had not shared the Carolingian experience. Charlemagne had an enormous impact on the peoples over whom he ruled. His ‘family of emperors and kings’ gave shape to the ‘Catholic core’ and formed part of the common heritage of the peoples within it.
It has to be said that England never succumbed to Frankish power, but its influence on the southern kingdoms of the island was immense. By the time of the First Crusade the myth of Charlemagne was an established part of the consciousness of the elites of the ‘Catholic core’. A knight who went on the First Crusade wrote an account of this astonishing event, the Gesta Francorum. He reports as history the legend that the old Roman road down the Danube to Constantinople was that travelled by Charlemagne on his way to the great city. More importantly, although this man was almost certainly of Norman descent and had either emigrated to or been raised in Italy, he regarded himself as a ‘Frank’ and never described himself or his companions in the army from South Italy as Normans. This is the mental world into which was born the epic poem, the Chanson de Roland, which portrayed Charlemagne as the great champion of Christendom fighting against the Muslims of Spain. This and its associated stories together form an important element in the great body of European myth.7 And there was a reality here, for Charles imposed a Frankish aristocracy upon his empire, and their blood ran in the veins of all the leaders and many of the participants on the First Crusade. Nor had the lands of the ‘Catholic fringe’ shared another unifying experience.
In the ninth and tenth centuries the ‘Catholic core’ had been thrust onto the defensive by a wave of external attacks, some of them, indeed, launched by peoples of the ‘Catholic fringe’. The most spectacular of these were the sea-borne attacks from Scandinavia that have bred an enormous literature. The Magyars (or Hungarians) had imposed a tribute upon much of Germany, and their raids into France and Italy had terrified whole populations. Groups of Slavonic peoples had at times posed at least a local threat to the eastern parts of Germany. Midland and western England were subject to Welsh raiding. Even by the time of the Norman Conquest the frontier between the English and Scottish realms was uncertain. Italy and southern France were exposed to Islamic attacks from Sicily, North Africa, Spain and the islands of the western Mediterranean, which succeeded in planting settlements in these areas. Only a major effort enabled the papacy to eject the Muslims from the Garigliano, about 120 km south of Rome, in the early tenth century, but they continued to rule Sicily and to hold settlements on the Italian mainland. The Muslims of La Garde Freinet, near what is now St Tropez in Provence, menaced traffic in the Alpine passes until 972 when their capture of St Mayol, abbot of Cluny, provoked William count of Arles and others to destroy their bases. As late as 1022 the Muslims of Spain mounted a major raid around Narbonne.
The lands of the ‘Catholic fringe’ were to be the earliest victims, or perhaps beneficiaries, of the expansion of Catholic Christendom. For the elites of these lands there was much to admire in the societies of the ‘Catholic core’ and emulation was to be at least as strong a factor in their assimilation as conquest. The same was true, up to a point at least, of the pagan neighbours of the ‘Catholic core’. Subtle mixtures of attraction and coercion served to bring them into the orbit of the world which looked, in matters of religion, to Rome. Such emulation was as profitable to the noble dynasties of the ‘Catholic core’ as to the elites who wished to join them, since it was associated with intermarriage and the implantation of their families in new lands. Beyond such peoples, in the north at least, was the open steppe land. In the south were other and alien centres of influence, Byzantium and Islam with their very different peoples and civilisations, which were, from the start of our period, viewed with a degree of hostility by those in the ‘Catholic core’. It must not be thought that because they shared a common religion and culture, rather similar economic and social institutions and recent historical experience, the lands of the ‘Catholic core’ were homogenous and unified. Indeed, precisely the opposite was true. The wave of invasions in the ninth and tenth centuries were the more threatening because the ‘Catholic core’ was fragmenting as the Carolingian family fell to quarrelling, or was replaced as it died out by local dynasties, ‘sub-kings’, as Regino of Prüm scornfully called them. At first sight one is obliged to wonder how dangerous some of these threats were.
The ‘Catholic core’ was richer and enjoyed some technological advantages over its pagan neighbours, notably the steel swords and mail shirts whose export to the ‘pagans’ Charlemagne had been at pains to prohibit. The ambitions of Slavs, Welsh and Scots were generally localised while the Hungarians seem to have sought a tribute domination over their neighbours. However, such peoples were dangerous because they could play upon divisions within the elites of the ‘Catholic core’. The Vikings were encouraged when western potentates, such as Charles the Bald of the West Franks (840–77), tried to use them against domestic enemies. Regino of Prüm described the coming of the Hungarians in 889 after his account of the confusion attendant on the deposition of Charles the Fat in 887, and the Fulda annalist made much the same point when he remarked that in that same year ‘Northmen, hearing of dissension amongst the Franks and the deposition of their emperor, devastated many lands which hitherto they had barely touched.’ In 954–55 it was German rebellion which offered the Hungarians another chance to dominate the Ottonian Reich. Such interventions could lead on to greater things. In 711 the Muslims of North Africa had been invited to intervene in a civil war amongst the Visigoths and this gave them their opportunity to conquer Spain. The great Danish army of 865 found collaborators in England, notably the ‘foolish king’s thegn’ who held much of Mercia for them, while on the death of Alfred of Wessex (871–99) the Danes were called in to the subsequent succession struggle in Wessex. But the Danish conquest of much of England was quite exceptional, and for the most part the existing elites were quite strong enough to hold off the outsiders, or, in the case of the Norman lodgement in northern France, to assimilate it.
