The First Crusade: A Christian Endeavor?

Vladyslav Nazarchuk

The First Crusade (1096–1099), a religious war fought by Western European armies against Islamic rule in Anatolia and Palestine, and which culminated in the capture of Jerusalem by the crusaders in July of 1099, was undoubtedly one of the most distinctive and dramatic events in the history of Western Christianity. Will Durant, for instance, characterized the crusades as “the culminating act of the medieval drama,” in which “all medieval development, all the expansion of commerce and Christendom, all the fervor of religious belief, all the power of feudalism and glamor of chivalry came to a climax.”¹ However, opinion about the First Crusade is far from unequivocal in the modern day. While some may see it as truly a holy, heroic war that was ordained by God, a more cynical interpreter would understand it as simply a military campaign for power and wealth by Western princes, who used religion as a flimsy excuse for their actions. While some of these issues fall into the realm of moral judgment, what history can objectively reveal is how the First Crusade was interpreted in its own time, by its own participants and observers.

This essay investigates the question of whether the First Crusade, in its origin, was understood as a pious, Christian endeavor, or as an ordinary military or economic campaign, in the eyes of its contemporaries. To answer this question, both the Latin and Byzantine perspectives will be considered as to the causes and background of the First Crusade, using Western sources as well as the Alexiad of Anna Comnena. In turn, the essay will discuss the pilgrimage origins of the First Crusade, its direct predecessor in the Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–1065, Byzantine expectations regarding it, and its calling and organization by Pope Urban II. Throughout, the views and motivations of the various figures involved will be analyzed, to hopefully reach a comprehensive understanding of how this complex historical event came to be.

Crusade as Pilgrimage

Viewed through a purely religious lens, the First Crusade was essentially a mass pilgrimage with Jerusalem as the ultimate goal; as such, it can naturally be seen as a continuation of the robust Western medieval tradition of pilgrimage to the Holy Land (Palestine). During the eleventh century, there is evidence for at least 117 such pilgrimages.² Several factors made these pilgrimages much more common in the eleventh century than previously. First, the Byzantine Empire, through recent military successes, secured control of the Mediterranean Sea from the Arabs in the tenth century, and of the whole Balkan peninsula by 1019, allowing pilgrims to travel for long distances in relative safety. Second, Hungary was converted to Christianity in 975, opening up a route that directly connected Western Europe to the Byzantine frontier. In response to these developments, the Latin Church began to increasingly recommend pilgrimages as a way of penance and obtaining indulgences for committed sins; in particular, the monastic network of the Cluny Abbey in France began in the eleventh century to popularize and arrange pilgrimages to Jerusalem, building hostels for pilgrims along the route. Cluniac influence helps explain why the majority of the Western pilgrims to Palestine during the eleventh century were French, and why the subsequent First Crusade was a mostly Frankish enterprise.³

The Fatimid Caliphate, which controlled Palestine for most of the eleventh century, on the whole was hospitable to Christian pilgrims because of the wealth that they brought into the region.⁴ For example, the Fatimids helped rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem after its destruction in 1010,⁵ and allowed Italian merchants from the Duchy of Amalfi to build a hospital for pilgrims inside the city.⁶ However, the situation drastically worsened when Jerusalem was conquered by the Seljuk Turks in 1070, who were less accommodating to Christian pilgrims. This provided a justification for why the safety of Christian pilgrims to Palestine needed to be secured through military force. One story, for example, relates that Peter the Hermit (d. 1115), after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1088, brought back to Pope Urban II (d. 1099) a letter from the Patriarch of Jerusalem which described the persecution of Christians in that area and asked for papal aid.⁷ Peter the Hermit would go on to lead the failed “Crusade of the Paupers,” in which a large army of peasants was massacred by the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Civetot (1096), before the arrival of the main crusading army.

