by Anna Alloro
Crusader expeditions
If it is true that the Crusade, considered as a historical event concatenated with other historical events, is presented as the continuation of the war against Islam and is framed within the centuries-old antagonism that characterises the two strongest monotheistic religions of the Mediterranean basin, it is equally true that it must also be read as an exclusively and purely religious fact, the idea and implementation of Pope Urban II who, trained at Cluny, inherited the grandiose renewal programme of his predecessor Gregory VII.
The Crusade was proclaimed under the banner of universality and spirituality: in Clermont, on 27 November 1095, to the crowds of clergymen and laymen gathered in the open field, Urban addressed his appeal for the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels to all Christians without distinction. No nation states had yet arisen in Europe to erect political barriers preventing Christendom from rallying around the pope and his idea, and there was a military class ready to go, the cavalry. Without the cavalry, the Crusade, which was basically an enterprise of a few tens of thousands of men, would have been impossible.
Chivalry’ has often evoked the idea of a supra-temporal, meta-historical category, if not even consigned to the eternity of mankind. Instead, it is a well-documented historical fact: as a social, political and military phenomenon, it was born towards the end of the 10th century and can be considered one of the outcomes of the European feudal structure after the dismemberment of the Carolingian state; and although it presented itself with a peculiar initiatory character, it was later institutionalised, first by the Church and later by the secular power.
Life in Europe does not offer great prospects for knights. Most of them barely have enough to live on; their equipment consists of a lance, an iron helmet, a shield and a cloth suit; only the richest can afford a chain mail. For the young, generally poorly educated, it is essential to know how to fight at the right time; always on horseback from the moment they can mount a horse, they do nothing but fight: in tournaments, in small private wars, in family vendettas. Violent, coarse, superstitious, they are nevertheless excellent fighters and when the great adventure of the crusade is still far off, the knight is a man who fights and shows courage in defence of honour or faith, according to the canons of widespread chivalric morality.
The Church out of Cluny enlists knights in its ranks; directing their energies it bends them to its ends and provides them with an ethical code of conduct: thus a true chivalric ethic takes shape.
In the atmosphere of profound religious spirituality that pervaded souls at the time, it was not uncommon to find milites who, accepting the reforming programme of Gregory VII, pushed their adherence, personally or as a group, to the point of serene acceptance of martyrdom or at least informed their lives by the voluntary practice of poverty.
That this was the direction taken by the Church was demonstrated by Urban II in fully accepting and carrying forward the Gregorian programme. In announcing the crusade, the pope in fact outlines a framework of the tasks of the miles that go precisely in the direction of a ‘chivalrous way to holiness’, of redemption conquered through martyrdom at the hands of the infidel: it is a programme of a life spent in the service of God, the Church and His favourite children, the poor and the weak.
And yet, it is precisely the integration of the milites into the body of the Church renewed by the reform that introduces a profound laceration into ecclesiastical life and reflection. This choice in fact poses the Church with the dramatic problem of the justification of war, even the ‘sanctification’ of certain wars: the idea of the ‘holy war’ is born in the Christian area, however abysmal the distance separating this from the Islamic holy war. The Christian ‘holy war’, a synthesis of chivalrous adventure and penitential pilgrimage, produces the collective exaltation of the religious spirit, and truly succeeds in transforming the knights who take part in it: often disloyal, crapulonious and violent at home, in the fight against the infidel they never break their word and the homagium corresponds to the offering of their whole person, body and soul, to the pope and the cause.
The crusader knights, with their helmets with lowered concealment, covered from head to toe in heavy armour, were certainly better equipped than their eastern adversaries. This heavy cavalry, trained to charge compactly, with lance in rest, man-horse-armour forming a single, unstoppable projectile, was already famous: it was said that a single galloping knight would break through the walls of Babylon. Emperor Alexius did not hide his astonishment and fear at the sight of the Flemish horsemen riding through his city. And the legend of the undefeatability and courage of the crusader knights manifests itself in the countless trials at Nicaea, Antioch and finally under the walls of Jerusalem.
In Jerusalem, people had always known the feelings that their city aroused. The Jews had it in their hearts, the Muslims linked it to the prophets who had preceded Mohammed, the Christians worshipped it as the place where Christ had died and, according to their belief, risen again. The ideal land of these three peoples, whose father, according to the scriptures of all three, was one and the same, Abraham, was, in short, considered to be the centre of the world.