The accession to the English throne of the Danish ruler, Cnut the Great (1017–35) was made easier because he was Christian. Accepted as king in 1017 he set about ruling his new lands in the traditions to which they were used. The elites of Scandinavia were targeted by a few zealous missionaries, but above all they were attracted by the society of the ‘Catholic core’. The spirit of imitation and emulation did much to protect and extend the ‘Catholic core’ in the tenth century and later. The savage struggle of the ninth and tenth centuries against external attack was clearly the result of internal dissent as the Carolingian dynasty became divided, and then died out. But these conflicts did not generate another great political authority. Instead, the leaders of the ‘Catholic core’, the Carolingian aristocracy, developed articulated dominions resting on the ability of greater landowners to defend them and in addition to coerce others. They achieved this by annexing governmental power to their landholdings, forming the characteristic institution of lordship.
They were aggressive, greedy and opportunistic: as early as the tenth century the counts of Flanders were founding castles to encourage the growth of towns and, therefore, taxes. In 1073 Hugh, Earl of Chester, seized Rhuddlan from the Welsh, quickly establishing there a mint and fisheries to generate wealth to sustain this latest advance. This fiercely competitive upper class lived and fought within the kingdoms like France and the German Empire which had emerged at the beginning of the tenth century, but except in Wessex and its successor state of Norman England, they were little inhibited by their monarchs. Internecine conflict was a way of life, yet despite this they had a sense of unity. Their success explains the survival of the ‘Catholic core’ for it was religion and culture that gave these mutually hostile forces a common bond. Charlemagne had given the Church deep roots amongst his elite. In the depths of political confusion around 900 Berno of Cluny and Gerald of Brogne, who both came from important families, re-established Benedictine monasticism and gave it a new vigour by its association with the great princes. In England, Alfred faced attack by the pagan Danes who were in all respects other than religion very like his own people.
He encouraged Church and learning precisely to draw a sharp line between his followers and the Danes. Religious attachment, cultivated by the leading kings and princes as a means of defending and articulating their own power, was a powerful reason for the survival of the ‘Catholic core’, which was essentially the result of the individual struggles of particular princes. Rudolf of Burgundy had many problems as king of the West Franks, but in 930 he was able to come to terms with Normandy and to rally the nobility to crush a Norse incursion into Aquitaine. It was as dukes of Saxony that the Liudolfing family marshalled the resources which would ultimately enable them to become kings of Germany and ‘Emperors of the west’. They ended the Hungarian threat and drove the catholic frontier eastwards into the Slav lands which were increasingly subjected to tribute-domination until the progress of German power was halted by the death in Italy of Otto II in 983. Alfred ruled a kingdom which was very much on the scale of a continental duchy, but he was able to mobilise its resources for war and to drive back the Danes: his successors sustained this and gradually the forces of assimilation converted and absorbed the Norse settlers. On a much smaller scale was the career of Bobo of Noghiers. He was a local lord at the time of the Muslim seizure of La Garde-Freinet in Provence. He built a castle and attacked the Muslim base, apparently with some success.
The loss of his brother in battle led him to undertake a pilgrimage to Rome, but he died at Voghera where he was revered as a saint. In northern Spain the tiny Visigothic kingdom of Asturias invoked divine aid against the Islamic threat. The survival of the ‘Catholic core’ was bound up with the intense localism of most of the attacks, and the generally local response to them. For what distinguished the people of ‘our continent this-side-the-sea’ was disunity: the ‘Catholic core’ was a Balkan shambles of weak states and quarrelling princes. In the year 1000 it was far more fragmented than it had ever been. A degree of unity was imparted by their faith, Roman and Catholic, and by the Latin culture which the clerical elite shared and extended amongst their lay relatives. Everywhere a lay elite ruled over a settled peasantry with which its members had little in common. The major lay lords and their closest followers, the knights, enjoyed great privileges and shared a common and highly militarised way of life. Around the time of the millennium states were barely articulated, and the power of kings depended on personality and drive, on their ability to persuade the noble elite who actually ruled in the localities. Monarchy and its leadership were universally accepted, but monarchs did not have complex administrations which enabled them to command. Western society was driven by a land-owning elite and all major landed proprietors enjoyed de facto important elements of sovereign power. Even minor landowners held aspects of it. At the very highest level great nobles might enjoy the title of duke, margrave, count or earl, and in the German empire they might be archbishops; these leaders were often described as ‘princes’. Such was their power that the papacy itself gave them considerable recognition. Of 152 lay addressees in the Register of Gregory VII, no less than 80 are princes in the sense of ruling persons who are not kings, and the pope speaks of ‘king or secular prince’ or ‘kings and other princes’. In Anglo-Saxon England there were great earls whose power rivalled that of the king, and Northumbria was as yet barely assimilated into the English realm. Throughout our period the princes of Germany waged war on their own behalf with little reference to their king. It has been said that ‘German bishops and abbots feuded as a matter of course’. In Italy the power of the German monarchs after the year 1000 was exercised through the bishops in the flourishing cities of the area; this inhibited the emergence of lay princes with a strong territorial base.
