Download PDF | Nirmal Dass - The Deeds of the Franks and Other Jerusalem-Bound Pilgrims_ The Earliest Chronicle of the First Crusades-Rowman & Littlefield Publishers (2011).
163 Pages
Introduction
AUTHORSHIP
See Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum (the Gesta), or “the deeds of the Franks and other Jerusalemites,” is the primal source for the First Crusade.' The various other extant chronicles of this crusade chiefly depend upon it for episodic and narrative structure, although the Gesta’s primacy has often been questioned.” The title of the work has been given to it from the earliest manuscript tradition, and the Latin term Hierosolimitanorum, or “of the Jerusalemites,’ in the title of the work points to a medieval practice of associating pilgrims with the holy place they were going to visit. Thus, the crusaders were Jerusalemites because they were pilgrims on their way to the Holy Sepulcher (the tomb in which Jesus was buried) in Jerusalem.
The Gesta is an anonymous work; nor can it be clearly ascertained where it might have been written. Paleographic evidence firmly suggests a European origin; handwriting practiced in the Latin Near East was markedly different.* The manuscripts also suggest a date around the first half of the twelfth century—well within living memory of the various events described in the Gesta. If an original version of the Gesta existed in Jerusalem, it has not survived; we only have European copies of it. The fact that some sort of a book about the First Crusade might have existed in Jerusalem is certain, since a visitor there states that he saw such a little book, a libellus, in 1101. The visitor’s name was Ekkehard of Aura, the famous chronicler, and his testimony is important in helping us understand how the Gesta came to exist in its present form.*
When dealing with a source such as the Gesta, two important questions immediately come to mind: Who wrote it? And is it an eyewitness account? Both questions are connected, since authorship suggests trustworthiness to the modern reader. If the authority of the author is missing, then the modern reader may well question the claims made in the book itself, since the modern world puts a great deal of confidence in individualized knowledge. Thus, in the present age it is often experts who write books, and readers turn to these books because of that authorial expertise.
Things were different in the Middle Ages. The authority of books came not from individual expertise but from tradition, and books were written in order to elaborate (but not change) that tradition. Thus, a book of history arose from, participated in, and elaborated on, the tradition of historiography that included classical sources—but more importantly it included the Bible. In fact, writing history without the Bible was unimaginable in the Middle Ages. And this medieval tradition of history was interested in providing the panoramic view rather than the individualized, particular one, because history was not about interpreting the actions of men, but about understanding the workings of God in human affairs. And so the questions—who wrote the Gesta, and is it an eyewitness account—are ultimately unimportant, because the Gesta is trying to relate not the experiences dependent upon personal expertise, but upon the tradition of history in the medieval world—the Gesta wants to provide a panoramic view of the First Crusade in order to make it obvious that this event is just one more episode in God’s grand scheme of redemption for humankind.
However, this has not stopped scholars from trying to guess who the author of the Gesta might have been. And over the years, three distinct answers have been provided for the question, who wrote the Gesta?
The first answer, which is the oldest,° sees the author as the younger son of a southern Italian nobleman, and therefore a Norman, who was being trained to become a priest, but when the crusade was announced, he dropped everything and became a crusader and fought all the way to Jerusalem. As he fought, he sat down and faithfully wrote down what he did and saw; and so he is giving us a firsthand, eyewitness account of what exactly happened. He reached Jerusalem, took part in its capture, and then wrote about it. Since the purpose of the entire First Crusade was the capture of Jerusalem, this Norman author wraps up his book with this event. It is this book that we now call the Gesta. And, as for that little book that Ekkehard saw, this first answer suggests that it was nothing other than the account written by the Norman knight. This answer is weak, if not entirely wrong. Nowhere in the Gesta is there a specific or even a vague indication that the author is a younger son of some noble family. Nor is there any hint of evidence that the author is from southern Italy and a Norman. And there is no mention at all that the author interrupted his training for the priesthood to become a fighting crusader. As for the idea that the Gesta is an eyewitness account, again, nothing at all in the work would lead to that conclusion. Therefore, this first answer really is misleading and incorrect.
The second answer rigorously critiques the first one,° correctly pointing out that nothing in the Gesta points to any notion of one specific author. Instead of one author, the second answer posits the Gesta as the work of a scriptorium, of monks sifting through various narratives of the First Crusade and then writing the Gesta based upon their research. This explains why there are so many instances of “misreadings” and of names being mixed up. Surely the author of a firsthand account would have made sure that he got the names right. Thus, this second answer suggests that the Gesta is not an eyewitness account at all but is based upon a compilation of “field reports,” that is, short, firsthand experiences of various crusaders.’ These reports would then have been collated into a little book of sorts, and it was this book that Ekkehard saw; it was not the “real” version of the Gesta at all, since that had not yet been written. There is much to recommend this second answer because it recognizes that the medieval historian was concerned not with individual authorship but with the tradition of doing history to explicate God’s grand plan for humanity—each historical event pointed to the verity of that plan. And also importantly this answer understands that the writing of a book in the Middle Ages was a collective effort and not an individual one.