Anna Comnena (d. 1153) was a Byzantine historian contemporaneous with the First Crusade, and a daughter of the emperor Alexius I Comnenus (d. 1118) who was personally involved in the crusade on the Byzantine side. In her Alexiad, Anna links the persecution of Peter the Hermit himself with the start of the crusade. She writes that “A certain Kelt, called Peter, … left to worship at the Holy Sepulchre and after suffering much ill-treatment at the hands of the Turks and Saracens who were plundering the whole of Asia, he returned home with difficulty.”⁸ Peter, wanting to return and successfully complete his pilgrimage, devised the following plan. Anna writes that

“He decided to preach in all the Latin countries. A divine voice, he said, commanded him to proclaim to all the counts in France that all should depart from their homes, set out to worship at the Holy Shrine and with all their soul and might strive to liberate Jerusalem from the Agarenes.”⁹

Peter’s preaching was very successful, gathering up hosts of soldiers and civilians “as if he had inspired every heart with some divine oracle,”¹⁰ and initiating the First Crusade.

Anna claims to be impartial in her history, “by appealing to the evidence of the actual events and of eye-witnesses.”¹¹ However, Lilie notes that her chief aim, when relating the events of the First Crusade, is to justify the actions of her father Alexius, defending him from the crusaders’ accusations of breaking his promises of support for the Latin army.¹² Presenting the crusaders in a negative light thus aligns with Anna’s goals. Here, Anna completely omits the fact that the First Crusade was called together and organized centrally by Pope Urban II, who followed up on the requests for aid from Alexius himself. Instead, she attributes the start of the crusade solely to the preaching of Peter the Hermit (who in reality only began preaching in support of the crusade after it was pronounced by Urban).¹³ Further, she presents Peter’s preaching as a clever ploy for personal gain, rather than arising from genuine religious conviction. All of these misrepresentations likely serve to discredit the crusaders’ cause. Still, Anna does grant that the persecution of Western pilgrims to the Holy Land was in some way connected with the start of the crusade. Also, by including the call to “set out to worship at the Holy Shrine” in Peter’s speech, she implicitly characterizes the crusade as a sort of pilgrimage. This is further evident in that she describes the majority of the participants of the crusade as essentially well-intentioned pilgrims, writing that “the simpler folk were in very truth led on by a desire to worship at Our Lord’s tomb and visit the holy places.”¹⁴

The Great German Pilgrimage: A Proto-Crusade

The explicit transition from regular pilgrimages to the Holy Land to an armed crusade can be observed in the well-documented Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–1065, a mass pilgrimage which occurred several decades before the First Crusade, and which likely influenced the conception of the crusade itself. In November of 1064, a group of seven thousand pilgrims led by several German bishops set forth from Germany, traveled through Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Byzantine Empire, and arrived in Caesarea, a city of two days’ journey from Jerusalem, in March of 1065. Importantly, the bishops traveled with great riches, intending “by an ostentatious display of wealth and magnificence to impress their importance and dignity upon the minds of the peoples through whose lands their journey would lead.”¹⁵ Soon after leaving Caesarea, the pilgrims were attacked by a horde of Bedouin bandits, who were intent on robbing the pilgrims of their wealth.

Here, a crucial split among the pilgrims occurred. The majority, “mindful that they had solemnly dedicated their safety to God, refrained on religious grounds from using force and corporeal arms in self-defense,”¹⁶ keeping to the traditional, nonviolent pilgrim ideal. Some of these were killed by the Bedouins, while the rest, after being despoiled of all their possessions, were allowed to proceed to the neighboring city of Ramla. A sizable minority, however, decided that “the pious quest for the Holy Sepulchre did not, in a case of necessity, preclude forcible defense of life and property,”¹⁷ being driven by the bishops among them who did not want to surrender their great wealth. Although the pilgrimage was unarmed, this group defended itself with whatever weapons it could, eventually falling back to a dilapidated fort in the nearby village of Kafar Sallām, suffering many casualties in the process. The pilgrims held the fort against twelve thousand Bedouin soldiers for two days, but because they had only managed to carry their gold into the fortress but not food or water, eventually were forced to offer peace terms to the Bedouins, for the price of surrendering all their wealth to them.