However, new social forces in the cities in some places threatened the power of the bishops, and therefore of the monarchy itself. In France the eleventh century was the apogee of princely power, when a duke of Aquitaine could think so little of the monarchy as not to bother to attend a royal election. Aristocratic potentates often used royal formulae to describe their power. Arnulf of Bavaria claimed to be ‘duke by the grace of God of the Bavarians and adjacent provinces’ and a writer sympathetic to his cause scorned Henry I’s claims to rule there ‘where neither he nor his ancestors held a foot of land’. William of Poitiers struggled to define the position of his hero, Duke William of Normandy, and explained that ‘Normandy, long subject to the king of France was now almost erected into a kingdom.’ In the Europe of the early eleventh century, one modern authority has remarked, ‘the age of kings seemed to have passed and that of princes to be the future’.8 The ‘Catholic core’ was not alone in generating an aggressive, ruthless, opportunistic aristocracy. But rival elites, such as those of Byzantium and the Islamic powers, existed within a much stronger framework of central authority which provided many opportunities for ambition. The nobles of the ‘Catholic core’ were fixated on land-ownership and acquisition as the real and virtually the only basis of power and status. There was certainly a concept of the state as an over-arching sovereign authority, but in practice monarchs were merely the most eminent of aristocrats whose domination owed more to personal qualities such as determination, allied to mastery of resources, than to settled structures of command. Landowners were government, a situation not fundamentally altered by the rise of Charlemagne or the disappearance of his line and the dissipation of royal power. But in the absence of a strong central power able to tap the wealth of a whole realm effectively and hand out patronage, or to wage effective and distant war, aristocratic families relied more and more on their estates. The settled areas of the ‘Catholic core’ were not overpopulated, but the armsbearing elite had concentrated their wealth into its own hands. To preserve family lands, inheritance practices became more and more exclusive, so that there was a marked trend in France and England towards primogeniture by which the lands of the father were vested only in the eldest son, though other heirs might have rights, to a greater or lesser extent. The result was a social overpopulation: the children of the elite, unable to count on an inheritance, had to leave home to seek their fortune. In Germany, southern France, Spain and Italy primogeniture was never as widely accepted, but the results were not very different as some children were bound to lose out in the scramble for succession. This process was the greater because intermittently the most powerful of the kings and princes were consolidating and beginning to impose their authority. Turbulent young men were unwelcome and obliged to look elsewhere; they were well-equipped to do so because the elite within which they were raised was militarised. In an age when state authority was weak, those who had wealth or who guarded it for others, had to be soldiers. They lived in fortified houses, castles, which guarded the wealth they extorted from the land against both aggressive competitors and the restlessness of its peasant producers. In and around these castles they developed a common style of war based on the heavily armed and armoured soldier who could fight effectively on horseback or on foot. They enjoyed tales of noble warriors narrated in epic vernacular poetry, the Chansons de Geste, in which there is a real delight in violence and war. The nature of aristocratic holding was so complex that it is almost impossible to draw maps of the distribution of power. Where a lord held land, he effectively was the government, and in France, Germany and Italy it was unlikely that the king would interfere much with him as long as he was loyal – only in England was royal government to a limited extent interventionist. But land was transmitted by the accidents of birth, death and marriage, so it was not held in great blocks, and where, as was most commonly the case, the possessions of several lords interpenetrated, the locus of authority was much more uncertain. Moreover, rights over land often became divorced from land itself. In this way peasant communities, which formed the units of production, were often divided by multiple units of exploitation of differing kinds. In the absence of powerful central authorities, proprietors of any substance had to be militant and aggressive, or else be prepared to submit to those who were. The elite of the ‘Catholic core’ generated numerous young swords for hire, some of whom made spectacular careers in distant lands. Roger de Toeni went to Spain about 1020 and terrorised the Muslims of Spain by pretending to be a cannibal. Robert Crispin joined the expedition to Spain that captured Barbastro in 1064 and later took service with the Byzantines. Roussel of Bailleul was another Norman who became a mercenary in Byzantium and he attempted to set up a principality in Asia Minor in the wake of the collapse of Byzantine power in 1071. Many Anglo-Saxon nobles who fled England after the Norman conquest served in the Varangian guard of the emperor at Constantinople and others settled on the Black Sea. William the Carpenter, Viscount of Melun, went on the French expedition to Spain in 1086, and the First Crusade. But just as important as a