The third answer is skeptical about the implications of the second one, namely the emphasis on authorship, whether individual or collective.* In its place, it sees the Gesta as a purely literary endeavor and not at all the record of actual experience of one individual or many; nor can it even be the objective observation of an observer of the First Crusade, since both these ideas at once suggest authorial expertise and intent. Rather, this third answer advises that the Gesta must be read in the context of medieval historiography, which privileges divine inspiration (proper understanding) over direct observation, and therefore the question of authorship is unimportant. This answer does not consider Ekkehard’s testimony. There is a great deal of merit to this third answer, because it stresses the role of tradition in the Middle Ages. However, it is too eager to abandon the insights offered by the second answer. The best way to begin understanding the issue of authorship is to consider a fourth possibility—that the manuscript tradition indeed suggests a clear authorship.
Firstly, it is reasonable to assume that the real “author” of the work was an institution. It was the “production team” of a scriptorium that produced the book known as the Gesta. This explains the various instances of misreadings, especially of names, and the many occasions when the narrative is unclear and the events fuzzy, because these are examples of “editorial” uncertainty and “educated guesses.” But if an institution was involved, why is the language of the Gesta rough and unrefined? For it was the “barbaric Latin” (Latina-barbara) of the original that annoyed Baudri de Bourgueil and Guibert of Nogent so much that they both launched into rewriting the Gesta to give it a more polished and refined finish.?
This question of language is important. Is the rough Latin of the Gesta reflective of ordinary speech, used by gruff soldiers, although such soldiers would have spoken the vernacular of their day, such as Norman French, Old French, Provengal, or medieval Italian, depending on their origin? Did a monkish scribe translate what these soldiers told him; and since he had to get everything down in a hurry, he simply carried into Latin the rough speech habits of his soldier-narrators? Or did these same soldiers write their reports in the vernacular, which were then translated into Latin? The answer to all three questions is, likely not. Certainly, the “barbaric Latin” does seem to give the Gesfa an air of authenticity: We are listening in on a soldier speaking of his experiences in the “war.” But this is precisely the point—the “barbaric Latin” is literary style; the Latin is constructed to sound like common twelfth-century speech. The unrefined diction and hurried syntax is an act of the imagination, an attempt to capture the speech patterns of soldiers, very much like the “imagined” speech of Muslims in the Gesta, which is always overly contrived and at times outlandish. And because we have no surviving vernacular sources in which we encounter a non-Latin version of the Gesta, the conclusion is obvious— the Gesta is not a translation of a non-Latin source or sources but a composition uniquely in Latin. The use of the pronouns I, us, and we is not any proof of an eyewitness account; it is merely a matter of point of view—“us” against “them.”
These pronouns led to the erroneous view that the Gesta was a firsthand, eye-witness account. But great care must be taken with such easy conclusions, since point of view is, again, a matter of literary style. Further, the use of the pronoun I in the Gesta simply suggests that the authors of the work are using the “field notes” of someone who wrote down what he knew. And the testimony of Ekkehard of Aura is also important in this regard, because he does attest to seeing a “little book,” and it is important to note the Latin term he uses to describe it—libellus, “little book,’ which means that the source was not a substantial tome of crusade history. Likely it was no more than a chronology and summary of the main events that happened over the four-year period of the First Crusade, and perhaps it also included the names of important people and a brief episodic “marker” of what they did—so-and-so did this and that at such a place and at such a day, month, or year.
This libellus would have been written by a cleric in Latin, since Ekkehard understood it—Ekkehard was a German, and it is unlikely that he would have read Old French. More importantly, if the little book were in Old French, Ekkehard would have modified libellus to make clear that he had before him a non-Latin source, a libellus vulgaris, “a little book in the vernacular.” In the absence of such a description, libellus by itself can only readily be taken to mean a little book in Latin. And perhaps there were several such “Tittle books” in circulation throughout Europe in the years following the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. The authors of the Gesta perhaps used one or more such versions to construct and write their own narrative. However, it appears that the chronologies the authors of the Gesta possessed were uneven, because their finished work, rather curiously, spends a lot of time describing the siege and conquest of Antioch. But the siege and conquest of Jerusalem—which one might imagine would be the highlight, since the entire First Crusade was constructed around such an event—gets short shrift. This can only be explained by the suggestion that the authors used sources that were either uneven or incomplete.
The earliest manuscript of the Gesta likely gives us the very names of the authors of this work; in other words, there is evidence of a clear authorship. At the very end of the Vatican manuscript Reginensis latini 641, and tucked away, almost surreptitiously, at the bottom of folio 45, are two lines that give the names of four men. The handwriting is certainly from the first half of the twelfth century, the very era of the Gesta’s composition. In Latin, these two lines read Petrus clericus de Mirabea. Wilelmus clericus de Vosaillia. Gauterea de Funfreide laicus. Johannes de Gelis laicus. In English, “Peter, the clerk of Mirabeau. William, the clerk of Vosailles. Walter of Fontfroide, layman. John of Gélis, layman.” The four names appear without explanation, but do belong to the twelfth century. Here, it seems, is the “production team” of a scriptorium, which hammered out the narrative of the Gesta. These names cannot be signatures, nor can they be the names of the owners of the manuscript; such methods of self-identity or marking of books were unknown at this time. Therefore, it is very likely that the clerks Peter from Mirabeau and William from Vosailles, and the laymen Walter from Fontfroide and John from Gélis together wrote the Gesta.
