Download PDF | Jonathan Phillips - The Second Crusade_ Extending The Frontiers Of Christendom-Yale University Press (2010).
401 Pages
Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively including The Crusades, 1095-1197 and The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, and is a frequent contributor to BBC History Magazine and History Today.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The research and writing of this book have, with a few interruptions, been in progress since 1994; it has, in the main, been a genuine pleasure to write. I have been fortunate to receive the good advice and help of a great many people on matters of history, translation and publishing. I would like to thank Marcus Bull, Alan Murray, John France, Jonathan Harris, David Bates, Rudolf Hiestand, Nikolas Jaspert, Susan Edgington, Linda Paterson, Benjamin Arnold, Peter Edbury, Matthew Bennett, Jason Roche, Colin Morris, Marco Meschini, Kurt Villads Jensen, Carole Hillenbrand, Thérése de Hemptinne, Penny Cole, Natasha Hodgson, Mari Williams, Pedro Teixeira-Dias, Iben Fonnesberg-Schmidt, Merav Mack, Tony Luttrell, Bernard Hamilton, Osman Latiff, Emmett Sullivan, Maria Jodo V. Branco, Zsolt Hunyadi and Francis Robinson.
The enthusiastic encouragement of Jonathan Riley-Smith has been particularly motivating. I am greatly indebted to William Purkis and Martin Hoch for their views on drafts of chapters, and especially so to Malcolm Barber, who read the manuscript for Yale and made many cogent and valuable comments. I would also like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their generous ‘matching leave’ award in 2001-2, which gave me the time to make several major advances on this project. Similarly, my thanks to the staff and five successive heads of the History Department at Royal Holloway for backing this work over the years. Seminars at the Institute of Historical Research, the Wessex Medieval Centre, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, York University, Cardiff University, the Portuguese Studies Centre, Oxford, and the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East Conference in Istanbul gave me valuable opportunities to try out my ideas.
I am extremely grateful to Robert Baldock of Yale University Press for his good faith in commissioning this book and his patience in waiting for its arrival. My thanks also to his cheerful and supportive staff including Candida Brazil, Hannah Godfrey, Stephen Kent and Sarah Faulkner; the index was compiled by Meg Davies. I appreciate the kindness of Jonathan and Louise Riley-Smith and Mike Routledge in allowing me to use their translations of (respectively) Quantum praedcessores and Chevalier, mult estes guariz as appendices here.
I have had the pleasure of running a ‘Special Subject’ on the Second Crusade at Royal Holloway for over ten years. My sincere thanks to the many students who have taken this course and, as the book has evolved, have proven valuable and rigorous interrogators of my ideas, as well as making teaching hugely enjoyable. The friendship of Alex and Ruth Windscheffel, Austen Rose, Ed Fuller, Ian Jenkins and Lisa Barry has been essential. I would also like to thank Sophie Phillips, John Wallace and my parents for their continued kind support throughout this period. I am proud to dedicate this book, with all my love, to my son Tom, whose quick humour and sharp questions always keep me on my toes; to Marcus, our happy new arrival; and to Niki, whose constant, gentle and generous love has brought so much to my life.
PROLOGUE THE FALL OF EDESSA, DECEMBER 1144
In July 1099 the armies of the First Crusade fought their way into the holy city of Jerusalem to achieve one of the most improbable victories of the medieval age. The Muslims of the Near East took time to come to terms with this religious colonisation, and it was not until the 1140s that their counter-attack started to gather momentum. In the late autumn of 1144, Emir Imad ad-Din Zengi, the Muslim ruler of Aleppo and Mosul, targeted Edessa, a place of great spiritual importance to the Franks: it had been the first city to convert to Christianity and was the burial place of the Apostles Thomas and Thaddeus. In more recent times the First Crusaders had seized it from its Armenian rulers; it was also the eponymous capital of the county of Edessa, one of the four Frankish States in the Levant.
Alongside his determination to promote jihad, Zengi intended to take revenge on Count Joscelin II of Edessa for his recent alliance with the Ortuqids of Diyr Bakr.! Zengi convinced Joscelin that he was engaged in a distant campaign against the Ortuqids, a ploy that induced the count to leave Edessa and cross the Euphrates to his favourite castle of Turbessel. The emir’s spies informed him of this; the Muslim forces quickly mobilised and, in late November, laid siege to Edessa.” Over the next four weeks, Zengi and his allies tried hard to breach the city’s formidable defences.