motor of expansion was dynastic corporatism. Families on or near frontiers exploited every possibility to enhance their positions. The von Wedels, as Bartlett has shown, came from western Germany to serve the dukes of Pomerania and helped to push his frontier eastwards, in the process becoming highly significant landowners with a network of castles.9 In England the de Braose were originally a family of secondary importance holding the Rape of Bramber in Sussex. Philip de Braose, (who may have been a crusader) moved to the Welsh March towards the end of the eleventh century and conquered Radnor, which became the seat of a collateral branch. But the real foundation of the family’s fortune was the marriage of his son, William (died c.1175) to Bertha, an heiress of the Earl of Hereford. William thus acquired the lordships of Brecon and Abergavenny and set in train a ruthless policy of consolidation and expansion that drove out native lords and replaced them with loyal followers. This brought royal favour, which allowed the de Braose to increase their lands even further, notably by the acquisition of Gower. Yet this quarrelling, bickering quagmire of authorities and kingdoms was not totally unstable and certainly not chaotic. In an age of poor communications, local power was the most secure and the means existed for determined men to run their lands efficiently. Fulk of Anjou (987–1040) is a remarkable example of a count who built up an important principality. He began with a rich assortment of lands and claims scattered from the mouth of the Loire to some 200 km up its course, of which the most important was the county of Anjou. These holdings were interpenetrated by territories belonging to other important magnates like the lords of Saumur and the counts of Blois who held Tours. Fulk created chains of castles to consolidate his control, and his son, Charles Martel (1040–60) added to his work by seizing Tours in 1044. The subsequent history of the new principality is illustrative; the outbreak of a succession dispute on Charles Martel’s death in 1060 weakened his eventual successor, Fulk Requin (1067–1109). The besetting sin was uncertainty, for authority and land passed by inheritance and were subject to the vagaries of personality. It is an apparent paradox that this divided ‘Catholic core’ was expansive, yet the source of this expansionism was its very violent and competitive nature. The competing dynasties made victims of the weak, and along the frontiers of the ‘Catholic core’ were neighbours at once troublesome and vulnerable. In North Germany the dukes of Saxony led raids against their pagan and recently Christianised neighbours and in time frontier zones, marches or Marks arose, whose very purpose was expansion. In Norman England the lords of the Welsh march expanded into Wales. Such violent and unstable places attracted adventurers for whom the conditions offered opportunities, and these would be replicated elsewhere. Other forces in turn lent their strength to the outward drive – merchants seeking profit, kings attempting to solidify their grasp on power. Yet if there is one manifest source of the expansive imperative in the ‘Catholic core’ it was the greed and ambition of the nobility and their followers for land, and this was the driving dynamic of the expansion which created ‘Catholic Christendom’ and, in turn, modern Europe. In this, the expansion of ‘Christendom’ in the Middle Ages was different from that which occurred from the fifteenth century onwards and which is discussed in the later chapters of this book. The ‘Age of Discoveries’ has long fascinated historians and for a very long time the earlier growth of ‘Christendom’ was all but forgotten. As medieval expansionism was rediscovered, it was quite natural and reasonable to see in it the roots of the ‘Age of Discovery’. There are certainly connections, but the growth of early modern Europe had different roots and took place in a quite different political environment from that of the Middle Ages. Moreover, the assumed connection between the two has tended to distort our perspective of what happened in the period after 1000. We know that the ‘Age of the Discoveries’ led to the European and later ‘western’ domination of the globe and this has led to an unduly optimistic view of medieval growth. In fact, the medieval expansion was modest and suffered major failures. Although emulation played a major part in drawing many pagan peoples to the ‘Catholic core’, its civilisation seems to have had little appeal to the more advanced peoples who came into contact with it. Lithuania developed a pagan society which was just as advanced as that of Catholic Christendom. By contrast, Islam spread into the East Indies, displacing traditional and well-established religions by missionary activity alone. The notion of continuity has given us another false perspective. The European expansion after 1500 has been seen as the result of superior western technology and this idea has been imported to discussions about medieval growth. The notion has taken root that ‘Castles, Cavalry and Crossbows’ made the whole process possible.10 In reality Catholic Christendom enjoyed only limited technological advantages over its more primitive neighbours and very few indeed over the Muslim and Byzantine worlds which were its competitors. Moreover, the emphasis on military technology has resulted in a failure to recognise that, at least in its early stages, expansionism owed much to emulation as well as conquest. And in fact discussion of military technology has led historians to underemphasise