The crusader horsemen and foot soldiers, who had arrived in front of Jerusalem and its defenders, who had previously had deep moats dug around the city, formed one of the most powerful apparatuses of warfare in the history of those early years of the second millennium. The crusader infantrymen, the nucleus of siege warfare, represented seven-eighths of that army: they fought with spears and axes, but more successfully with crossbows, whose arrows, fired by mechanical shots, easily pierced through shields and armour. They struck at great distances: the technique of the crusader army was so perfected that each throw of two hundred crossbowmen was followed by the rapid deployment of five hundred shields, which, deployed in defence, allowed the crossbows to be slowly reloaded. And if imagination allows us to imagine the scene, it must have been a truly impressive spectacle for the besieged: swarms of arrows shot from a great distance; the enemy’s response, slow and difficult because of the space, was matched by the forest of shields that immediately closed in for protection. And when, on the evening of 14 July 1099, Raymond of Toulouse gave the order for the first assault tower to advance towards the walls of Jerusalem, not only did a deluge of arrows and stones hit the attackers: there was also talk of the launching of a sort of primitive napalm, the ‘Greek fire’, as the Crusaders called it.
Other attempts were repulsed. Together with the towers and rams, the attack carried out with the aid of the great catapults, mangonels and ballistae, eventually outweighed the desperate courage of the defenders. In short, torrents of blood were still shed, as on the first roads the crusade crossed, in the name of the God of love and peace whose Sepulchre was being conquered. The massacre of Muslims and Jews that followed the capture of the city was terrible if it is true what the chronicles of the time report: the horses of the Christian warriors who rode through the vanquished city sank in blood up to their knees.
The conquest of Jerusalem effectively ended the first expedition to the Holy Land, the Crusade par excellence. Held and ruled for less than 100 years, the holy city was forever wrested from the Christians in 1187, by Saladin.
The first crusade was to be followed by seven more official expeditions. After the tragic death of Louis IX, in 1270 on the Tunisian coast, the crusade was only postponed: first for three years, then to an indefinite point in the future, which never came. Without help, the last Christian bulwarks in Syria collapsed: the fall of St. John of Acre in 1291 put an end to the adventure in the Holy Land that had begun in Clermont, back in November 1095.
The idea of a ‘crusade’ has come down to us; even today, the term is currently used to indicate a collective action aimed at eradicating a widespread social evil, or, in an ideological sense, an organised fight experienced by those who undertake it as dutiful and global against any kind of scourge that could cause ethical-political breakdown.
The immense war effort of the Crusades proper, which lasted two centuries, had little or no direct consequences: it did not repel Islam, it did not create union with the Greek church, it did not even preserve Jerusalem.
The assumption of the spiritual and political conduct of the movement by the Catholic Church in the first person did, it is true, bear fruit: it united Europe in a common endeavour and directed untamed energies towards a precise goal; the Christian West, in fact, together with the ‘knights’ had also diverted turbid and restless elements to the East. But the mystical inspiration and religious spirit that had inspired the first crusade soon died out, allowing the Muslims to reconquer most of the lands occupied by the Christians, until the fateful date of 1291.
From the Crusades undoubtedly came a great increase in trade in the Mediterranean: it was the Italian maritime cities, the descendants of the ancient mercatores, who ultimately drew the most fruit from the Crusade. The warrior-merchants from Genoa, then Pisa, and finally also from Venice were, in fact, protagonists of the crusade epic on a par with the French, German, Flemish and English knights, so much so that the contribution of the fleets of the maritime cities, throughout the 12th and 13th centuries, was fundamental to the crusade movement. These cities derived rich profits from the expeditions, in addition to the proceeds of the booty collected in the warfare operations: first from the trade and the ‘passages’ of troops and pilgrims that they organised and then, other and more considerable, from their colonial installations on site. The Christian knights, who had fought and on many occasions aroused the admiration and respect of their enemies, may have dreamed of the realisation of a Church empire extending outremer, descending from Syria to the deep east. It was not to be.
Paradoxical and provocative is Le Goff’s judgement: ‘The crusades brought to Christendom neither the commercial development, born of earlier relations with the Muslim world and the internal development of the western economy, nor the techniques and products, which came by other routes, nor the cultural equipment, provided by the translation centres and libraries of Greece, of Italy (Sicily first and foremost) and Spain, where contacts were otherwise close and fruitful than in Palestine, not even that taste for luxury and those soft habits that grim Western moralists believe to be the prerogative of the East and a poisoned gift of the infidels to the naive and defenceless crusaders before the Eastern charms and enchantresses . .. The apricot is the only good fruit that Christians have gathered from the crusades’ (J. Le Goff, Civilisation of the Medieval West, Florence, 1968, p. 78-79).
The editorial is an excerpt from the article I cavalieri in Terrasanta (Knights in the Holy Land) by Anna Alloro, published in the catalogue of the Mostra Cavalleria e ordini cavallereschi in Casanatense [P. 61-103] held in 1995.
The pictures illustrating the editorial are taken from J.F. Michaud, History of the Crusades…, Florence, 1842 2 v.R.III.91-92
Read more:
CATALOGUE – Chivalry and Knightly Orders in the Casanatense. Rome, Biblioteca Casanatense, 1995