The absence of regular soldiers required the citizens to man the walls themselves, and the senior Armenian, Syriac and Catholic churchmen worked together to direct the resistance. Muslim sappers dug an elaborate system of mines to the north while siege machines pounded at the walls elsewhere; slowly and inexorably Zengi’s men closed their grip on the city. Yet in spite of heavy losses and serious damage to the fortifications, the defenders rejected overtures of peace.* They probably anticipated help from Count Joscelin, who tried to organise a relief force — although William of Tyre claimed that he was hampered in this by the hostility of Raymond of Antioch, his Frankish neighbour in northern Syria. Queen Melisende of Jerusalem, whose mother was an Armenian—Edessan noblewoman, sent troops north, but they would be too late to help.*
On 23 December Zengi’s troops set fire to the beams that supported the mine and a long section of wall collapsed. The Christians fought hard to hold the gap, but the following day the Turks forced their way in. The panicstricken populace fled to the citadel for safety; in the confusion, Archbishop Hugh was killed and dozens more were crushed to death as they attempted to squeeze through the gates. In the meantime, Zengi’s men started to put the city to the sack and his troops slaughtered many of the inhabitants. In early January, low on water and supplies, those in the citadel surrendered. Most of the men were killed or tortured and the women and children enslaved. The Armenian ‘Lament on Edessa; written within two years of the siege, provides a lurid and dramatic picture of the barbarism of Zengi and his men:
Like wolves among a flock of lambs [they] fell upon them in their midst. They slaughtered indiscriminately, the martyrs let out streams of blood, They massacred without compassion the young and the children.
They had no mercy on the grey hairs of the elderly or with the tender age of a child.
The fabric of Edessa also suffered severely — seven of its towers were destroyed, as was the Church of the Confessors. An even greater calamity was the destruction of the silver coffin that held the bones of Thaddeus and King Abgar.° News of the disaster spread rapidly; Antioch lay 160 miles south-east, and from there messengers set out for Tripoli and Jerusalem.
Zengi had struck a powerful blow for the forces of Islam, and soon the Frankish settlers sent appeals for help to their co-religionists in Europe. These envoys provided the trigger for the Second Crusade: initially the expedition planned simply to recover Edessa, but within eighteen months a combination of inspirational preaching and political opportunism transformed it: simultaneous campaigns in the Levant, the Iberian Peninsula and the Baltic region constituted an attack of unprecedented magnitude on the enemies of Christendom; the confidence and ambition of the Latin West were immense. Truly, as one contemporary wrote, they aspired to ‘extend Christianity’.’
INTRODUCTION
In the early twenty-first century the study of the crusades and their history appears to be in vigorous condition; numerous works, both academic and popular, are published each year and there is an ongoing and energetic debate concerning the extent and the definition of crusading. The so-called ‘pluralist’ view has emerged to the fore in recent decades; in essence, it argues that papally sanctioned expeditions engaged in penitential wars went not only to the Holy Land, but also to Spain, North Africa and Eastern Europe, and that campaigns against heretics, Mongols and political opponents of the papacy were comparable to the better-known, ‘numbered’ crusades to the Levant.! Furthermore, the movement did not end with the fall of Acre in 1291, but continued down to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
As Housley indicates, there are drawbacks to this conceptual framework with regard to matters such as terminology and the role of the Military Orders; nonetheless, it represents a good starting point. The Second Crusade itself, with its campaigns in Iberia, the Baltic and the Holy Land, has a pluralist aspect and, as we will see, contributed much towards the evolution of the idea of the crusade. Regardless of definition, it is remarkable that the last major monograph on the Second Crusade was published in 1866: Bernhard Kugler’s Studien zur Geschichte des zweiten Kreuzzugs.* The crusade of 1145-9 has fared poorly by comparison to its triumphant and near-legendary predecessor of 1095-99 and the more glamorous Third Crusade (1188-92), dominated by the heroic Richard the Lionheart and Saladin.