However, when the Bedouin leader along with sixteen sheiks (Arab officers) entered the fort to inspect the wealth the pilgrims were offering to surrender to him, he insulted Bishop Gunther of Bamberg (d. 1065), the leader of the pilgrimage. Gunther then “leaped forward from his seat and thrust his fist into the face of his would-be captor,” and “pressed his foot down upon the neck of the prostrate Bedouin.”¹⁸ The rest of the pilgrims, “clergymen and laymen alike,”¹⁹ similarly seized the rest of the sheiks, using them as hostages to prevent the Bedouin army from attacking the fort again. Eventually, the pilgrims were relieved by an army of the Muslim emir of Ramla, who was afraid that “if the pilgrims perished in such miserable slaughter no one would afterward come through that land for the sake of prayer, and in consequence he and his people would suffer serious loss.”²⁰ Now under armed guard, the pilgrims finally arrived at Jerusalem in April of 1065, and after worshiping there, returned to Germany in July of 1065, this time by sea to avoid the dangerous land route through Palestine. Out of the seven thousand pilgrims who originally left for the pilgrimage, fewer than two thousand returned; Gunther died shortly before arrival to Bamberg, and was mourned as a hero, being both the leader of the pilgrimage as well as of the defense against the Bedouins.

Multiple interesting conclusions can be drawn from this historical episode. First, the pilgrimage must have confirmed to the West that pilgrimages to the Muslim-controlled Holy Land were no longer safe: both those pilgrims who remained nonviolent and those who fought back were killed. Second, the Great German Pilgrimage represents a crucial transition point in which a group of pilgrims consciously chose to forsake the traditional pilgrim ideal of devout nonviolence, and instead defended themselves en masse using force of arms. Joranson notes that, just like the pilgrims making up the Great German Pilgrimage were unarmed, there is no evidence that any pilgrims to the Holy Land, prior to this time, had been armed. Accordingly, most of the chroniclers “who describe or mention the hostilities at Kafar Sallām are at pains to justify the pilgrims for having fought at all.”²¹ The concept of the “warrior pilgrim,” introduced by the Great German Pilgrimage, is already quite close to the idea of crusade.

However, the Great German Pilgrimage also demonstrates some uncomfortable trends within Western Christian mentality, which retained their relevance during the First Crusade. First is the conjunction of religion and wealth: although the pilgrims were on a devotional voyage, their bishops nonetheless traveled with great riches, through which they sought to convey their religious importance. The pilgrims were not persecuted by the emir of Ramla (then part of the Fatimid Caliphate), and were only attacked by the Bedouin bandits because of the wealth they carried, not for religious reasons. Essentially, greed was the principal reason for why the pilgrims chose to defy tradition and defend themselves using force, and why they were forced to endure the Bedouin siege. Joranson notes that “the fact that they had fought to save worldly treasure was so utterly out of harmony with the prevailing concept of the pilgrim that but a single chronicler had the courage even to suggest it,” the rest of the Western chroniclers “carefully dissembling or ignoring this spiritually discomforting bit of history.”²²

Second, the Great German Pilgrimage helped normalize the involvement of clergy in military matters. Gunther, although a bishop, acted as a military commander during the siege, and even himself used violence against the Bedouin leader, with the other clergy helping in subduing the other sheiks. Moreover, the Western chroniclers of the pilgrimage do not see anything wrong with Gunther’s actions. Notwithstanding Gunther’s wealth and display of violence, the Annalist of Nieder-Altaich writes of him that “such was his perfection in manifold virtues … that in his own time he had been rarely if ever excelled, and it was almost unbelievable that posterity would behold his equal,”²³ and Gunther was mourned as a hero upon his death. Gunther acting as the military commander of the besieged pilgrims can be seen as a prototype for Pope Urban II later becoming the ultimate architect and director of the First Crusade.