the significance of maritime development to the medieval expansion. There was certainly a drive to expansion within the ‘Catholic core’, but it could only be realised because of the difficulties and preoccupations of the competing centres of influence like Byzantium and Islam. When he referred to ‘our continent this-side-the-sea’ Rodulfus Glaber laid his finger upon a vital contemporary reality. The Mediterranean was the centre of the world, and around it lived three civilisations. Byzantium was the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire ruled by emperors in an unbroken line from Augustus. But in practice its culture and outlook had evolved in a very different way from the ‘Catholic core’. It was essentially a Greek Empire ruled from Constantinople. It was unitary in the sense that it was ruled by a single emperor whose power was conceived of as worldwide and absolute. He was served by a centralised bureaucracy that collected taxes. The immense wealth of this central government made it the focus of competing aristocratic factions. Many of these were important landowners, but such was the wealth of the court that the focus of their interests was control of central power and the person of the emperor. The palace, the bureaucracy and the imperial army offered to the Byzantine elite a diversity of career paths and opportunities for enrichment that simply were not open to western lords preoccupied with landownership. One consequence of the absolute authority of the imperial office was that succession struggles in the Byzantine Empire were particularly bitter. Another pillar of the imperial autocracy was the Church, which was closely integrated into the state. There were minor differences of practice between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, but the essential bone of contention was the authority of the Roman See, for the Orthodox Church looked to the emperor for day-to-day guidance, and to an Ecumenical Council of all the bishops of the universal Church as final authority. Byzantium impinged upon the ‘Catholic core’ in a number of ways. Its rulers always took seriously their claim to rule the whole Christian world, and they strenuously objected to the pretensions of the German kings who, as rulers of Italy, claimed coronation as Roman Emperors. Otto I had had to fight a war for recognition of the title after his imperial coronation in 962. In a more practical way the Byzantine hold on Calabria and Apulia was deeply resented by the Lombard rulers of southern Italy, by the German Emperors who claimed suzerainty, and by the pope whose southern frontiers were close. Intimately bound up with this were religious tensions over the papal claims to control the churches in some of the Greek-ruled areas, and the autonomy of the Greek Church.
Byzantium could pose a real threat. In the midninth century the Emperor Romanus II (959–63) intervened in the affairs of the Italian kingdom and sent a fleet to support Hugh of Arles in his attack on the Muslim settlements in southern France. Later, in 984 and in 997 the Byzantines exerted enough influence in Rome to engineer the election of Greek anti-popes. Byzantine resurgence at the start of the eleventh century, and her ambition to regain Sicily, tended to intensify these tensions. Basil II (976–1025) imposed a firm domination over Bulgaria, consolidating Byzantine cultural and religious influence in the Balkans and posing an alternative choice to Rome for the areas now called Central and Eastern Europe. In his reign, Orthodox Christianity also penetrated the western steppelands. Here the Rus, Scandinavian adventurers, had established a chain of cities connecting their homelands with the great trading zones of the Byzantine Empire and the Caliphate. Cities along the trade routes, such as Novgorod, Polotsk, Smolensk, Turov, Chernigov, Perseiaslavl and Rostov had all come to recognise the hegemony of the house of Riurik whose chief outpost was Kiev in the south. Prince Vladimir Sviatoslavich (980–1015) had to fight against rivals for the succession to Kiev, and he seems to have recognised that conversion to Christianity would offer a substantial extension of his authority. Emulation was certainly at work here, but it was emulation of Byzantium.
The Rus had attacked Constantinople as early as 869, but subsequently they had developed great trading interests in the city where there was a special quarter for them. Byzantine interest in converting these pagans was very strong and it is said that the magnificent rituals of the Orthodox Church at Constantinople impressed the people of Rus. It is likely, therefore, that the two societies were moving together by the time of Vladimir. In 988 Basil II faced a major revolt and he concluded a treaty with Vladimir by which he gave his sister , Anna, to the prince of Kiev in return for military support, in the form of Russian mercenaries, against his internal enemies. Kievan Russia was now firmly brought into Constantinople’s cultural sphere. Constantinople was regarded with great respect and some suspicion in the ‘Catholic core’, and while we know it would ultimately pose no threat, contemporaries did not. It was clearly an alternative centre of influence and around it there had arisen a ‘Byzantine Commonwealth’ of countries linked to it by religion and culture, effectively the Balkan region, Bulgaria and Russia whose conversion extended it to the far north.11 However, from the mid-eleventh century violent political divisions weakened the Byzantine state and prepared the way for the loss of southern Italy to the Normans.