In one sense, however, historians have only mirrored their twelfth-century counterparts; the fact that the First Crusade conquered Jerusalem and that the Third Crusade made progress in the recovery of the Holy Land, encouraged many contemporaries to record these events. By contrast, because the Second Crusade was largely unsuccessful, it was ill served by narrative writers; few people, it seems, were interested in describing a failure. As Otto of Freising, a hugely accomplished scholar and a participant in the expedition, wrote: “But since the outcome of that expedition, because of our sins, is known to all, we, who have purposed this time to write not a tragedy but a joyous history, leave this to be related by others elsewhere. In spite of such sentiments, a substantial body of evidence from charters, contemporary letters, songs and smaller narratives does, in fact, survive and enable this study to be made.
Simply because the Second Crusade failed does not mean that it offers little of interest to the modern historian. It witnessed several significant developments in crusading history; for example, it was the first time that major European monarchs risked leaving their kingdoms to make the dangerous journey to the Holy Land. The crusade also saw the launch of the most organised preaching tour to date and, in the issue of the bull Quantum praedecessores (December 1145), a consolidation, clarification and, in some ways, an extension of crusading privileges, which became the basis for papal appeals for decades to come. Above all else, the Second Crusade was remarkable for its scale. It saw campaigns to the Baltic, both coasts of Iberia and the Holy Land; Christian holy war of this magnitude was unprecedented and, in the case of the Baltic, the deployment of the formal apparatus of crusading to the region marked the emergence of another important innovation in the history of religious conflict.
A lack of monographs has not led historians to ignore the Second Crusade entirely. Shortly before Kugler wrote his book, Bernhardi published a biography of Conrad III which contained a substantial discussion of the expedition, albeit from the perspective of the German crown.’ The campaign has also been covered in general histories of the crusades. By reason of the narrative of Odo of Deuil, the emphasis has tended to focus heavily on Louis VII’s campaign to the Holy Land, although writers such as Berry (1969), in the sixvolume ‘Wisconsin’ History of the Crusades, and Runciman (1952) made some effort to discuss the Baltic and Iberian campaigns too.° By far the most important work on the subject is Constable’s brilliant article “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries’, published in 1953.° This seminal study offers a close analysis of the official preaching messages and considers the reaction to the dismal outcome of the campaign in the Levant. More important, however, is the conceptual framework in which Constable placed the crusade, his prime argument being that many in the mid-twelfth century saw the three theatres of war as part of one co-ordinated movement of Christian expansionism. This has tended to become the conventional interpretation of the crusade, although it is a view recently challenged with some vigour by Forey, as will be seen below.”
Bernard of Clairvaux is the pre-eminent figure associated with the expedition and, as one of the most important churchmen of the twelfth century, he has attracted enormous interest. At times this attention bears upon the crusade, although for the most part it concerns his career and theological beliefs.’ Relevant textual analyses and studies of the man and his inner circle can be of considerable use; Meschini’s monograph on Bernard and the crusade is particularly valuable.’
Over the last two decades there has been a perceptible increase in work on, or closely connected to, the crusade of 1145-9. Much of this has emerged from Germany, with the studies by Horn on Eugenius III, by Hoch on Jerusalem, Damascus and the crusade, and with a series of important articles by Hiestand.'? Hehl’s study on “Church and War in the Twelfth Century’ has covered the attitudes of ecclesiastical authorities towards Christians waging war, and Kahl’s numerous articles about the Wendish Crusade and Crusade Eschatology are also of note.'! Two essay collections in English, centred on the Second Crusade, were published in 1992 and 2001, and these brought further impetus to the study of the subject.”
The aims of the present work are varied. First, it proposes to relate the story of the crusade in an accessible fashion. Secondly, it will give a more detailed and accurate analysis of the successes and failures of the various campaigns than has hitherto been attempted. At the heart of the project, however, lies this thought: if the outcome was not entirely what its progenitors wished, in terms of recruitment, at least, the Second Crusade was a genuine triumph. Why did so many people take part in it? Conrad and Louis led large armies to the Levant; a fleet of almost 200 ships sailed from northern Europe via Lisbon; formidable armies besieged Almeria and Tortosa, and the rulers of Denmark and the senior ecclesiastical and secular hierarchy of northern Germany campaigned in the Baltic region. It means, therefore, that those who directed the preaching of the crusade had chosen an extremely effective set of messages and/or were approaching an audience highly receptive to their appeal; it is the exploration of these points that is of particular interest.