THE LANGUAGE OF THE GESTA
The Latin employed in the Gesta is devoid of ornamentation, besides being economical and precise. The “editorial decision” seems to be to tell the story in a style and tone that would fit the subject matter—war and the life of soldiers on campaign. This is not to say that the Gesta is ignorant of literary effects. For example, the lengthy speech by Curbaram’s mother is an elegant homily on the divine destiny of Christians, which is further strengthened by Curbaram’s natve questions about the nature of the men he is about to fight. Curbaram is the leader of all the Muslim forces who fight against the crusaders in the Gesta.
Further, it had been previously assumed that the pared-down language of the Gesfa is reflective of the author’s station—a fighting knight with a rudimentary grasp of Latin. However, it makes better sense to see the language of the Gesta as indicative of stylistic choices—to capture the simple, straightforward speech of soldiers. As a result, the Latin of the Gesta is very close to the vernacular of the day (the emerging French and Italian), which would have been the common speech of the crusaders. Thus, for example, the preposition de (““from’’) is used instead of ex (more typical of Latin), the gerund or the infinitive is replaced by the present participle, and there is a regular use of vernacular terms, such as, burgus for “suburb,” papilio for “pavilion,” and casale for “a piece of land.” This is an attempt to capture the common, living speech of the crusader on the ground.
THE MANUSCRIPT TRADITION
The Gestfa exists in seven extant manuscripts; and given the relationship that they exhibit one to another, they have been arranged into three different groups. The first group is the earliest and comprises the parchment Vatican manuscript, in folio, Reginensis latini 572, which once belonged to the French antiquarian Paul Petau (1568-1614) and which dates from the first half of the twelfth century. Next is the Vatican MS Reginensis latini 641, which likely dates from the later part of the twelfth century; it was once owned by Cardinal Alain de Coétivy (1407-1474), who was the bishop of Avignon. Lastly, there is the Madrid, Biblioteca Nacional E.e. 103 (9783),a parchment manuscript in quarto, which dates from the early part of the fourteenth century; it once belonged to the Marquis of Valleron, Joseph Louis Dominique de Cambis (1706-1772).
In content, all three manuscripts are similar in that they contain the Gesta, the description of the holy places in Jerusalem, a Mass in veneration of the Holy Sepulcher, and the dimensions of the Holy Sepulcher. In addition, Reginensis latini 572 contains a quatrain in praise of Bohemond, and several folios have been added at the end, which include a letter by Oliver of Cologne (obit 1227), describing the siege of Damietta in 1219, during the Fifth Crusade. Reginensis latini 641 has a quire missing, for at the bottom of folio 32 verso is found the note, of fourteenth-century orthography, Hic deficit quaternio (“here a quire is missing”). This manuscript also contains subtle changes, the purpose of which is to show Robert Curthose, the duke of Normandy, and one of the leaders of the crusaders, in a good light.
The language in the three manuscripts is also very similar in that it is unrefined and often betrays Germanic characteristics; for example, nichil for nihil (“nothing”); sepulchrum for sepulcrum (“sepulcher”), where the ch is guttural; or the term Northmanni for Normans, instead of the more Latinate Normanni. Plus, the Latin has typical medieval traits, such as the simplification of the diphthongs oe and ae into e, and the frequent omission of the initial h.
The second group comprises four manuscripts, and all of them are versions of Reginensis latini 641, with improvements and refinement of the Latin. Two of these are of English provenance. The first is a parchment manuscript dating from the late twelfth century, which was in the abbey of Barlings in Lincolnshire. It came into the possession of Antonio Agustin y Albanell (1516-1586), and from his library it came into the Real Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, where it is now housed as D. HI. ii; it is bound with a collection of the lives of saints. On the title page, someone has jokingly written Sutorii sive potius incerti Itinerarium Hierosolymorum, that is, “The shoemakers, or the unknown Jerusalem Itinerary.’ The second manuscript of English provenance is in the Berlin Staatsbibliothek, referenced as Latein 40 503. It dates from the thirteenth century and originally belonged to the priory of Kenilworth, in England. It was in the collection of Arthur Cowper Ranyard (1845-1894), the English astronomer. The manuscript is badly damaged, with several leaves missing. The third manuscript of this group is in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, reference number 162/83. It dates from the thirteenth century or perhaps the fourteenth. The fourth manuscript is known as Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 281 and is an abbreviated version of the Gesta. It also tends to favor Duke Robert Curthose and places him at the head of each list of princes given in the work.
There is also somewhat of a mystery in the entire manuscript tradition in that the very first printed edition of the Gesta by Jacques Bongars (1546-1612), published in 1611 as Gesta Dei per Francos (“the deeds of God through the Franks’’), was based upon two manuscripts. One belonged to Paul Petau (the Reginensis latini 572) and the other to William Camden (1551-1623), the great English historian. It is not certain which manuscript Camden possessed; Bongars states that it ended with the words Explicit via bona (“here the good way ends’’). It may well have been another account of the First Crusade that has not survived. However, the title chosen by Bongars deserves comment in that it emphasizes the medieval notion of history—God actively involved in history in order to accomplish His great salvific plan. This also is the concern of medieval historiography, as previously mentioned, and indeed therefore of the entire Gesta, grounded as it is in the understanding that life is a sacred process toward a final, heavenly goal. Hence the journey toward Jerusalem is also everyman’s path (and that certainly hard-won) through life and into a state of redemption.