But important as Byzantium was, the central process in the history of the Mediterranean lands was the struggle amongst the successor states and authorities of the great Abassid Caliphate of Baghdad. The rise of Islam had established the Arabs as the ruling force in Persia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. The new conquerors recognised no division between sacred and secular authority; both were vested in the Caliph, the ‘Commander of the Faithful’. In 750 a coup massacred the Umayyad dynasty of Caliphs based in Damascus and established the Abassid dynasty, descendants of the Prophet’s uncle, al-Abbas, as Caliphs at Baghdad. The Abassid Caliphate was a world power second only to China, by far eclipsing Byzantium in riches and power. But it had many preoccupations, not least the eastwards expansion of Islam towards India. Although the court at Baghdad had an efficient and well-organised administration based on ministries, diwan, the sheer scale of the Arab empire meant that local powers had great autonomy. North Africa was very remote from the centre and by 800 almost autonomous. In al-Andalus (Spain) an Umayyad prince who had escaped the massacre of his family in 750 was a thorn in the side of the Caliphs of Baghdad and his house eventually established an Umayyad Caliphate at Cordoba. The Abassid Caliph, Harun al-Rashid (786–809), had been prepared to ally with Charlemagne to curb such independence. Moreover, this was not the only source of dissent. The Umayyads had seized power in 661 by murdering the Prophet’s first cousin, Ali, who had married the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima. Many throughout the Islamic world believed that his successors still lived and were the true Caliphs; these followers, the Shi’ites, elaborated a system of law and practice substantially different from that of the orthodox Sunni majority. In 909 the Ismailis, a branch of the Shi’ites, established their leader as Caliph in Tunisia: they took their name of Fatimids from their supposed ancestor, Fatima. This was a serious fraying at the edges of the great Caliphate, and it was in part a consequence of a weakening at the centre. For about a century after its establishment, the Abassid Caliphate maintained control over Islam. However, like their predecessors, the Abassids recruited composite armies, made up of mercenaries and contingents from all the peoples subject to them. As a result, court factions found support in sections of the military. Thus the Caliphs fell under the control of a series of court groupings and their military supporters. By 945 power at Baghdad was firmly in the hands of the Buywids, a Persian family who were Shi’ite (though not Ismaili). But their power was localised in Mesopotamia because during the dislocations attendant on court struggles, local governors had taken over their provinces, while protesting their loyalty to the Caliph. The Saminids were a Persian family who dominated eastern Persia and ignored the Caliphs to whom they proclaimed loyalty. The Abassids were, in effect, being treated as a purely spiritual authority; secular power lay with the provincial rulers who fought bitterly amongst themselves for control of the administration and reproduced at a local level the courts of the Caliphs. This dissolution of the Caliphate was accompanied by another great change. The Abassids were Arab, but in their composite army were diverse peoples from inside and outside their empire, prominent amongst whom were Persians and Turks from the Asian steppe. Their leaders were the chief beneficiaries of the dissolution, and by the tenth century Islam was no longer an Arab regime. The weakening of the temporal power of the Caliphs was an event of enormous importance whose consequences would be played out over a period of about 200 years. Its reverberations were felt all across the civilisations of the Mediterranean world. In 969 the Fatimids of Tunisia, profiting from a wave of disgust across Islam at the corruption of the Caliphate of Baghdad, mounted a military expedition which established their Caliphate at Cairo. They then attacked Syria as a step to destroying the Abassid Caliphate, with the result that Palestine and Syria became a disputed zone between the adherents of the two Caliphs. The Fatimids had come to power to restore Islamic purity, but they recruited a composite army and by the mid-eleventh century they too fell prey to factional struggles which were only resolved by the emergence of an Armenian soldier, the Vizir Badr al-Jamali, and his son, al-Afdal, who took complete military and political control of the Caliphate. The Fatimid schism was a terrible division within Islam because Egypt was enormously rich. At the other end of the Mediterranean the death in 1002 of the Islamic champion, al-Mansur, ushered in a collapse of the Umayyad state of Spain within whose boundaries there arose a plethora of minor kingdoms. The fragmentation of al-Andalus opened the way for the small Christian kingdoms of northern Spain to expand. This was all the more possible because the Spanish Muslims viewed their co-religionists in North Africa with suspicion, a sentiment shared by the Emirs of Muslim Sicily who thereby cut themselves off from their obvious source of military support in Tunisia. Some of the most important troops in the service of the Baghdad Caliphate were the Turks. They were recruited from Central Asian tribes who had long pressed upon the frontiers of Islam where ghazi, zealous young volunteers from all over the Islamic world, had been prominent