The Knight, the Cross, and the Song. Stefan Vander Elst
followed Urban II’s call considered their vows fulfilled and returned home.2
To those who remained in the East, however, the following years were almost as challenging as the previous ones had been. Some, like Raymond of Saint-Gilles, the count of Toulouse who had led the Provençal contingent, had been left without territorial holdings of their own and sought to remedy this by aggressively expanding Christian dominion to the nearby regions that had as of yet avoided conquest.3 The three established principalities of Jerusalem, Antioch, and Edessa had to stabilize their frontiers against repeated attacks from their Turkish and Arab neighbors,4 as well as build up the machinery of a functioning state: fiefs had to be divided, obligations formalized, and systems of administration and collection established.5 A clerical hierarchy had also to be put in place; in the kingdom of Jerusalem, first under the rule of Godfrey of Bouillon (1099–1100) and then under that of his brother Baldwin I (1100–1118), this proved especially problematic, as the successive appointments to patriarch of Arnulf of Chocques in 1099 and of Daimbert of Pisa later that same year were disputed6 and led to conflict both within the clergy and between the clergy and the monarchy. Finally, disparate groups of Norman, Flemish, Italian, French, and Provençal settlers had to find common cause, and common identity, as subjects of new rulers who were often alien to them.7
The demands of state formation were made all the more difficult by a chronic shortage of settlers in the new principalities. The need for more men to cross the sea to help with the tasks of settlement, fight the battles, man the ramparts, work the land, and trade its products was a concern to the leaders of the Crusade army even before the final victory at Ascalon. Raymond of Aguilers, a priest of Provençe who traveled to the East in the retinue of Raymond of Toulouse, and who chronicled the Crusaders’ slow advance toward Jerusalem, described how the need for additional manpower affected the thinking of the army’s leaders. When discussing how to progress after the fall of Antioch in 1098, they wondered: “Will Christians from the West come if they hear of the fall of Antioch, Gibellum, and other Islamic towns? No, but let us march to Jerusalem, the city of our quest, and surely God will deliver it to us; and only then will cities on our route, Gibellum, Tripoli, Tyre, and Acre be evacuated by their inhabitants out of fear of the new wave of crusaders from Christendom.”8 The return home of much of the army after the conquest of the Holy Places furthermore removed the cutting edge that had carved out the principalities. The almost constant conflict of the ensuing years, coupled with high mortality among the Latins adapting to their new surroundings,9 compounded the demographic pressure on the nascent states. If they were to survive and flourish, the flow of motivated men, money, and material from West to East had to continue.10
In the West, the desire to sustain the Crusade enterprise was equally resilient. Popular interest was understandably strong—returning Crusaders, coming home with news of their spectacular victories, fired the imagination. Large new groups of Crusaders, joined by men who had not yet fulfilled the Crusade vows they had made in 1096, set out for the East, where, in the late summer of 1101, at Mersivan and Heraclea, they were defeated and scattered by Seljuq and Danishmend Turks.11 The extent to which the Western clergy, with the papacy at its heart, supported continued military expeditions to the lands beyond the sea is instanced by the vigor with which it encouraged—pursued, even—the Crusaders of 1101. Even though the liberation of the Holy Places, the professed goal of the Crusade as Urban II had presented it at Clermont and beyond, had been achieved, some of the underlying motives for his call to arms were rather more open ended. The spiritual revival of the Latin West, the moral reform of Latin chivalry, and the clerical control of lay violence—all of which the Crusade was intended to advance—were hardly completed when the Crusaders scaled the ladders at Jerusalem.12 Although the Crusaders had come to the aid of the Eastern Christians, there were now even more Christians in the Levant that needed protection against the threat of Islam; and if Urban had ever been concerned about the overpopulation of Western Europe, as Robert the Monk claims, that problem was not likely to be solved by the events of 1096–1099.13 There was still much work to be done, and church authorities were steadfast in their encouragement of the expeditions to the lands beyond the sea.
The First Crusade, however, had resulted from a more or less impromptu outpouring of popular enthusiasm, strongly tied up with the indelible image of a threatened Jerusalem. To guide the spiritual and martial energies that had driven the First Crusaders to the East into something enduring and continuing, now that the city was under Christian control, required some intellectual reorientation. Even though the campaign itself had on the whole been extremely successful, the status of the Crusader, or even the very meaning of Crusade, had been remarkably undefined.14 Although many considered participation a form of pilgrimage,15 there was no one notion of what it meant to go on Crusade, what should motivate those taking the cross, how it might benefit them, or what place Crusading occupied within the greater framework of Christian history. The job of convincing others to tread on the path laid by the First Crusaders therefore apparently depended, to a significant extent, on clarifying and interpreting what those First Crusaders had actually achieved.
The task of retelling the events of the First Crusade, and of placing them in an interpretative matrix that would encourage continued lay enthusiasm, fell to a number of writers who wrote about their experiences or adapted those of others in the years following the conquest of Jerusalem. Several of the earliest chroniclers, such as the anonymous author of the work known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolimitanorum,16 Peter Tudebode,17 Raymond of Aguilers, and Fulcher of Chartres, had themselves participated in the Crusade. Others, such as Albert of Aachen and Ralph of Caen, relied on the eyewitness testimony of those who had.18 A third group of writers with less direct access, such as Robert of Reims, Guibert of Nogent, and Baldric of Bourgueil, reworked earlier writings to suit their purposes.19 Their writings looked forward as well as back; they narrated the remarkable successes as well as the setbacks of the First Crusade, highlighting their moral or historical justice and their value as indications of God’s approval or disapproval while encouraging their audience to emulate the work so promisingly begun. It is, however, important to realize that there were multiple pressures at work on them. On the one hand, members of the clergy understandably were most interested in interpreting the events spiritually, seeking to read them morally or typologically so as to clearly show the path God laid out for the righteous. To them, the Crusade had been a pilgrimage to the heavenly Jerusalem as well as to the earthly place, a journey during which sins could be shed and the West purified under the auspices of the church.20 Indeed, far from their families and under constant duress from the elements, starvation, and enemy attack, the First Crusaders had sought salvation, in life or death, almost as if they had been monks. As most of these writers, with the possible exception of the author of the Gesta Francorum, were churchmen of varying degrees of importance, it is not surprising to see these concerns weigh heavily in how they represent the events of 1096–1099. Ranging from Raymond of Aguilers’s enthusiastic recognition of miracles throughout the campaign21 and Robert of Reims’s comparison of the Crusaders to the Israelites of the book of Exodus,22 to Guibert of Nogent’s description of Crusade as a divine answer to the internecine wars of the West,23 they expanded upon the place of the Crusade and the Crusader within providential history and church reform.
The writers of the early histories were, however, often also aware that the First Crusade had resulted in three (later four) incipient and very isolated Christian states, and that, rhetoric notwithstanding, the priorities of these were not always identical to those of the Latin Church. Pilgrims from the West could help conquer a city or keep the enemy tide at bay, but they would eventually return home just as so many of the First Crusaders had done. The settlements in these early years needed a continuous stream of financial and human reinforcement—the money to build up their structures and defenses, and the people to populate the newly Christian territories—that exceeded what a periodic expiation of individual sins could provide. The nascent Crusader states had, furthermore, to compete for such resources with other areas that saw Latin Christian expansion at the time, such as Spain and the lands east of the Elbe, a struggle in which their location on the far end of the Mediterranean put them at a disadvantage.24 They therefore required as many as possible of their Western coreligionists—including