THE STRUCTURE OF THE GESTA
The entire Gesta runs though ten narratives, or books, a division found in the earliest manuscripts. Thus, the first narrative proceeds up to the battle of Vardar. The second narrative ends with the capture of Nicaea; the third includes the battle of Dorylaeum; the fourth describes the march down to Antioch; the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth narratives are concerned with the siege of Antioch; the ninth deals with the Turkish counterattack at Antioch. The tenth, and the final, narrative deals with the deliverance of Antioch, the victory at Ascalon, and the taking of Jerusalem. All the narratives, with the exception of three and eight, end with a doxology, and such a conclusion further grounds the Gesta in sacred history.
The initial part of the first narrative comprises the preaching of the crusade by Pope Urban II and Peter the Hermit and the ensuing “People’s Crusade” led by Peter the Hermit and Walter Sans-Avoir. After the slaughter at Civetot, the first narrative takes up the story of the assemblage and the journeys of the various leaders that made up the second part of the First Crusade, which has come to be known as the Princes’ Crusade. It is also near the end of the initial narrative that the pronoun we is first used, which is an important stylistic indicator of a strongly partisan narrative from here on in—the narrative is built around the deeds of these princes. The remaining nine narratives move geographically eastward into present-day Turkey and then southward into what is now Lebanon, Syria, and Israel. As well, the Gesta is a mix- ture of historical fact and imaginative fancy. Details about the “deeds of the Franks” are grounded in sacred history, while the deeds of the Turks are grounded in speculative fantasy; they are thoroughly visualized as pagans who operate on a logic that is entirely contrary to the logic of the Christian world, and therefore the Turks, as pagans, reside outside the pale of sacred history.
The Gesta is uneven in that it is fuzzy about the early beginnings of the First Crusade and especially the People’s Crusade, and it confuses some of the names of the lords involved in the Princes’ Crusade. Also, it handles the intricacies of Byzantine politics clumsily so that the motivations of the emperor, Alexius I Comnenus, and the various lords are somewhat of a puzzle. However, with the march eastward from Constantinople, the account becomes more cohesive as the crusaders make their way toward the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. Indeed, once the crusaders leave behind the labyrinth of Byzantine politics, their “job” is simple and straightforward—head to Jerusalem. And here the geographical details are precise and give a sweeping quality to the account as the”10 encounters the Turks at various crusader army, known as the “host, points in their “pilgrimage” to Jerusalem. The mind-set of the Muslim Turks is also exotically imagined, although typically they are portrayed as true pagans who believe in many gods and worship idols (something that Muslims, of course, do not do). After the capture of Antioch the story begins to falter. The battle of Ascalon is hastily described, while the capture of Jerusalem seems little more than a sideshow, especially when compared to the high drama of the siege of Antioch and the taking of that city.
This imbalance in the Gesta suggests that the material available to the authors was uneven or incomplete, as indicated earlier. For example, six of the ten narratives are about Antioch. And when it comes to the battle of Ascalon and the taking of Jerusalem, the details that the authors possess are sketchy at best and rather ad hoc. It is as if the authors are on very unsure ground; the earlier confidence in the process of storytelling is gone. It has been replaced by a rapid summary of the main points and then a hurried conclusion. Perhaps it is for this reason that the manuscript tradition places at the end of the tenth narrative an itinerary of Jerusalem, a sort of traveler’s guidebook of what to see in that city. And then to emphasize the purpose of the entire First Crusade, the prayers of a Mass that might well have been said at the Holy Sepulcher in 1099 are included. And then there is an interesting, though repetitive, quatrain in praise of Bohemond, the lord of the Sicilian-Norman contingent of crusaders, which is rather odd, since he is not the central character of the Gesta. Perhaps this quatrain was found in one of the sources that focused on the deeds of Bohemond, just as some accounts emphasized the role of Duke Robert Curthose of Normandy.
THE GESTA AND HISTORY
The Gesta tells the story of the First Crusade by continually shifting locales and therefore contexts. The narrative has a sweeping quality as it moves from Italy to France to Germany and then eastward toward Constantinople and Anatolia, or modern-day Turkey, and then south into what is now the state of Israel. These involve the reader with different histories, cultures, and geographical locations, and by doing so, the Gesta allows for a reconsideration of questions that lie at the very heart of the chronicle. What was a “crusade”? What were the conditions that brought about the First Crusade? And why did anyone want to become a “crusader’’?
The term crusade is not medieval and only came to be used in English well into the sixteenth century, at which time it meant “crossed,” or “being marked by the cross.’ The term does, however, focus on the sign that the medieval participants wore on or over their clothes, namely a cross, which identified them as particular types of pilgrims—those heading to Jerusalem. A modern example of this practice of marking apilgrim is the scallop shell emblem that designates pilgrims walking the Way of St. James to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Spain.