in defence. Many of these Turks were converted and taken into the service of the Caliphs and their chief magnates, who valued them for their skill as horse-archers. In time whole tribes of Turks adopted Islam, imbibing from the ghazi a spirit of fierce Sunni orthodoxy. In the mideleventh century one Turkish group, the Oghuz, loyal to the family of the Seljuks, had come to dominate in north-east Persia. Their leader, Tughrul Bey, established close connections with the Turkish generals in Baghdad. With their assistance he seized Baghdad in 1055 and, under the nominal authority of the Caliph, ruled with the title of Sultan. This great Seljuk empire seemed likely to restore the dominance of Baghdad in the Muslim world, especially as it quickly drove the Fatimids from Syria. The Turks accepted the administrative structure of the old Caliphate, and occupied all the key posts. In essence the Turks were a narrow rural elite, quite alien to the peoples over whom they ruled. In this they were rather like the Catholic aristocracy of the west, but they were drawn into the cities which, throughout the Middle East, were the foci of the money economy. The Turkish nobles were as competitive and aggressive as their counterparts in the west, but the main concern of their internecine struggles was to control the structure of government because this, rather than simple land-holding, was the key to power and influence. The history of the institution known as ’iqta nicely illustrates the difference between this elite and that of the west. In principle, ’iqta were very like fiefs, lands allocated by rulers for the support of cavalrymen, and they were much used for this purpose by the Seljuks. However, Muslim armies relied much more heavily on cash wages gathered through taxes by the treasury, which was thus able to control the actual land and merely allocate incomes from it to the cavalrymen. The Seljuks were devout Sunni, but the reconquest of Syria from the Fatimids, which culminated in their seizure of Jerusalem in 1073, accorded much with the expansionist ambitions of their sultans. Not all the Turks were willing to accept the authority of the Seljuks of Baghdad, and several groups, amongst them one owing allegiance to dissident Seljuks, attacked against the Byzantine frontier. The Seljuk Empire appeared to be the most successful successor-state of the old Caliphate now converted into a spiritual authority. The Seljuk promotion of Sunni Orthodoxy and their pressure on Egypt appeared to presage a new unity under Baghdad, but this was not to be. The great disturbances that attended the decline of the Abassid Caliphate were a primary factor in the expansion of the ‘Catholic core’. Islam was immensely rich and highly organised, but had never applied its full power or anything like it against the ‘Catholic core’; even so it had often represented a major threat to Christendom.
As the break-up of the Abassid Caliphate progressed, the Muslim pressure upon Italy, northern Spain and southern France simply began to weaken, and it became possible to contemplate reconquest in these regions. Indirectly this freed the energies of the ‘Catholic core’ to turn against the other peripheral peoples. The collapse of the old unitary Arab Caliphate created the basic conditions for expansion. The dynamism and energy of the elites of the ‘Catholic core’ took advantage of those conditions and was favoured by the imperialistic and militaristic outlook of the Roman Church. This expansion was underway, as will be indicated, by about 950, long before the Crusade. At first it seemed as if the great beneficiary of the breakdown of the Caliphate would be Byzantium. After the fall of Egypt to Islam in 642, Byzantium was driven onto the defensive for three centuries. In 653–54 the Arabs reached the Bosphorus and in 674–78 besieged Constantinople itself. Crete and Sicily fell to them and they continued to menace Byzantine Anatolia. The first reversal of the tide of war came with the capture of Melitene in 934; then in 969, the same year that the Fatimid Caliphate was established in Egypt, Antioch was recaptured.
Under Nicephorus II Phokas (963–69) and John I Tzimiskes (969–76) the frontier was driven deep into Syria, and by 1025 and soon after the Transcaucasus and Armenia were annexed. But under Basil II (976–1025) Byzantium conquered the Bulgars and even attempted a reconquest of Sicily. After Basil’s death Byzantium enjoyed a brief term of stability, but succession problems produced a period of uncertainty and factional conflict which proved disastrous for the empire when the eastern frontiers were attacked by the Turks. Many of the Turkish tribes within the Islamic world refused to accept the dominion of the Sultan at Baghdad, and these dissenters raided the Empire. The Byzantine response was for long uncertain, but under Romanus IV Diogenes (1067–71) a clear and aggressive policy emerged. Romanus was an experienced soldier and he knew that the Sultan of Baghdad, Alp Arslan (1063–72), was preoccupied with driving Egypt out of Syria. Romanus decided to mount large expeditions against Syria in an effort to coerce the Sultan into controlling the Turks on the frontier. The culmination of this policy was the campaign of 1071. Alp Arslan was distracted from his proposed attack on the Fatimids by the Byzantine expedition, but he could not ignore the threat to his lands nor abandon the Turkish tribes. In the event, at the battle of Manzikert, on 19 August 1071, the huge Byzantine army was very badly handled and Romanus was captured during the rout.