Both of the problematic aspects described above align with how Anna Comnena would later disparage the crusaders in the Alexiad. Regarding love of wealth, she writes of the crusading Franks that “their greed for money … always led them, it seemed, to break their own agreements without scruple for any chance reason,”²⁴ and later adds that “the Latin race at all times is unusually greedy for wealth.”²⁵ Anna is also sharply critical of clerical involvement in war, contrasting it with the Orthodox mandate of nonviolence for priests. She writes that

“your Latin barbarian will at the same time handle sacred objects, fasten a shield to his left arm and grasp a spear in his right. He will communicate the Body and Blood of the Deity and meanwhile gaze on bloodshed and become himself a ‘man of blood’ … Thus the race is no less devoted to religion than to war.”²⁶

In particular, Anna relates an episode when “Count Richard of the Principate” (likely Richard of Salerno, d. 1114), while crossing the Adriatic Sea with his army on his way to the First Crusade, was intercepted by the Byzantine fleet that was patrolling the area. A fight ensued between the soldiers of Marianus—the son of Nicolas Mavrocatacalon (d. 1096), commander of the Byzantine fleet—and Latin marines led by a priest, who was also a “polemarch” (military officer). The priest fought with a variety of weapons, even while “covered with streams of blood from his wounds”;²⁷ when he finally ran out of weapons to use, the priest found a sack of barley-cakes, throwing them around “as if he were officiating at some ceremony or service, turning war into the solemnization of sacred rites,”²⁸ and hitting Marianus in the face with one of the cakes. Clearly, the whole episode is meant to mock the involvement of Latin clergy in war. Still, even though Anna’s descriptions of the crusaders may be biased or exaggerated, it is evident that her general criticisms are supported by the events of the Great German Pilgrimage, and thus likely are at least somewhat truthful in relation to the First Crusade itself.

Calling the Crusade: Piacenza and Clermont

The direct impetus for the First Crusade begins with the Council of Piacenza (March 1095), which was presided over by Pope Urban II. At this council, among the other matters discussed, Byzantine ambassadors of emperor Alexius I Comnenus addressed the assembly, asking for military help for the Byzantine Empire in helping it recover the territory it lost in Anatolia to the Seljuk Turks. Although the ambassadors appealed to Christian duty, emphasizing the hardships Christians faced under Turkish occupation,²⁹ Alexius essentially sought regular mercenaries for his army, appealing to the Pope primarily because the Pope was the only Western power which had an incentive to support the Byzantine Empire—in this case, for achieving ecclesiastical unity.³⁰ Alexius was following a well-established tradition in the eleventh century of Western mercenaries serving in the Byzantine army: previously, for example, Robert I, Count of Flanders (d. 1093) placed five hundred of his knights into the service of Alexius. Alexius never intended nor expected from the West a force of thirty thousand soldiers on a Holy War.

Accordingly, Alexius essentially treated the crusading armies as mercenaries during the First Crusade. For example, as the crusading princes were passing through Constantinople on their way to the crusade, Alexius sought to control the princes by making them swear an oath of fealty to him in the Western feudal manner. This oath, at least nominally, required that the crusaders give back to the Byzantine Empire all its former territories that the crusaders might conquer, as far as Jerusalem itself—an oath which some of the princes would later argue became invalid after Alexius had failed to fulfill his part in the feudal relationship.³¹ Then, Alexius used the crusaders to recover Byzantine territory in eastern Anatolia, and as a cover while he himself conquered western Anatolia. However, when the crusaders were faced with the arrival of an overwhelming Seljuk Turkish army at the Siege of Antioch in 1098, Alexius (convinced by Stephen, Count of Blois, that the crusader army was likely already destroyed) marched back to Constantinople instead of helping the crusaders, not wanting to risk his own army and empire. In all these situations, Alexius evidently prioritized the interest of the Byzantine Empire above any religious considerations, trying to cautiously control and use the crusading armies to his advantage as best he could. In fact, Anna Comnena explicitly denies any holy character to the crusade, writing of its leaders that “to all appearances they were on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem; in reality they planned to dethrone Alexius and seize the capital.”³²

Pope Urban II was evidently inspired by the request of Alexius’ ambassadors, but significantly modified it in developing his own idea of the First Crusade. Urban preached this crusade in a speech at the Council of Clermont in November of 1095 before an audience of 310 bishops and abbots, as well as laymen. On one hand, Urban essentially continued the pleas of the Byzantine legates, calling to mind the crimes done against Christians by the invading Turks, who “have killed and captured many, have destroyed the churches, and have devastated the kingdom of God,” and beseeching his audience to “hasten to exterminate this vile race from the lands of your brethren, and to aid the Christians in time.”³³ However, Urban makes no mention of serving as mercenaries in the Byzantine army; instead, he uses his papal authority to bless the enterprise and grant remission of sins to those who might die in the crusade. Invoking pilgrim imagery, Urban exhorts the crusaders to “enter upon the road to the Holy Sepulcher,” but also uses worldly wealth and power as additional enticements: “wrest that land from a wicked race, and subject it to yourselves. Jerusalem is a land fruitful above all others, a paradise of delights.”³⁴ Fulcher of Chartres (d. after 1128), a French chronicler and priest who participated in the First Crusade, nevertheless saw the crusade as a good work for the soul’s salvation, concluding that “Urban, a man prudent and revered, conceived a work by which the whole universe prospered.”³⁵

Thus, in presenting his idea of crusade, Urban appealed to a variety of different benefits: salvation, helping Christians in need, glory, land, and wealth. Accordingly, the motivations of the Western princes who responded to Urban’s call, each of which would lead his own army, also differed. For example, Godfrey of Bouillon (d. 1100), Bohemond of Taranto (d. 1111), and Tancred (d. 1112) had few political prospects in Europe; they intended to go to the East to establish lordships for themselves. On the other hand, princes such as Robert of Normandy (d. 1134), Count Robert of Flanders (d. 1111), and Count Stephen of Blois (d. 1102) already possessed rich lordships in Europe, and had no intention of remaining in the Holy Land: they went on the crusade solely for religious reasons and to attain glory. This difference in motivation would later be manifested in the events of the First Crusade: those leaders who sought to gain territory for themselves had more conflicts with the Byzantine emperor, and remained part of the crusade for longer, than those who were simply there for the glory of God.³⁶

Conclusion

Drawing together all the different threads which would come together to initiate the First Crusade in 1096, it is evident that the crusade had both sacred and secular origins. From a purely religious perspective, the First Crusade continued the Western tradition of pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and many of its participants genuinely had a pious motive to visit the holy places. At the same time, experiences such as the Great German Pilgrimage of 1064–1065 demonstrated to the West that military force needed to be involved to secure the safety of the pilgrims. The Great German Pilgrimage also “loosened up” for the Western mind the definition of what it meant to be a “pilgrim”: it became normalized for a pilgrim to also be a warrior, for these warrior-pilgrims to fight for worldly wealth, and for Latin clergy to lead and fight in war.

Accordingly, Pope Urban II combined all these aspects in conceiving and calling together the First Crusade. Since the crusade was for the sake of defending Christians from Muslim persecution, the whole endeavor was sanctified under the will of God: thus, it became allowable, and even virtuous, for the Western princes to kill, loot, and conquer over the course of the crusade—things which normally go against Christian ethics. However, the Byzantine perspective, as evidenced by the actions of Alexius and the historiography of Anna Comnena, never saw the First Crusade as having a holy character at all. Anna thought of the crusade as simply the product of a crafty preacher, condemned the Latin union between religion and war, and saw in the leaders of the crusade only greed and the desire to conquer Byzantium itself. Therefore, as a whole, there cannot be a simple answer to the question of whether or not the First Crusade started out as a truly Christian endeavor, since even its contemporaries disagreed in their assessment of its nature and causes.