Two of the strongest themes in the papal bull Quantum praedecessores are the idea that the expedition was following in the footsteps of the First Crusade and the desire that the new crusaders should not let their fathers’ achievements be wasted.!? To explain the Church’s choice of these themes and to understand the reasons why they proved so attractive requires one to place the Second Crusade within the context of the first fifty years of the crusading movement. In effect, this means a study of the ‘post-history’ of the First Crusade with particular reference to the impact that the earlier expedition made on historical writing, songs, art, politics and knightly culture.
This analysis of Quantum praedecessores also led me to consider the role of Pope Eugenius more closely than previous historians of the crusade have done, and I will suggest that the contribution and influence of the pope and his circle have been obscured by the charisma and energy of Bernard of Clairvaux. Madden’s recent Concise History of the Crusades commented: ‘In avery real sense it was his [Bernard’s] crusade.'4 In similar spirit, Williams’ epic biography of the abbot argued: “We may not be very far wrong in concluding not only that he was the mainspring of the movement when it had begun, but that its initiation was really due to him.!> Undoubtedly Bernard’s seductive tongue, his persuasive quill and the fact that he spent at least nine months urging the people of western Europe to take the cross played a central part in this movement. We even have Bernard’s own words to back this up: ‘“I have declared and I have spoken, and they are multiplied above number’, towns and castles are emptied, one may scarcely find one man among seven women, so many women are widowed while their husbands are still alive’!°
The last book of his Vita cited the numerous miracles that accompanied the preaching tour; hardly anyone was left blind or lame in his wake. But this is not the whole story. While one cannot dismiss Bernard’s oratorical skills, the response to the call for a new crusade was not simply a question of personal influence. In a more practical vein, the dispatch of many other crusade preachers and the promulgation of a clear and comprehensive crusading bull must have been very important as well, and it is the process of uncovering Eugenius’s part in the campaign that has helped to cast new light on the crusade as a whole.
This book will also investigate the recruitment and motivation of Louis VII and Conrad III; the latter’s participation will be shown to have been integral and essential to the wishes of the crusade’s ecclesiastical leaders. Linked to an exploration of the crusaders’ motives and the question of the legacy of the First Crusade, I have followed the lead taken by Riley-Smith’s prosopographical studies of the 1095-9 expedition and, largely using charter evidence, I have identified as many individuals who took part in the Second Crusade as was possible.'”
This yields proof of family traditions of crusading, which in turn can help to explain why people took the cross, while also permitting a closer look at the financial and logistical planning of the expedition. The requisite diplomatic preparations are also of note, especially concerning relations with the Byzantine Empire. The expansion of the crusade into Iberia and the Baltic region is another prominent theme of this book; such episodes will also be considered in the context of previous holy war activity. Finally, there will be a brief discussion of the aftermath of the crusade, the attempt to organise a new campaign in 1150 and the legacy of the Second Crusade for the Latin settlers in the East.
With regard to the Second Crusade as a whole, the picture to emerge is that of a dynamic and broad-ranging expedition which evolved through circumstance and the opportunism of certain lay (and in one instance, ecclesiastical) leaders, and was, in all theatres of war, fired by the vigour and spiritual enthusiasm of the papacy and its representatives. Constable suggested that the Second Crusade ‘incorporated into a plan practically every major military expedition against non-Christians of these years’ and that it was ‘a grandiose scheme of Christian defence’'® Helmold of Bosau, who wrote in the early 1170s, was the only author to make such a claim directly: ‘The initiators of the expedition, however, deemed it advisable to design one part of the army for the eastern regions, another for Spain, and a third against the Slavs who live close by us.’!?
But, attractive as Helmold’s words are, other evidence does not support his claim. The present work will argue that Constable’s interpretation needs to be nuanced.”° It is true that the papacy exerted a measure of control over the whole enterprise through the offer of remission of sins, but Constable’s sense of formal overall direction (‘a plan’) is too precise. In fact, as we will see, Eugenius and Bernard were much more reactive than proactive. Nonetheless, the magnitude of the crusade reflected the spiritual confidence and the crusading experiences of the churchmen at its heart; they were men predisposed to be receptive to invitations to widen the range of the campaign.
Their call for the expedition to the Holy Land generated a situation whereby it became appropriate for leading figures in Italy, Iberia and northern Europe to try to incorporate their ongoing aspirations, both secular and spiritual, into the apparatus of crusading. As the prime focus of the Christian faith, the Holy Land was the most important of these objectives. The expeditions to the Baltic region and eastern Iberia may well have taken place anyway but, when their leaders asked for papal endorsement it allowed Eugenius to cast them as part of a wider undertaking, if not to fit them into a preconceived plan. The circumstances of the time also created an opportunity for the Catholic and Armenian Churches to move closer, although in the event this was not fully realised.
This work will follow Constable’s lead in relation to the idea that many contemporaries regarded some, or all, of these campaigns as linked in a wider, collective Christian endeavour, rather than representing a strict papal plan or scheme. Eugenius himself mentioned three theatres of war in his papal bull of April 1147, Divina dispensatione II — where he discussed the ongoing conflicts in Spain and officially granted to those wishing to fight the Wends the same privileges as he gave to the Jerusalem crusaders.”! Forey, however, has argued strongly against the perception that contemporaries made links between the campaigns.
He claims that ‘most ... of the chroniclers and annalists commenting on conflicts with the infidel in the later 1140s ... mention only one area of combat.’ This is hardly surprising; most medieval writers were naturally more occupied with regional affairs because these reflected the priorities of their audience; even when writing of international affairs, chroniclers of the First Crusade inevitably emphasised the deeds of their particular local hero. In fact, numerous chronicles and charters made reference to two or more of the Second Crusade arenas of war.
This reflects a combination of regional interests, the wish to record major events and the availability of information, be it from other writers and participants, or material such as the so-called ‘Lisbon Letter’, a document that circulated widely in northern Europe from early 1148 onwards and appeared in several works.” If one accepts that there was no grand plan, there is less need to insist that contemporaries had to make reference to all three areas of the conflict to demonstrate some understanding of a broader purpose; in other words, we can allow a less prescriptive recognition of what was perceived to constitute this shared Christian endeavour. Several German annalists made the point, some more explicitly than others. The author of the Annales Rodenses suggested: ‘Expeditio haec in tria est divisa, ubique contra ethnicos pugnatura.* The Annales Magdeburgenses gave its readers an account of the campaigns at Lisbon, in the Baltic region and in the Holy Land — as did, with differing degrees of detail, the Annales Colonienses maximi and the Annales Palidenses.”°
Writers from a further variety of backgrounds — such as the Anglo-Norman Robert of Torigny, and the Praemonstratensian continuator of Sigebert of Gembloux (from the dioceses of Laon or Rheims) — chose to outline the fighting in the Levant and at Lisbon, Almeria and Tortosa.”® Another AngloNorman, Henry of Huntingdon, discussed the reasons why the crusade to the Holy Land had failed and the conquest of Lisbon succeeded; he mentioned Almeria too.’” The Vaucelles continuator of Sigebert of Gembloux noted that the Lisbon crusaders were en route to Jerusalem.”* In 1146, an anonymous Old French troubadour writer linked the fighting in the Holy Land with the struggle on the eastern coast of Spain.”? Otto of Freising connected the war against the Wends with that against the Muslims of the Holy Land through the idea of fighting the ‘enemies of the cross, although he made no mention of the conflict in Iberia.*°
In this assortment of sources there is relatively little consistency about what constituted the Second Crusade, but Helmold of Bosau and the Annales Rodenses apart, consistency was not the writers’ purpose. The key point remains: they saw one or more of the campaigns to Iberia or the Baltic as part of the same enterprise.
To the minds of many contemporaries, crusading had clearly developed in scope beyond an expedition to the Holy Land; they were comfortable in accommodating one or more additional theatres of war within the idea. Linked with this was the realisation that Christianity could expand further. This in itself was not a new thought, but the scale of the Second Crusade gave it unprecedented impetus. As we saw in the prologue, a charter of Countess Sibylla of Flanders stated that the crusaders were “extending Christianity’; Otto of Freising wrote of ‘extending the observance of the Christian faith’; and the Annales Coloniensis mentioned ‘extending the borders of the Christian Empire in the East’3! This concept of expansion was shared by many contemporaries but, as with so many societies on the verge of war, ambition far outstripped accomplishments.
The Second Crusaders proved unable to emulate the feats of their heroes in the Holy Land and made progress only in Iberia. Yet by 1145-9 the world in which the First Crusade had operated was changed in a number of ways: politically, economically, spiritually and culturally. Insofar as they impacted upon the Second Crusade this study will identify such changes in passing. In essence, however, this book is an attempt to understand the origins, the development and the outcome of the Second Crusade — a subject which has much to offer historians of the crusading age.
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