Thus, what is now termed as a crusade was called a pilgrimage in the medieval period. And when Pope Urban IJ set the First Crusade in motion, he called for pilgrims who would take a holy vow to head out to Jerusalem and once there do everything they could to free the Holy Sepulcher (the tomb of Jesus) from Turkish control. Unlike all other pilgrimages, however, this one had a special feature—it would be an armed one, in which the pilgrims would also have to fight those who might resist this act of liberation. The pilgrims would be the “soldiers of Saint Peter.” But because it nevertheless was a pilgrimage, spiritual benefits, to compensate for this effort, were made available to the participants by Urban II.
Thus, on November 27, 1095, at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II preached the first of such armed pilgrimages, or the First Crusade. No exact text of his message survives, but the gist of what he said can be surmised from the various sources that reported the event: He called for a threefold effort of liberation—to free the Christians of the Middle East from humiliating Muslim rule, to restore dignity and glory to the Christian city of Byzantium, which was facing constant harassment from the Turks, and to free Jerusalem, the city of Christ, from Muslim possession. The power of his message was such that those assembled cried out in one voice, “God wills it! God wills it!!!
What was the context of this message, or what were the conditions that led to such an armed pilgrimage? Firstly, there was the emergence and reformulation of Western Europe after the meltdown of the Carolingian empire by the end of the tenth century. Secondly, there was Church reform and the rise of the papacy, both of which began in earnest in the eleventh century. Thirdly, there was the rapid establishment of the Seljuq Turkish Empire in the Middle East and Central Asia in the latter part of the eleventh century. And fourthly, there was the intricacy of the Byzantine world, especially as it sought to deal with the threat posed by the Turks who had successfully stripped away large parts of its territory.
By the time Urban II delivered his sermon at Clermont, Western Europe had undergone an entire revolution, politically, religiously, economically, and culturally. Until the end of the ninth century, most of Western Europe had functioned as a centralized unit in the form of the Carolingian Empire. But the success of its founder (Charlemagne) could not be repeated or maintained by his descendants, so that central authority completely broke down and ushered in a lengthy period of internecine warfare as one son of Charlemagne fought another for total authority. The result was political and economic chaos—and perhaps because of this chaos, this era also experienced countless devastating raids by the Vikings and then later by the marauding Magyars, which drained off precious wealth of both Church and state and also destroyed the lives of ordinary people.'* Large tracts of land that had once been cultivated were abandoned for fear of the Vikings, and more and more people began to congregate around the castle of the lord to seek his protection. By doing so, they established the system of manorialism, in which the peasants got security in exchange for cultivating the local lord’s land. Typically a field was divided into equal strips, some for the lord and some to feed the peasant and his family.!9
The lack of centralized authority allowed governors to take possession of the various territories that they once managed for the Carolingian rulers, thereby carving their own personal principalities and dukedoms. Often these petty lords formed larger units for added protection and strength by pledging allegiance to one another; the lord that had the most territory often became the supreme authority figure in this relationship of obligations, of “feudalism,” as it is commonly called. Thus, the humblest farmer to the highest lord owed allegiance to someone more powerful than he. Such interdependence also ensured that a small disagreement between two lords easily involved all their clients and vassals as well, which meant that both the tenth and eleventh centuries were very violent ones, especially for the ordinary person.'4
But this ordinary person also now had a voice, because of the manorial system. Since people now lived together, they had a greater economic impact. Thus, these people began to object to the violence perpetrated by the lords upon them—and they demanded change. A lord could not ignore or suppress such protests, since the ordinary person also farmed the lord’s land. In the end, the protests forced the lords to observe the Peace of God, by having them swear a holy oath that in their fights and skirmishes, they would not harm noncombatants. This was soon followed by a further refinement, the Truce of God, which made belligerents take a holy oath that they would not fight on Sundays or on feast days.!° These movements were popular in origin and were adopted by the Church, because the Church at this time was ineffectual and structurally weak.
The Vikings had focused their attacks on churches and monasteries, and this had made the position of individual holy places very precarious. And when rebuilding was begun after a destructive raid, the funds and resources were provided by the local lord. And once this lord gave money to build a church or a monastery or a convent, he assumed that the new building belonged to him and he could therefore control its revenue. To do so effectively, he took it upon himself to appoint the clergy; these appointees were often members of the lord’s own family, who had little or no training in matters theological or liturgical. Also, such appointees ended up selling their holy office to the highest bidder (a church’s revenue depended on land as well as offerings, which made the job of a priest attractive). This was the practice of simony, which by the eleventh century had thoroughly permeated the entire hierarchy of the Church, right up to the office of the pope itself.'°
But again there was discontent among the ordinary people, since they could not be sure if a person who had no training or education to be a priest could actually perform the rites of the Church—and whether these rites had any legitimacy or spiritual benefit. This discontent spread also into certain members of the nobility. One such noble was Saint Gerald (855-909 AD), who established a new monastery at Aurillac, in the Auvergne region of France. But instead of putting a relative in charge of it and siphoning off its revenues, Gerald granted this new monastery complete independence from all secular or state influence.
In fact, he placed the monastery directly under the protection of the pope, which was unheard of.'’ Such piety was shared by a far more powerful lord, Duke William I of Aquitaine (875-918 AD), who founded a new monastery at Cluny, in Burgundy, where he had a hunting lodge and some land he never used; and he too gave it complete independence. '® This simple act of devotion further strengthened the reforming trend in the Church that would see it become an independent spiritual institution and not simply an extension of the state.!? Soon, many other monasteries and churches began to demand similar freedom from their various secular lords.”” This demand was strengthened by the adoption of the Peace and Truce of God movements by Cluny. And the power the Church had over the lords was twofold. First, it offered assurance and security in the life to come through prayers and masses. Second, it could channel divine grace for immediate benefits through saints’ relics.?! This assurance and grace was the spiritual currency of the Middle Ages; without it life was entirely without meaning.