The Byzantine army was not totally destroyed by this defeat and Alp Arslan imposed only moderate terms upon the Byzantines. However, Romanus’ enemies denounced the treaty as shameful because he had agreed to pay tribute to the Sultan, and they deposed and killed him, precipitating a bitter factional struggle within the Byzantine Empire. The Empire fell apart in a protracted series of civil wars during which the rivals for the throne blithely invited the Turks into the cities of Asia Minor which, as a result, fell into Turkish hands. Alexius I Comnenus (1081–1118) managed to establish an alliance of great families and restored a degree of stability, but Asia Minor, the old imperial heartland, was now largely in Turkish hands. Thus Turks controlled garrisons in the cities of the area and dominated the roads, but there remained a large Christian population. The Turks were also divided. In the south-west Smyrna was the centre of an Emirate. A huge swathe of Asia Minor from the Black Sea to the coast opposite Cyprus was held by the greatest Turkish power of the area, the Seljuk Sultanate of Ru¯m, centred on Nicaea and Iconium. To their east were the Danishmends who held Ankara and Caesarea-in-Cappadocia. Beyond them the Menguchekinds held power around Erzinjun, and the Saltukids dominated around Erzerum further to the east. None of these peoples enjoyed good relations with the Grand Seljuks at Baghdad.
The Byzantine crisis after 1071 produced a development of great significance for the future, though in the short run it was to have no outcome. In response to these troubles of the Eastern Christians, Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) sent out a series of letters in 1074–75 to the potentates of the west appealing for military support for the Byzantines, and even proposing a great military expedition led by himself which would go on to Jerusalem. Gregory may have been acting on his own initiative in response to news of the disasters in Asia Minor, or to an appeal from the Emperor Michael VII Doukas (1071–78), or both. Political circumstances frustrated Gregory’s intentions, but although the project failed, it is interesting that the consequences of the collapse of the political power of the Abassid Caliphate stimulated western interest in the East. Although there were tensions between the papacy and Byzantium, these appeals demonstrate a real sense of Christian fraternity – the Orthodox were still seen as part of one Church.
This was not the last appeal for military support from a Byzantine emperor to the papacy. In 1095 Urban II (1088–99) set out on a journey into Gaul, but at Piacenza encountered a Byzantine embassy despatched by Alexius asking for mercenaries to be sent to help his war in Asia Minor. No doubt these ambassadors stressed the Turkish threat, but Alexius knew all too well that a new wave of instability was sweeping through the Islamic East which offered the possibility of a Byzantine reconquest of Asia Minor. In 1092 the Seljuk Sultan of Baghdad, Malik Shah, died. His son, Berkyaruk, succeeded him at Baghdad, but his rule was challenged by his uncle, Tutush Shah, ruler of Syria and of much of Palestine which had been reconquered from the Fatimids. Such succession problems were a commonplace in the Seljuk family. However, this one caused very protracted divisions because Tutush was killed in 1095, and his dominions in Syria were divided between his sons, Ridwan of Aleppo and Duqaq of Damascus.
They were hostile to one another, and neither was fully in command of his lands, with the result that important elements, notably the city of Antioch under its governor, Yaghisiyan, went their own way, while Berkyaruk was deeply preoccupied in asserting his authority in Persia. In these circumstances both Fatimid Egypt and Byzantium saw golden opportunities opening up and appear to have concluded a working alliance to dismember the Seljuk domination. These conflicts were bound to enmesh Kilij Arslan of Nicaea (1092–1107) and the other and weaker Turkish lords of Asia Minor. It was to be no accident that the First Crusade entered the Middle East at a time of great political fragmentation. But if the timing of the crusade was the result of the interplay of Seljuk dissensions and Byzantine ambitions, it has to be stressed that this was merely the trigger for the events of the First Crusade, not its cause. For the crusade was not just a mere speculative military expedition, but a complex phenomenon arising from the very nature and experience of the society of the ‘Catholic core’. What was the relationship of expansionism, which is rooted in aristocratic ambition, to crusading? This is essentially the subject of the next chapter, but for the sake of completeness something needs to be said here.
The key to understand-ing this lies in the evolution of papal thinking. The crusade was an attempt by the papacy to make real its long-held claims to supremacy in the universal Church, spurred on by the need to avoid the potential problems which it saw likely to arise from expansion and to capitalise on the opportunities which arose from it. Essentially the crusade was an attempt to enlist the confidence and expectations of an expanding ‘Catholic core’ behind the banner of the papacy, to impose a degree of unity upon the existing pattern of diversity, and thereby to give Christendom the political leadership of the pope himself. This must have seemed possible because the ‘ideology’ of the upper class made it responsive to such ideas and because the occasion for the crusade, arising out of events in the Middle East, came at a time when the papacy had achieved a new and impressive, though as yet precarious eminence in Christendom.
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