This reform slowly worked its way upward, for the popes themselves owed their office to the nobility. But curiously, papal reforms and the subsequent rise of the papacy were the result of simony. In 1044, Pope Benedict IX sold his office twice: first to Silvester III, who died quickly and Benedict again became pope; second to Gregory VI, who, despite his own simony, fervently wanted to reform the Church. Benedict was not pleased with what Gregory wanted to do and declared him a simoniac and himself the true pope. This led to much unrest and chaos among the people, both lay and cleric. To settle things, the powerful Henry I, the Holy Roman Emperor, marched into Rome, got rid of both Benedict and Gregory, and chose another man to become pope (Clement II). But in less than a year, Clement was dead. The Emperor installed another pope, Damasus IJ, but he died just twenty-three days into his papacy. Finally, Henry made his own cousin pope, namely Leo IX, who happened to be very reform minded. Leo set in motion the process that would make the Church entirely independent of the state. He eradicated the practice of simony. He enforced clerical celibacy. And he ensured that priests were properly educated in theology and Church doctrine. Most important of all, he established the College of Cardinals as a body that would study issues and concerns important to the faith. This allowed the Church to centralize its authority by breaking away from secular control and placing itself under the control of God Himself.”
The reforms became more radical under the next pope, Nicholas II. First, the Council of Cardinals prohibited lay investiture, or the choosing and installation of the clergy by the local lord. Second, in 1059, the Papal Election Decree was issued, which established that henceforth the only way a man could become pope was by being elected to the office by the Council of Cardinals. Secular lords could no longer put a pope in office. The Church had become free of state control. This decision did not sit well with many rulers, and Gregory was openly and violently opposed by Henry IV, the king of the Germans and the new Holy Roman Emperor, who wanted to regain the lost privileges of the state. This led to the great Investiture Controversy, which plunged Europe once again into bloody conflict and chaos.”? However, the popes now had powerful supporters in the Normans of southern Italy, who had carved up a principality for themselves right up to Capua and Benevento, taking away lands from both the Lombard rulers and the Byzantines.”* They belonged to highly successful families of adventurers from Normandy, such as the Drengots and the Hautevilles. Members of the Hauteville clan had fought many battles against Byzantium, men such as Robert Guiscard (1015-1085) and his son Bohemond (1058-1111), both of whom consolidated the Norman hold on southern Italy and parts of present-day Macedonia and Greece.”°
Further, the economic basis of Europe had changed—cities replaced villages as places of commercial activity. This change strengthened the Church as well, by increasing the role and function of the bishop—for a city was also a diocese in which the bishop functioned as the spiritual head. In the earlier rural economies of village life, that role was fulfilled by the abbot of a monastery. Thus, the papacy consolidated its authority by making bishops answerable to the pope, who represented Christ. In this way, the hierarchy of the Church acquired its authority not from the state but from God. Thus, by the time Urban II became pope in 1088, the Church was a tightly organized institution, self-sustaining and independent, that could marshal, direct, and control a unified response from its faithful.
Like Western Europe, the Middle East had undergone a destabilization and then consolidation process. By the eleventh century the nomadic Turks were on the move from Central Asia.”° One tribe, the Seljugs, from the Kazakh Steppe, probed into Iran and gained supremacy in the province of Khorasan. And from there they slowly began to take over the Middle East up to, but not including, Egypt. In 1055 they took Baghdad, rendering the caliphate there, once the spiritual and political backbone of Islam, as ineffectual and peripheral. It was also at this time that they converted to the Sunni sect of Islam. Then they turned westward, and by about 1060 began to filter into Anatolia, which belonged both to Byzantium and Armenia. Matters came to a head in 1071 when the Byzantine army met the Seljuq Turks in battle at Manzikert.*? The outcome was a disaster for the Byzantines; not only were they thoroughly defeated, but their emperor, Romanus IV Diogenes, was captured. It did not take the Turks long to consolidate their hold on Anatolia under the able leadership of Alp Arslan (1029-1072), including the capture of Armenia. They established the Seljuq Sultanate of Rum, which would become the foundation of what is now Turkey.”° For the Christians in these areas, there was severer oppression. The pope at the time, Gregory VII, called for an army to be raised to fight the Muslims and defend the eastern Christians. He may well have succeeded in launching such a campaign had he not become embroiled in the Investiture Controversy, which destabilized his papacy and much of Europe.
However, a strong emperor had come to the throne in Constantinople, namely Alexius I Comnenus (1048-1118), who effected important economic and social reforms that saw prestige and influence return to Byzantium, and he sought to normalize relationships with the papacy and the West.”? He restructured the military so that it might effectively contend with the Turks, raising more mercenaries from England (largely disaffected Anglo-Saxons who had fled after the Norman invasion of 1066 led by William the Conqueror) as well as Bulgars, Pechenegs, and even Turks.°” However, Alexius still had much trouble with the Seljugs. He wanted to retake Anatolia. But to do so, he would need more soldiers than he presently had. He turned to the West and sent his ambassadors to the new pope, namely Urban II, who was friendly to Byzantium.*!
The ambassadors arrived at Piacenza, where a church council was to meet from March 1 to 5, 1095, and there they asked for help in driving the Seljuq Turks out of Anatolia. To emphasize the urgency of this request, they also reminded the pope and the council that pilgrimages to Jerusalem had become impossible for Christians, now that the Holy Land was in the possession of these same Turks. And there might also have been a hint of the unification of the Eastern and Western Churches after the Great Schism.*” The appeal resonated strongly, and a few months later, at the Council of Clermont, Urban delivered his call for action, which would become the First Crusade.*? The Gesta gives a summary of what the pope said as well as the great fervor this evoked among the people. And here it is important to note that the First Crusade was largely a Norman and French undertaking—and an undertaking by individual nobles. None of the European kings supported the pope—Philip I of France was an excommunicate, Henry IV of Germany was Urban’s greatest foe, and Spain was engaged in fighting Muslims on its own soil. It would largely become a Norman expedition, with support from three members of the French nobility: Hugh I, Count of Vermandois (1053-1101); Raymond IV, Count of Toulouse (1041-1105); and Godfrey of Bouillon (1060-1100).
The call went out throughout France and Germany and was further spread by the fervid preaching of Peter the Hermit.** However, Urban had stipulated that only those who could afford to do so should go on the crusade, while women, children, and the enfeebled were to stay behind.*° He also discouraged priests and monks from joining, stating that they served far more effectively through prayer. In time, some 150,000 people gathered to become pilgrims, ready to march off to the Holy Land. They were poor, they were both men and women, and they had no notion of what this pilgrimage entailed; some were even the unfit and ill, who no doubt wanted to go to the Holy Land in the hope of getting well. Of these, only about 20,000 made it all the way to the Near East. They were all killed, except those that converted. Thereafter the crusade fell into the far abler hands of the Normans and their allies. But why would anyone want to become a crusader? To answer this question properly, it is important to understand the medieval mind-set.
The Middle Ages were deeply rooted in Christianity, and this meant that God was central to all aspects of life, and He could be accessed through the structure of religion, that is, the Church.*° No human endeavor existed outside a universal moral structure: good or evil—the choice was part of free will. It is in this context that the crusades are best examined, as pious acts. History, therefore, was pious history; it was history with a moral core that sought to guide humankind into attitudes and behavior contained within the framework of universal goodness, whereby the individual could become aligned to, and find a place in, God’s grand program of redemption. This is the mind-set of all the individuals that went on the First Crusade, because for them it was not a matter of winning land, but winning salvation by seeking to do what they thought was pious. It was a pilgrimage taken to restore the connection between the individual and God. Since participation in the crusade was entirely voluntary, a crusader’s final allegiance thus lay with God alone.
NATURE OF THE FIRST CRUSADE
As previously mentioned, the First Crusade occurred in two phases. The first, the People’s Crusade, consisted of nothing more than an enthused rabble that believed it was simply enough to show up in the Near East and God would take care of the rest. Thus it had no military leadership other than that provided by Walter Sans-Avoir (wrongly called the Penniless, for he was far from poor), and it had no clear strategy other than allowing God to use the pilgrims as His instruments. The Turks, therefore, easily overcame them and slaughtered them, enslaving those who converted. In the second phase, known as the Princes’ Crusade, the nobility led their own armies made up of professional warriors, who were accustomed to military tactics and maneuvers. Thus, it was the participants in the second phase, about 40,000 strong, who won the crusade and brought about the capture of the Levant and Jerusalem.
Also, three specific incidents in the course of the crusade are often commented upon and deserve closer scrutiny.
Firstly, when Peter the Hermit preached the crusade in Cologne and the Rhineland, it spawned another sort of reaction—one that sought to exact vengeance from non-Christians closer at hand, namely the Jews.*’ This contingent of the People’s Crusade was led by the lord of Leiningen, Count Emicho, who brought his followers down the Rhineland, from Speyer to Cologne, attacking Jews and taking their property. Of course, it also must be remembered that even to the medieval mind this was an aberration of the crusade ideal, and the Church actively sought to protect Jews. These attacks, though vicious, were not typical and were strongly condemned by the clergy of the day. But it is always difficult to insist on ideals, since mobs are motivated by various forces, just as it is equally wrong to use these various incidents to label all crusaders as regularly participating in anti-Jewish violence.
Indeed, the violence against Jews happened mostly in Germany, where the Jews were quickly equated with the faraway Muslims. But this violent mob never got to the Near East: Count Emicho’s followers were slaughtered by King Coloman of Hungary, and Emicho himself barely escaped with his life. Thereafter, the violence against the Jews dissipated. In other words, persecution of the Jews was not the focus of the First Crusade, which is why it was persistently decried and denounced by the Church. And it is important to note that the Gesta does not mention any violence against the Jews.
Secondly, there is the infamous incident of cannibalism at the siege of Marra. It is recorded in most of the chronicles of the First Crusade. The Gesta does mention it briefly, and recently a lot of scholarly ink has been spilled in trying to explain what exactly happened and why. These explanations range from describing this cannibalism as a sacral act*® or as the manifestation of Western cultural superiority, as a literal devour- ing of the alien Other,*? or even as a form of Holy Communion, since the crusaders saw themselves as the materialization of God’s justice on earth.*° In the final analysis perhaps this is all an overintellectualization of war’s brutality by scholars who wish to seek some rational, philosophical, or psychological understanding of what happened. Despite its ideal nature, the First Crusade was also a war; like all wars it was nasty, brutish, and cruel, and this was evident both on the Turkish side and on the side of the crusaders.
Thus, this incident of cannibalism suggests only two possibilities. First, the few crusaders that practiced it were simply insane with hunger—throughout the Gesta mention is made again and again of the unending struggle to just find something to eat and to have some water to drink—and the sheer agony when there is nothing. In one extreme case of suffering from thirst, the crusaders soak rags in cesspits (open latrines) in order to have any kind of liquid to drink, or they resort to drinking their own urine.
This certainly indicates intense suffering. The occurrence of cannibalism is also the result of such unrelenting physical suffering through hunger. And second, if a detailed analysis really is necessary, this incident must be read in the context in which it occurs (a context often missed by commentators on this incident): The cannibalism happens immediately after the crusaders begin cutting open the guts of the Turkish dead to retrieve bezants and small precious items. This, of course, means that many of the Turkish inhabitants of Marra had swallowed their valuables to transport them safely away from the crusaders. Many of these never made it to safety. The cutting open of the bodies to extract these precious objects and the resultant cannibalism (practiced not by all, but a few) are to be read together; the one leads to another. When the Turkish dead are cut open to extract what valuables they might have swallowed while alive, their bodies become simply flesh; and it is not a great leap for the soldiers involved in such acts to think of roasting the flesh and eating it because they are hungry—for the crusaders are perpetually near starvation. War and severe privation dehumanize people. This is the only thing to be understood from the incident of cannibalism at Marra. To read it as indicative of cultural or philosophical positions of the crusaders is simply a failure to come to grips with the necessary and wretched brutality of war.
Thirdly, there is the slaughter by the crusaders of the inhabitants of Jerusalem. The Gesta relates that the streets ran ankle-deep in blood.
Like so many such details in medieval chronicles, this is a trope of the utter destruction of the enemy. It should not be taken literally. It is true that a lot of the inhabitants of Jerusalem were killed by the crusaders, but it is also true that many were not. Thus, a medieval trope needs to be “stylistically” read—the enemy that had defiled the holy city of Jerusalem has been entirely destroyed. To the medieval mind, this meant that the good had vanquished evil—the ideal war is always a total war.*!
In effect, the destruction of Jerusalem described in the Gesta is “biblical” in proportion and style and must be read as such. Here, for example, is a passage from the Bible that describes such destruction: “Then Joshua turned back at that time, and captured Hazor and struck its king with the sword; for Hazor formerly was the head of all these kingdoms. They struck every person who was in it with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them; there was no one left who breathed. And he burned Hazor with fire. Joshua captured all the cities of these kings, and all their kings, and he struck them with the edge of the sword, and utterly destroyed them; just as Moses the servant of the Lord had commanded. However, Israel did not burn any cities that stood on their mounds, except Hazor alone, which Joshua burned. All the spoil of these cities and the cattle, the sons of Israel took as their plunder; but they struck every man with the edge of the sword, until they had destroyed them. They left no one who breathed. Just as the Lord had commanded Moses his servant, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did; he left nothing undone of all that the Lord had commanded Moses. Thus Joshua took all that land: the hill country and all the Negev, all that land of Goshen, the lowland, the Arabah, the hill country of Israel and its lowland from Mount Halak, that rises toward Seir, even as far as Baalgad in the valley of Lebanon at the foot of Mount Hermon. And he captured all their kings and struck them down and put them to death. Joshua waged war a long time with all these kings. There was not a city which made peace with the sons of Israel except the Hivites living in Gibeon; they took them all in battle. For it was of the Lord to harden their hearts, to meet Israel in battle in order that he might utterly destroy them, that they might receive no mercy, but that he might destroy them, just as the Lord had commanded Moses” (Joshua 11: 10-20). It is in such a biblical landscape, setting, and context that the crusaders themselves moved.
This translation is based upon the published editions of the Gesta that have been edited by Bongars, Le Bas, Hagenmeyer, Bréhier, and Hill,” as well as personal consultation of the manuscript tradition. It includes the complete Gesta as it has been preserved, as well as the description of the holy places in Jerusalem, the prayers for the Mass of the Holy Sepulcher, and for the first time, the quatrain in praise of Bohemond, and the list of four names that concludes the Gesta portion of the Vatican manuscript Reginensis latini 641.
The place names in the Gesta have been left unchanged as they appear in the original Latin, although some personal names have been translated since they are well known in the field of crusade studies. Also, the archaisms prevalent in the previous two English translations have been avoided, especially in the case of Hill, who takes excessive and needless liberties with the original.#’ The rough and simple Latin of the Gesta and the many repetitious phrases are clearly stylistic choices made by the original authors; and so it is the intent of this translation to not allow editorial outlook to skewer or color what the Gesta has to say. It is the earliest account of the First Crusade, and that is indeed wonder enough.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق