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An Introduction To The First Crusade

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The passage provides an overview of the research and debates around the causes and origins of the First Crusade. It argues that the traditional textbook view of the Crusades being a response to Turkish conquests needs modification.

According to textbooks, the immediate cause of the Crusades was the Turkish conquest of the Near East, which was seen as a threat to Christendom that needed to be countered by military action. Textbooks also viewed the Turks as always being an intolerant race based on later Ottoman history.

The author argues this view needs modification because Christians and the Holy Land had been under Muslim rule for over 4 centuries before 1095 without a Crusade. Islam generally allowed non-Muslims to practice their religion under Muslim political rule. Persecution by Al-Hakim was an exception.

The Past and Present Society

An Introduction to the First Crusade Author(s): Claude Cahen Reviewed work(s): Source: Past & Present, No. 6 (Nov., 1954), pp. 6-30 Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/649812 . Accessed: 13/02/2012 16:35
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PAST AND PRESENT

An Introduction to the First Crusade

THE SUBJECT OF THE CRUSADESIS ONE THAT HAS FASCINATEDVERY

many writers in the past, and still continues to attract apologists of all persuasions, not only religious, but political, and social. Nevertheless the more that is written, the less there seems to be of value to the scientific historian. It cannot be denied that some of the literature is very erudite, and that many of the authors have tried to look at things from a new point of view. In spite of this the popular textbooks continue to serve up the same traditional errors, while learned works, besides suffering from weaknesses due to the contemporary outlook on history, suffer also from certain inherent difficulties. The Crusades belong to the history of both West and East, and it is difficult for a historian to be an expert in both. This short article does not pretend to provide even a plan for a comprehensive study of the whole subject. All that I shall attempt will be to examine the particular question of the First Crusade, giving an outline of the progress recently made in research, and suggesting desirable lines of further study. For nine and a half centuries, the textbooks have repeated, almost word for word, with mechanical regularity, that the cause, or at least the immediate cause, of the Crusades was the Turkish conquest of the Near East, which they say constituted a very real threat to Christendom, that had to be countered by military action. Looking at the Turks in the light of the later history of the Ottoman Empire, historians have supposed them to have been always an intolerant race. As a first step this traditional view must be considerably modified. In IO095 many Christian peoples and the Holy Land itself had already been subject to the Moslems for four and a half centuries, and yet there had been no Crusade. Islam, in its attitude towards unbelievers had from the first been faithful to two distinct principles, on the one hand that the believer was bound by his faith to the duty of the jihad, the Holy War, whose aim was to bring the unbeliever into political subjection to Islam, on the other hand that such subjection involved no forced conversion, and the unbeliever, once relegated to his inferior and subordinate position, enjoyed the protection of the Moslem Law. Naturally there had been occasional outbursts of fury. The only serious one had been El-Hakim's

AN INTRODUCTIONTO THE FIRST CRUSADE

persecution at the beginning of the XIth century, in Egypt and Syria. This had made a deep impression in the West, because of the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre. News of this outrage was carried home by returning pilgrims. But El-Hakim was mad, and the persecution was never resumed after his death. In spite of this there continued to be numerous conversions to Islam: the material and moral advantages of conforming to the religion of the ruling power were obvious enough to account for them without the need of any other pressure. Nevertheless in Palestine and Syria it is probable that Christians remained at the end of the XIth century as numerous as Moslems, and in some places, like the Lebanon, much more numerous; their life was no different after the Turkish conquerors came from what it had been ever since the Arab conquest in the VIIth century. As for the jihad, long before the Turkish conquest it had lost the character of a great offensive and a serious bid for conquest that it had had in the first generations after the death of Mohammed. Since the VIIIth century it had only existed as a series of almost routine forays, becoming more and more infrequent, which were launched against the frontier territories of the enemy for the sake of booty, with no idea of conquest. Even in this form the Holy War became fainter and fainter; it had real interest only for the soldiers on the frontiers, and was a matter of complete indifference to the Moslem population in the heart of Islam. Indeed the frontiersmen, both on the Moslem and on the Infidel side, were often military colonists only loosely attached to their central governments, and between raids they fraternised with each other in complete indifference to frontiers and religious differences. Armenia and Spain provided remarkable examples of such co-existence. It is true that in the middle of the Xth century there was a revival in the East of the idea of the Holy War. The initiative was Byzantine. Taking advantage of a temporary political break-down in the Moslem world, the Byzantine emperors had taken the offensive to recover those parts of eastern Asia Minor and northern Syria which had been lost to the Moslems three centuries earlier. The Hamdanid dynasty of Aleppo, characteristically deserted by the other Moslem states, was left to face the attack alone. The founder of that dynasty, Saif ad-Daula, was supported by the Bedouins, professional marauders, and by the poets, who, imbued with the herioc spirit of ancient Arab poetry, were the creators or the voice of public opinion. He had stubbornly resisted the invaders and sometimes counter-attacked, thereby restoring the tradition of the

PAST AND PRESENT

jihad to a place of honour. But this had been but a brief conflagration. People had become used to Byzantine victories, between Christians and never was there more intrigue or fraternisation and Moslems against other Christiansand other Moslems than in the XIth century. In only two areas did the spirit of the jihad survive, and there it was directed against pagans, and not Christians: in the Sahara, amongst the groups of wild and fanatical warriors sheltered by the ribat, Murabitun(the Almoravides);and in centralAsia, in the region of the Syr-Daria, the ghdzis, those volunteer champions of the Faith, a sort of militant religious order who renewed against the Turks beyond the frontiers the immemorial tradition of the conflict of the sedentary Iranians with the nomadic " Turanians." It was no chance co-incidence of time which was to give these men, of the West and East alike, a new importance in this history of the Moslem world. In the XIth century the Moslem West presenteda picture of political anarchy, and, in the eyes of the teachers of the Law, the theologians and the jurists, one of depravity and decay. They found it easy to win over the wild fanatics to a programme of making a " clean sweep" of this corruption: they appealed to the Almoravides who conquered a large part of north Africa. In Spain they could not have succeeded so easily had not circumstances been favourable, for Spanish society was more cultivated,and opposed to " barbarian" intervention. The favourable conditions were provided, involuntarily, by the Christians. The war between the Christians in the North and the Moslems in the South of the Peninsula had been going on with alternating periods of vigour and relaxationfor three hundred years, but now, owing to the internal divisions in their country it was, as far as the Moslems were concerned, almost extinct. But among the Christians, because of the breakdown of Moslem unity, it had again resumed its aggressive character. Moreover, and this is note-worthy, for reasons which will be given later, the war was no longer waged merely by the Christiansof Spain, who had formed the habit of combining war with the needs of " peaceful co-existence," but also by ultramontane warriors, by Frenchmen who were strangersto such needs, and who thought only of fighting and pillaging under cover of religious duty. It was to save themselves from this danger that the Spanish Moslems admitted the Almoravides. Thus by the end of the XIth century Moslem Spain had recovered its political unity at the price of submitting to the leadershipof a people animatedby the spirit of war and intolerance.

AN INTRODUCTIONTO THE FIRST CRUSADE

A similar development had taken place in the East. There too the state of the Moslem world, divided politically, socially and religiously, seemed a scandal to the leaders of orthodoxy. They therefore looked for an instrument which would restore order to their own advantage. They found it in the Turks. By that time the Turks had been effectively converted to Islam. Being recent converts, zealous and strait-laced, they were easily persuaded of the necessity for energetic action. Their chiefs, often skilled military leaders, found here just what they wanted. The ghdzis no longer opposed the Turks, who were now Moslems. On the contrary the Turks now became the best recruits of the ghdzzs. Having been converted to Islam as it was on the frontiers of central Asia, they had adopted the Islam of the ghazis which so well suited their way of life and their customary liking for raids. They now had only to divert these raids against their kinsfolk to the North who were still pagan. In the outcome almost all Moslem Asia was conquered by the Turks to the benefit of the ruling Seljukid family. Moreover the Turks who carriedout this conquest were nomads, Turcomans as they were called, inspired with the zeal of the ghadzsand impatient to transfer their activities to all the new frontiers where they had been installed by the creation of the Seljuk empire. From the point of view of the relations between Moslems and Christians, with which we are here concerned, the effect of this was two-fold. The fate of the Christians who lived inside the Seljuk empire was unaffected. The Seljukids, heirs of orthodox Moslem tradition, applied to their non-Moslem subjects the legal protection afforded by Islam. The Christians outside the Moslem world were subjected to a renewal of the Holy War of early Islamic history. The result was a new surge of Moslem expansion which took advantageof the dissensions among the Byzantines, and robbed them of almost all Asia Minor - virtuallyhalf of their empire. This conquest was made almost against the will of the Seljukidswho were much more concerned with the struggle against the heresies within the Moslem world than with the subjection of infidels outside it. They had simply given their head to the Turcomans who would otherwise have been a source of trouble and disquiet. Used to a wandering life, impatient of all the restrictions of the central government and of the rights of privateproperty,still half savageand accustomed to pillage and blood-shed, the Turcomans were difficult subjects for any master to control. To incorporate them in Asia Minor as part of the Seljuk empire would have been a difficult task, for there was no established Seljuk administration there and the

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Turks were as yet incapable of instituting one; to do so would have meant a definitive breach with the Byzantine empire, which to some extent the Seljukids preferred to have available in order at need to use its good offices against Turcomans themselves. They therefore left the Turks to do as they liked in Asia Minor and Byzantium was impotent to hold them. There ensured a period of cruelty, suffering and destruction. The vital date is the Byzantinedisasterat Manzikert (IO7I), where the emperor was taken prisoner. Undoubtedly for the Byzantine empire this was territorially disastrous and the occasion of terrible suffering for the Christians of Asia Minor. Only two reservations must be made: first, the ravages of the Turcomans had been almost as devastatingin all the Moslem countries which had resisted them; secondly, while the state of war long continued on the whole periphery of western Asia MLinor, elsewhere, once the wave of devastation had passed, life was reorganised and we are presented with quite a different picture.
* * *

It must be remembered that in the Near East there was not one but several Christian communities. Within the Byzantine Empire the official Church comprised the vast majority of believers, subject to the patriarchate of Constantinople; there were also Christians of the Greek rite, but for the most part Arab speaking, in Egypt, Syria and Armenia, who were subject to the patriarchatesof Antioch, Jerusalem and Alexandria. But there were other Churches, long separated from Constantinople and Rome: the Maronites of the Lebanon, separated more de facto than de jure, the Jacobite Monophysites in Syria, Mesopotamia, and the upper Euphrates, the Coptic Monophysites in Egypt, the Nestorians in Mesopotamia, Persia and central Asia, and finally the Armenians, who had their own national Church. All these were Churches of communities which for centuries had been in opposition to the Greek Church, less by reason of doctrinal differences, however important such differences were for the theologians, than by reason of the mutual jealousies between their independent hierarchies, their established property rights, and above all of their racial differences. They had earlier welcomed the Arab conquest as a deliverance from the domineering and mischief-making Greek Church. The non-Greek Christians of eastern Asia Minor ha.d found almost insupportable the restoration of Byzantine authority. The Greek Church in the

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Xth and XIth centuries had not learnt by experience to be more tolerant than it had been before the Arab conquest. Therefore whatever they had suffered from the Turcoman invaders the local churches were convinced that what the Greeks suffered was well deserved, and there were even some exceptional cases of native Christianswho lent a hand to the Turcomans againstthe Greeks. More generally, there is no doubt that in the period immediately following the Turkish occupation the native non-Greek Christians had recovered at the expense of the Greeks the equivalent of what the momentary devastation of the Turcomans had cost them. Not only were they free of the religiousand fiscal oppressionof Byzantium, but also, because the Turcomans had no idea of administration,they were left alone to run their own.internal affairs. It is also probable that, on a more purely ecclesiastical level, they inherited churches which either they had taken from the Greeksor which the Greekshad abandoned, as we know happened at Antioch. The Armenians benefited less than the Monophysites, for among the Armenians there remained a party allied to the Greeks, and even among the enemies of the Greeksthere were some warriorlords who endeavoured to carve out for themselves principalities beneath the heights of the Taurus. But for the Monophysites, who had long lost all political ambition and all attachment to any foreign power whatever the benefit was unqualified. For the Greeks the Turkish conquests were clearly a catastrophe. Yet its magnitude must not be exaggerated. It is true that the Greek prelates were suspect in the eyes of the Turks of complicity with Byzantium. Nevertheless there was no systematic opposition to their continued residence in the country. Sulaimanibn Kutlumush (Qutalmish), the conqueror of Asia Minor and Antioch, allowed the Greek patriarch to continue to reside in that city and did not even stop him from making visits to Constantinople. Sula'iman, Moslem as he was, affected to consider himself the lieutenant of the Basileus. Many Greek bishops, like many of their flocks, fled from Asia Minor, but more often because of the material difficulties of existence or the diminution in the number of believers than in consequence of any proscription. Some prelates stayed, and in any case, on the lower level, the monks and the priests remained, and the Greek communion, shrunken it is true, did not disappear. Gradually the Moslem. state in Asia Minor organised itself and the situation of Christiansof all rites was much as it was in other Moslem lands. In order thoroughly to understand the situation in Palestine it is

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necessaryto bear in mind some facts and dates which even the experts have not always appreciated. First it must be remembered that long before the arrivalof the Turks the Bedouins had kept Palestine in a state of semi-anarchy and insecurity which the Fatimid government had been unable to bring to an end. With the Fatimids, who represented in the Moslem world the Ismailian heresy which the Seljuks were pledged to extirpate, the Byzantine Empire maintained diplomatic relations, and thus they had been able to help the Christians, particularlythose of the Greek rite, to rebuild the ruins left by El-Hakim's persecution. In I071 Palestine was conquered by a Turcoman chief named Atsiz, who was acting on his own account and not for the Seljukids. In 1079 it was incorporatedin the Seljuk dominions, forming together with central Syria the appanage of Prince Tutush; he in his turn in io86 granted it as a fief to another Turcoman chief, Artuk, who had been long in the Seljukid service; finally, in 1098, the Fatimids recovered Palestine from Artuk's heirs after his death. It is probable that the wiping out of Byzantine influence benefited the non-Greek Christians at Jerusalem as elsewhere. Atsiz had to nominate a Christian, a Jacobite, as governor of the Holy City, for any Moslem he might have appointed would have been suspect of Fatimid sympathies. In 1076 the Turcoman ruler put down a revolt of the Moslems in the City with much bloodshed, while the Christians, who since the repair of the ramparts in the middle of the XIth century had been segregated in a special quarter, were unharmed. Even the Greek Patriarch, Symeon, was allowed to live in the City. The anonymous author of the History of the (Coptic) Patriarchsof Alexandriapraises Atsiz, which is the more remarkable because some years later the same author was to complain of the intolerance of the Crusaders. It was true (he admits) that the Turcomans denied the miracle of the Sacred Fire which at Easter every year came down to light a candle in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but then in the year when the Franks came, the miracle never took place at all. Artuk (perhaps)shocked the Christians to the soul by shooting an arrow into the roof of the Holy Sepulchre, but that was merely the traditional Turkish way of signifying that they had taken possession, and not a gesture of religious intolerance. In all the lands incorporated in the Seljukid Empire, including, after the fall of Atsiz, Palestine, the situation of the Christians was perfectly normal. There was perhapsa greaterreluctancethan under previous regimes to employ non-Moslems as high officials, but that did not affect the ordinary people and there was nothing systematic about it. Everybody, Moslems included, complained of the ravages

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of the Turcomans. The new Empire was quickly organised. A


chorus of praise for the great Seljukid sultan Malik Shah (IO73-92)

was voiced alike by Moslems and by Christians who had no axes to grind. His reign symbolised the return of order, security and equal justice for all. It may be that the Armenian literary style of a Matthew of Edessa, a Sarcavag or a Stephen Orppelian is inflated by rhetoric; but the same impression is given by the more measured prose of the Chronicles of the Jacobite Michael the Syrian and the Nestorian Amr bar Sliba. It is true that the death (in 1092) of Malik Shah markedthe beginning of a period of dissensions, but they injured the people no more than the similar quarrels which had filled earlier Moslem history, and in any case they were not antiChristianin character. It is well known that the Turks imprisoned the patriarchJohn of Antioch in 1097, but the Christians,reinforced by the Byzantines, were then under the walls of the city. Similarly, when the Crusaderswere approachingJerusalemthe Egyptians drove several Christian dignitaries into exile, among them Symeon, who went to Cyprus: but in neither case can this be regardedas more than a measure of elementaryprudence. It is an established fact that the non-Greek Christians sent no appeal to the West, not even to the Papacy. The exchange of letters between Gregory VII and an Armenian Catholicus (patriarch) reveals nothing of that sort. Even though the Orientals had met a considerablenumber of Norman mercenaries,it was difficultfor them to envisage the dispatch to the East of a real western army, even had they wished for it. There is nothing to indicate that they had been complaining of their fate any more than usual or had expressed any but the traditional desire for deliverance. It is true that the West had seen Palestinian monks asking alms on behalf of their Church, seeking to arouse the pity of the faithful, but that was nothing new; it had long been a practice, more common immediately after the destructionof the Holy Sepulchre. There are no gounds for thinking that the Turkish conquest had increased the number of such mendicants or accentuated the pathetic force of their appeal. It is noteworthy that when later oriental writers tried to explain the genesis of the Crusades they never spoke of any sufferings of the Eastern Christians. Ibn al-Athir cites the aggressive policy of the N ormans of Italy; another Moslem al-Azimi, and a Christian, Michael the Syrian, who was particularlysensitive to the concept of Christianfraternity,only adduce the stories of western pilgrims which obviously derive from Westernersalreadyestablishedin the East.
* * *

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But what truth is there in these stories of the molestation of pilgrims ? The pilgrims had the choice of two routes from the West to Palestine; some crossed the European continent, the Byzantine empire and Asia Minor; certainly for these the persistence of Turcoman disorder in Asia Minor was as good as a denial of passage. But that did not mean a denial of the possibility of pilgrimage altogether; it was possible to travel by sea, either from Constantinopleor from Italy. This second route was the one which Italian merchants had been following for generations. It was unaffected by the Turkish conquest, which had not reached all the Syrian ports. Even those which were affected, like Antioch, were still as much visited by the Venetians and others as before, and the Venetians were luke-warm supporters of the Crusade. Nothing then prevented the pilgrims going to Palestine by sea. It may be that for two or three years the Turcoman disorders had interfered with Palestine also; but we also know that two pilgrimages had been disturbed by the Bedouins in 1055 and 1064, that is before the coming of the Turks; and by about oo80there was certainly greater security than there had been for a long time. The disappearance of the semi-protectorate of Byzantium over Jerusalem may have actually worked in favour of the Latin clergy: at least that is what a passage in Nicon of the Black Mountain implies, if its dating is to be relied on. The Amalfitanshad two hospices in Jerusalem,which may indeed be older than the Turkish conquest, but which certainly continued to function after it. The truth is that pilgrimages continued as before. It is true that there were none as importantas that it of o1064; was learnt by experience that a troop of that size excited the covetousness of the Bedouins. But we know of many cases of pilgrims reaching Turkish Jerusalem as their fathers had reached Arab Jerusalem. They had grievances, it is true, but it must be repeated that most of them areknown to us only from writingssubsequentto the Crusade, and that such grievances are adduced as a justificationafter the fact. Even if we accept them as true, they must be admitted to be merely laughable. Often they come down to mere acts of petty spite, such as are always provokedby the close proximity of two hostile religious communities (Moslems relieving themselves in churches, and so forth); sometimes they merely reveal that the pilgrims had no conception of the problems of a developed administration. It was naturalthat they should have found it hard, after a costly journey, to have to pay a fee to enter the Holy City, but they had had to pay for the right to cross Byzantine territory; and it is very difficult to regard

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this as a mark of intolerance. Even the most galling experience known to us, that of the pilgrims who for lack of money were unable to enter the Holy Places, belongs to the period of the pilgrimage of Fulk Nerra, Count of Anjou, some sixty years before the appearance of the Turks in this area. To sum up: The Turkish invasion of Asia Minor was a disaster for Byzantine Christendom,with some compensationsfor non-Greek Christians;to the Christiansof the Moslem countries and of Palestine in particularit brought temporarysufferings which they shared with their Moslem neighbours: as these territories became incorporated in the Seljuk empire, the Christianinhabitantsfound themselves in a situation very like that which they had always known under Islam. The pilgrims had been annoyed at having to abandon one traditional route, but had not been prevented from using another instead, and were no less welcome in Jerusalemthan before. This then is the problem: why was it that when the real danger was to Byzantium, that the Crusadecame to be directed to the rescue of the Holy Sepulchre which was not in danager? It is clearly a case of the substitution of motive. The danger which the Crusade sought to avert was not the real danger. Naturally in the mind of the average Crusader there was not substitution but confusion. Monophysites and Greeks, Asia Minor and Palestine, el-Hakim and Malik Shah, all that for him merged into a vague picture of the East confused by the dazzling light of the Cross. He envisaged churches laid waste and pilgrims molested, as he was told by the propagandists. Much more often it was a matter of abstract Christian feeling and of the humiliation he felt at the domination of Islam in the places where the Saviour had lived. But even if this confusion made the substitution of motives pqssible, it is not of itself sufficient to explain how that substitution came about. So there is a second problem: the western world revised everything it had ever known about Islam; that which before had merely nourished a passive sense of grievance now became the motive for action; that which hitherto had been borne with equanimity was now felt to be intolerable. The explanation of this phenomenon can be sought in two directions: in Byzantine propagandaor in the situation in the West.
* * *

There was at least one mediaeval author who saw the problem of substitution. P. Charanis has recently drawn attention to a passage in a Byzantine chronicler of the early XIIIth century which

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seems to indicate that it was Alexius Comnenus himself who, knowing that it was vain to seek reinforcementsfrom the West merely to save Byzantium, made the central theme of his propaganda the rescue of the Holy Places. Indeed this theme had already on occasion been sufficiently useful to Byzantium itself for there to be no need for its invention now; it had been used when John Tzimisces in 975 led an expedition up to the very walls of the Holy City. But that had been an exceptional episode. Byzantine policy had been much more directed to the stabilisation of the frontiers of Asia Minor than to an eccentric thrust towards Jerusalem, neither is there any reason to think that the Patriarchateof Constantinople,having already seen the reincorporation of the Patriarchate of Antioch in the Empire, was insistent on the acquisition of that of Jerusalem also. The Byzantine emperors had concerned themselves, without undue haste, in the rebuilding of the Holy Sepulchre, but it cannot be said that Jerusalem occupied in the mind of eastern Christendom, Greek or non-Greek, the same place as in that of the West in the XIIth century; the Greeks did make pilgrimages but, except for those from the neighbouring provinces, not in any great numbers. In any case as far as the present problem is concerned it does not seem that the evidence of the Byzantine chronicler should be given much weight. It is more than a century later than the events with which it deals and is chiefly interesting as indicating awarenessof the problem in the mind of an author known to be otherwise concerned to discover a basis for France-Byzantine collaboration; but in the last analysis the Crusade was organised by the Pope, and who will believe that the Pope confounded Jerusalem and the Byzantine Empire? If he did in fact connect them, whether it was suggested to him or not, it was because it seemed good to him to do so, and the reason for it can only be sought in his own policy and in the situationin the West. Even so it does not of course follow that there are any grounds for under-estimating the effect of the appeals of Byzantium for help. There is no doubt that such appeals were made. But to understand them there is something else to bear in mind. Since 1054 there had been an open schism between the Churches of Constantinople and Rome, a fact which clearly compromised their relations on the political level also. Recent research however has made possible a less radical interpretationof the Schism than that which was long accepted. On the one hand what happened in 1054 was much more the declarationof a separationwhich had long existed in fact than a new phenomenon: at the most it was a reaction against the tentative rapprochementwhich had been provoked by the danger which the

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Norman expansion in southern Italy in the middle of the XIth century presented to Constantinopleand Rome alike. On the other hand, this Schism, which we to-day know has widened and endured, was not felt except by some extremists to be irremediable; it was not the first, and it did not, like heresy proper, destroy the feeling of belonging to the universal Church, which though torn by dissensions, and with rival hierarchies, yet remained one and the same. Finally even if the will to schism may have been strong in the Patriarchate of Constantinople, it was weaker at Antioch, which stood to gain much less than Constantinople,and it was even weaker at Jerusalem, where the Patriarch,beyond the Byzantine frontier, had daily to rub shoulders with Christians of all rites, Latins included. In such circumstancesthe negotiations for military aid to Byzantiumthrough Papal mediation took the form on both sides of a spiritual-temporal bargain: in Byzantium the Emperors, anxious to obtain political help had to take into considerationthe Pope's opinion, and allowed the hope to be aroused that re-union would follow military aid; Rome may have been inclined to make the willingness of the Greeks to accept religious union the price of persuadingthe western princes to come to the aid of Byzantium. In Byzantium for fifteen years the Turks had been regarded only as pillagers, insufferable it is true, but not a serious danger to the political integrity of the empire. For reasons of internal politics the recruitingof the indigenous population had been in part replaced by the enrolment of foreign mercenaries, especially Normans. But it had not seemed necessary to make any further effort before the time of Romanus IV Diogenes (IO68-107I). He alone, and in vain, had tried to make peace with the Normans in Italy in order to be free to act against the Turks. After the disaster of Manzikert his successor, Michael VII, at the price of the total renunciation of Italy, secured not only peace but an alliance(IO74). In the meantime he had also tried a rapprochementwith the Pope, but the effort was wrecked on the religious obstacle, and, it seems, was only actively pursued in Byzantiumin so far as the Emperordespairedof obtaining an alliance with the Normans, which would have been far more immediately useful. Gregory VII, however, who had just become Pope, had, as we shall see, takenthe question of rescuingthe Byzantine Empire very much to heart, and had alreadytaken steps in the West with that end in view. There was another question which occupied the first place in the attention of the Church. Though for more than a century it had vivendi with the western Empire, now, maintained a sort of mnodus

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as a result of the movement for reform, the Church was emancipating itself from the Empire, and was rapidly entering into open conflict with it. In order to be able eventually to resist an attack by the Emperorthe Papacy had since 1059 had to envisage a reversal of alliances. It had opened negotiations with the Normans, who like their northern kin, were inclined to seek the collaborationof the clergy in political matters. These negotiations had resulted in an alliance. As the conflict with the Empire was more or less fended off during the minority of the emperor Henry IV and as the Normans found it irksome to give up their predatory habits, this alliance became somewhat tenuous under Alexander II. But from 1076 there was a complete rupture and soon bitter war between the Papacy and the Empire. Robert Guiscard, the principal leader of the Normans, had become a powerful prince. The alliance was confirmed and Gregory VII was hardlyin a position to argueabout terms. In ByzantiumMichael VII had been overthrown (IO78), and Robert, as usual, was eager to get possession of the Greek shores of the Straits of Otranto. War broke out between him and Byzantium and Robert obtained the papal blessing for his expedition as the price of his helping the Pope against Henry IV. This meant the renunciation of any policy of Christianfraternitywith the East. But in 1085 both Guiscard and Gregory died, and Gregory's successor Victor III soon after. Among the divided Normans it was Guiscard's brother Roger, who had already won Sicily from the Moslems, who became supreme. He had no interest in the war against Byzantium which might cost him the valuable help of the numerous Greeks of Sicily and Calabria in his struggle with the Moslems. In ConstantinopleAlexius I Comnenus, who had ousted Michael VII's successor [Nicephorus III Botaniates, IO078-81], was above all concerned with the needs of the struggle against the Turks of Asia Minor and against their kindred the Pechenegs, who were menacing Bulgaria. Finally, the new pope, Urban II, was a diplomatist who had no desire to see Byzantium helping Henry IV or the antipope whom Henry had set up, or to risk such an alliance of the two Emperorsbecoming the prelude to a union of the Churches against the Papacy. The negotiations, protracted throughout the year 1089, had no definite result. But it is clear that they did create a new climate of opinion and that in the course of the ensuing years the quarrel was allowed to die down, that anything which might revive it was carefully avoided, and it was doubtless hoped that progressive collaborationon other levels would lead graduallyto the

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revival of Union. The Pope raised for Alexius a small reinforcement against the Pechenegs, while perhaps the detente also helped the Byzantine Emperor to recruit others, particularly from Robert count of Flanders whom Alexius had known since Robert's pilgrimage to Jerusalem. It is certain that when the Crusade began the Crusaders, in the first stages, did not treat the Greeks as religious
enemies.

Did Alexius ask for the Crusade? No, if it is meant that Alexius asked for the organisation of the expedition in the form which it actually assumed. But that at Piacenza, where at the beginning of 1095 the Pope held a Council, the Byzantine ambassadorsasked for help for their master and that the Pope spoke to the assembly in that sense cannot to-day be doubted, much as the matter has been contested. Yet that is not the essential question, for the Crusadewas properly speaking something quite other than the recruitment of soldiers for Byzantium by Papal mediation. And therefore it is in the West that we must end our search.
* * *

We must deal first with the Pope, because it was to him and not to the Emperor that the appeal was made. I will not dwell upon the fact which has been so well brought out of late by differentmediaevalists that the Church, having for centuries left the temporal sword to the Empire, and been content to confine itself to encouraging those wars which were fought for the defence or expansionof Christendom, had come eventually to believe that when the temporal power was deficient, even more when it was hostile, it was the right or even the duty of the Church to conduct such wars itself. Nor do I wish to dwell on the birth of the associatedidea, alreadyexplicit in the mind of Gregory VII and natural to clerics recruited largely from the seigneurial class, that service in arms might also be service to the Church, and that the pernicious warlike activity in which so many feudal lords engaged and which the Truce and the Peace of God had tried to restraineven if they could not end it, might at least be diverted to war for the Faith. All this was alien to Byzantine mentality. Because the Byzantines had often been at war with their Moslem neighbours and because the Cross and the prelates had taken part in those campaigns, they have been regarded as pre-Crusades. We must beware of confused thinking. That the Byzantine people had regarded some of these wars as holy wars is true, but the Byzantine

20

PAST AND PRESENT

Church had always refused to consider that participation in such wars could be of itself a Christianvirtue which could win for soldiers a diminution of their penalties before the tribunal of divine judgement. The western Church was now proclaiming that with certain reservations the war for the Faith could earn partial or complete absolution from sin. It was therefore only in the West that the concept of the Holy War fully developed. Both the idea and the practice of the Holy War developed under the aegis of the Papacy. Though the facts are well known I believe that it may be opportune to sketch some of the outlines a little more precisely than has usually been done. For, among other things, it is important to emphasise that the initiative in the Holy War against the Moslems was taken before Manzikert and a fortiori before the advent of the Almoravides. In earlier centuries it was the Moslem offensive which had forced the Christiansin Spain or the Papacy in Italy to take up arms, and had thus led the Papacy to deviate from its original doctrine. But it is to be noted that just at this moment, in the XIth century, the Moslem danger, far from having increased,had vanished. In Spain, North Africa and Sicily the Moslem states were breaking up. Their perpetual internal quarrels led to their renouncing all external aggression. In Spain in particular, paradoxical as it may seem to day, there was a temper of collaboration between rivalfaiths such as the Middle Ages rarelywitnessed. Never had Christians in the western Moslem lands had so little cause for complaint. In one place only had the situation deteriorated. The Moslems of North Africa, ruined by the invasion of the Hillali Arabs, and driven back into the seaports, were no longer able to devote themselves to the commerce which had been the source of their wealth. They had therefore embarked on that " Barbary" piracy which was to continue off and on until the beginning of the XIXth century. But it does not seem as if it was against these particular Moslems that Rome wished to take action. It may be that the expeditions which the Pisans and Genoese made in Io88 against Al-Mahdya, the principal port of Tunis, had the blessing of Pope Victor III (but it is only his officialbiographerwho says so); they certainly had no more substantialhelp from him. Gregory VII conducted a correspondence with a prince of Bougie, into which there may have entered the idea of an understanding which would act as a counter-poise to the hostility of his rival of Tunis, but the correspondencewas chiefly concerned with the local Christiansunder the protection of the Moslem prince, and, doubtless more covertly, with the affairs of the Roman merchants who lent their financial

AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE FIRST CRUSADE

2I

backing to the Holy See. The first great effort of the Papacy against the Moslems was not in this direction, and here too the Normans may have been the cause. Roger of Sicily, having defeated the reinforcements sent to the Moslems of Sicily by the prince of the Tunisian dynasty of Banu Tamim, made peace with him, and ensured that he would not give further support to his co-religionists. Roger had no intention of breaking that peace, and refused the Pisans' offer to hand over El-Mahdya to him; a little later, when he had completed the conquest of Sicily, he seized Malta, but the island, it appears, was not then part of the dominions of the Banu Tamim. Thereafter Moslem soldiers served in Roger's armies, and made possible his success against the rival Christianpowers in Italy. It was, however, on the Sicilian front that the Holy See made its first official intervention, and in significant circumstances. In 1059, during the period of the Papal- Norman entente, the Norman leaders did homage to the Pope, and among the territories which they then obtained the right to conquer, besides those they had taken from Byzantium, was Moslem Sicily; later Roger was to receive the extraordinaryprivilege of being legate of the Pope in the island, a function normally reserved for clerics. But in the first instance two essential features of the new papal policy appeared. On the one hand the Papacy was approving, even waging (in a strictly legal sense, for the Normans had become its vassals), an offensive war against Islam (or, if you like, a counter offensive to arrestthe Moslem offensive); on the other hand the Papacybegan to set up in opposition to the Empire from which it was emancipating itself, a series of temporal suzerainties, which, vague though they may have been in strict feudal law, signified none the less an attempt to dispose of resources which had hitherto been at the disposal of the Empire. Moreover the Norman conquest of Sicily and Southern Italy meant the restoration of the Latin church in lands where it had been weakened not only by the Moslems but by the Byzantines. It is true that the Pope and the Normans together pursued a tolerant policy towards the Greek hierarchyof southern Italy, for they did not of look upon them as accomplices of the Patriarchate Constantinople; their aim, which was partly achieved, was to bring them into direct obedience to Rome by granting them a measure of disciplinary and liturgicalautonomy. In Spain one can see these different trends at work. In the beginning the intervention of the lords of the northern Pyrenees was not the work of the Papacy. The princes of northern Spain were anxious to take advantage of the weakening of Spanish Islam

22

PAST AND PRESENT

by expansion at its expense, and welcomed the neighbouring French lords as useful military allies. On the other hand the task of restoring Christianity in Spain was in large measure conducted under the influence of Cluny. It can hardly be doubted that it was due to Cluny that the chief part in the French participationin the Spanish wars was played by the Burgundians, who had no natural interests there. What has wrongly been called the BarbastroCrusade (to63) was solely due to this situation. But if the intervention of Alexander II, to whom traditional historiographyhas been wont to ascribe the Barbastroexpedition, is to be more probably connected with certain new projects he made at the very end of his pontificate,yet there is no longer any doubt about that intervention, and the slight advancement of its date does not alter its essential character any more than that of Gregory VII's policy which was its continuation. The influence of Cluny on the popes it produced goes without saying. The men whom the Holy See encouraged to go to Spain were to some extent connected with the Normans of Italy. But that does not seem to be the essence of the matter. At the beginning of this article I pointed out that the French brought to the Spanish war a spirit of ignorant brutality which was alien to the Spaniards. At the same time the Holy See was pursuing in Spain, as in Southern Italy, a policy of religious re-integration. It claimed that Rome had a special right to temporal suzerainty over lands reconquered from the infidel. The Church in Spain had derived from its historical isolation a near autonomy and a rite of its own, which seemed dangerous from the point of view of reform itself, as much as from the Roman point of view that reform should be directed by the Pope. There developed a policy, at first Cluniac, but afterwards going beyond the plans of Cluny, where Spain was regarded as a private preserve. The Roman Pontiff was to take into his own hands the Church of Spain, and to use French military intervention to strike a bargain in the same way as was done with the Greeks. Another reason for his taking this line was that non-Spanish influence would obviously be stronger in fiefs held by French lords, as it was in those held by the Normans in Italy. Among the Spanish princes themselves there were two tendencies: Aragon, which, owing to its geographicalposition was more open to unifying influences, entered, like the Normans, into vassalage to the Holy See. In Castile on the contrary the Roman claims were the occasion of a conflict which may have begun by causing AlexanderII to abandon his military project. Whatever the reason, this was

AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE FIRST CRUSADE

23

not carried out. It is not clear whether official Roman support was given to the French contingents which took part in the ensuing expeditions, both before and after the Almoravid invasion, and especially the great coalition of 1187 which followed that invasion. In any case the hero who is most honoured in Spanish national tradition was neither French nor Roman, but the Cid, and he distinguished himself not only in conflict with the Moslems but also on occasion with Christians in Valencia, which he conquered; he was just as popular with his Moslem subjects as with his fellow believers. But the French both at Barbastro and at Tudela (1087) had broken their word and had slaughtered all the male Moslems before taking possession of their women. It was Urban Ii, a better diplomat than Gregory VII, who was ultimately able to secure the reconciliation of the Spanish Church by means of certain disciplinary concessions. And, whatever was the exact role he played in these expeditions, it is certain that at the least he encouraged them as soon as they had begun. But he looked for support not to the Burgundians, but to the Mediterranean powers. Rome had indeed never neglected to establish its influence whenever the opportunity occurred over the most distant monarchies, such as that of the Norman William the Conqueror in England. But it seems that the Papacy was above all concerned to surround itself with a ring of vassal Mediterranean states, or allies, capable of helping it alike against the German Emperor, Islam and even Byzantium if Byzantiurr should ever In these plans the Abbey of St. Victor of reverse its policy. Marseilles appears as the rival of Cluny. The count of Provence (1085), the count of (Oi81), the viscount of Melgeuil-Montpellier Barcelona during the pontificate of Urban II, all became papal vassals, like Mathilda Countess of Tuscany who bequeathed her estates to the I-Ioly See; Gregory gave the royal crown to Zvonimir prince of the Croats. The Papacy maintained excellent relations with Raymond of St. Gilles, who added successively the counties of Toulouse (Io88) and Provence (1094) to his Languedoc inheritance (io66). Raymond was in 1087 one of the chiefs of the anti-Moslem coalition against Spain and several of his vassals were to take part in the operations of the following years, those which Urban II encouraged after his accession. What is remarkable is that these operations were directed not against the Almoravides but against the still independent Moslems of northern Spain, who were perhaps considered to be their allies, but the attacks certainly induced the northern Moslems to submit to the Almoravides. The result was that Spain at the beginning of the XIIth century had nothing but

24

PAST AND PRESENT

Holy War against Holy War with the result that in the middle of the century the new dynasty of the Almohades embarked on a policy of intolerance towards the non-Moslems of their dominions quite contraryto the traditions of their predecessors.
* * *

Though it has long been realised that Urban II's eastern projects were linked with his western projects in that they were both antiMoslem wars, and in that the same men who had gained experiencein Spain were those whom he was to send to Palestine, less attention has perhaps been paid to the fact that the Spanish policy of the Holy See may provide an explanationof its eastern policy in respect of the Crusade. It can be taken as established by recent research that the Pope dispatched the Crusade with a mission to collaboratesincerely with Alexius Comnenus; the Legate Adhemar of Monteil and Raymond of Toulouse, whom Urban intended to lead the Crusade, loyally aitempted to carryout their mission in contrastto the deviations of the other Crusaders. But this thesis has been presented in too one-sided a manner. It can hardly be denied that what Alexius originally hoped for was an energetic reinforcementof the same sort as that which had long been provided by the mercenarytroops whom Byzantium had hired to serve exclusively Byzantine purposes. It is also undeniable that he ought to have foreseen, as the shape of the enterprise became visible, that the Pope's scheme of aid was going to be more independent: it is true that he both wanted to impose and succeeded in imposing on the majority of the Crusading leaders an oath of homage which bound them to keep for themselves no territory which they might conquer which had once been part of the ancient territories of Byzantium, but there was no question of preventing them from making conquests in Syria or Palestine, where perhaps he thought of accompanyingthem. It was obvious that in so far as the Crusadewas the Pope's affairthere could be no question of demandinghomage from the Pope or his legate, and in view of this, even though none of the chroniclers of the Crusades understood the point, it is perfectly understandablethat Raymond of Toulouse should have refused to do homage, if in fact he was ever askedto do so. If then it can be readily admitted that Urban wanted to succour the Byzantine Empire without any mental reservations,it is nevertheless true that he had also a programmeof his own. This programmecan only be known by inference for no text which expounds it has been preserved and there is no reason for thinking that such a text ever

AN INTRODUCTION

TO THE FIRST CRUSADE

25

existed. It can however hardly be denied that the programme included the establishment in Syria of a Latin or semi-Latin power, about whose form we cannot be precise. Such a state would of course be dependent upon the Holy See in certain respects, and even if there remained Greek clerics in Syria, as in Southern Italy, or as there remained Spanish clerics in Spain, there would be a new predominance of the Holy See. This would be done with the goodwill of restored Byzantium, if the campaign should have been brought to a successful conclusion, but it would underline the fact that for a weakened Byzantium was being substituted in whole or in part a strengthened Holy See. That would inevitably run counter to the the influence of Constantinople over the eastern Christians, those of the Greek rite and others, who would be brought to form a new sphere of Latin influence; in place of the semi-solidarity of the four eastern patriarchates there would follow the isolation of the patriarchateof Constantinople,much reduced in prestige. The plan envisaged extending to Palestine what had been begun in Sicily and Spain and raising the prestige of the Papacy by completing the chain of its advancedposts. That the programmewas never realised in fact is no argument against the hypothesis that such had been the Pope's intention. This then was his conception of the Crusadewhen Urban preached at Clermont. As in Italy and as in Spain, it was no longer a time of great Moslem aggression. The Turkish danger, recent as it was, His had much decreased since the death of Malik Shah in 1092. heirs were quarrelling. In Asia Minor, Alexius's intrigues were well able to keep the remaining independent Turcoman chiefs at loggerheads. There was good hope that their territories might be re-absorbedin the Empire, as had happened so often before. When at Piacenza Alexius asked for succour it was not an appeal of urgency or despair. It was rathera plea born of hope for help in a reconquest which had become possible. There is no reason to think that Urban did not know it, or that such an appeal was not for him an encouragement to action. That action he entrusted to his old and faithful ally Raymond of Toulouse, enriched by his experience in Spain, and to his Legate Adh6mar, Raymond's friend. Doubtless he did not see much furtherahead.
* * *

It was at this point that there occurred the intervention of the third party which metamorphosed the Crusade, making it totally

26

PAST AND PRESENT

unlike what it had been hitherto and giving to it that character which it has ever since had for posterity, a " mass " movement. True, Urban II had foreseen that Raymond's forces would be joined by reinforcements from neighbouring lands; the Pope had himself preached the Crusade in west-central France and had caused it to be preached elsewhere. Events outran him. We have hardly anything which he wrote about the Crusade; but his letter to Bologna indicates that in 1096 he was already seeking to dam a flood which, if it were left unchecked would be prejudicial to order and the necessary control of the Crusade by the clergy. Forces which he had not foreseen had been let loose and were to make of the Crusade something very different from what he had wished. What were these forces ? Gallons of ink have been poured out in discussing whether the Crusade at this stage was more or less religious or self seeking. According to their own preconceptions men have seen in it clear evidence either of pure religious faith or of outright seigneurial or mercantile greed. Such a presentation of the problem is absolutely false, because it was not the joining of the Crusade by groups or individuals who saw in it an opportunity for seeking their own advantage that made it different from what it originally was. Spiritual enthusiasm and material greed were not opposed to each other within the consciences of the Crusaders (nor in those of the revolutionaries of I789), and the real problem is not to weigh the one against the other, but to try to understand how far one was supported by the other, and how far each explains the other. Naturally their relationship was not everywhere the same, and can therefore lead us to no general conclusion. Much has been said about mercantile greed, for the profits which the Italian merchants made out of the Crusade are well known. But what the merchants at once realised when the expedition was suggested was its risks, including the risk of losing the commrnercial positions they had won in Moslem lands before the Crusade. It is true that Amalfi, which was perhaps the best established of all in the eastern trade, being in a state of revolt against the Normans was in a helpless position, but the other Italian maritime cities were very careful to have nothing to do with the enterprise until its success was practically assured, and then they tried to secure their share in the profits. As for Venice, what was essential to her was the Byzantine market, and for her there was no question of taking part in any expedition except in alliance with the Byzantine fleet until the crusaders had passed beyond the boundaries claimed by Byzantium. For Pisa the main concern was not to distract forces more usefully

AN INTRODUCTIONTO THE FIRST CRUSADE

27

occupied in the struggle with the Moslem pirates in the west. Only the Genoese came immediately to the help of the crusaders in the East, but, it will be noticed, only as individuals; Genoa itself intervened no earlier than the other cities. Altogether, apart from the special case of the Norman Bohemond in South Italy, there was no widespread recruitment of crusaders in Italy before IIoo and the After-Crusade. Nor was the Pope, preoccupied as he was with the struggle with the Empire, likely to have encouraged it. The Crusade was created pre-eminently in lands where the idea of commercial profit could not have arisen. The profit motive therefore does not come into consideration. The Crusade was born on French soil, and when its first phase of the papal initiative had passed, its adherents came rather from the north than from the south, where, until the After-Crusade, Raymond stood alone. But even in France what strikes one immediately is the division of the Crusaders into two groups. It has always been realised that the Barons' Crusade was preceded by the People's Crusade, but the social implications of this fact have not always been sufficiently stressed. Already in Spain in 1087 men of the people had fought side by side with the barons and in any case a feudal lord was always attended by a train of men-at-arms. What was new in 1093, and what was never repeated in later Crusades, was that the People's Crusade was distinct from the Barons' Crusade. In other words it took place as if the feudal class structure of French society in the XIth century did not exist. If it was not a revolt, it was at least a split. This was the age of the peace movements, and of nascent urban autonomy, both consciously anti-seigneurial phenomena. To a certain extent there was yet another split, for lords and commons found themselves on the same side in opposition to the prelates. It is true that the Crusade had its priests, men of the people, and no one has ever denied the great credit due to the Pope and his Legate. But there were no episcopal troops in this holy war. This was the age when the people supported reform of the Church against the bishops, who were often temporal lords rather than pastors; as for the great barons, it was not their way to leave the conduct of wars to others. What was the state of mind of barons and people ? What drew them to take part in such an unheard-of enterprise? Partly the Byzantine appeal. Partly because, if the situation of the pilgrims and of the Christians in Palestine had not changed very much, there had been in the XIth century an increase in the number of pilgrims, made possible by improved commercial relations, and by the conversion of the Hungarians, which allowed them the use of the Danube

28

PAST AND PRESENT

route. In consequence every incident, every report of the troubles of the Christians in the East, which hitherto had affected few, now reached a wider public. It is not the worsening of the situation in the East, it is the greater interest of the West in the East which is to some extent the explanation of the Crusade. But above all it is clear that all this would have meant nothing had not so many people in the West been materiallyand morally disposed to attempt the great and wonderful adventure. There is no need here to go over again what has been told a thousand times of the ardent but crude and militant faith and the social unrest at all levels in France at the end of the XIth century. The common people with nothing to leave behind and ready to depart at once, the Lords who, having to settle their affairs,were slower but no less determined; the People went in search of immediate materialand spiritual profit, hoping to return if it pleased God, the Lords to spend the rest of their lives in the Holy War and to establish themselves in new and marvellous lands where they would reap the reward of their service to God first in this world and then in the next: it was only saints who believed that their bliss would not begin here below . . . What is important is not to examine this faith, evident even amongst the most worldly, who were, spasmodically,the more avid of redemption because they knew themselves to be worldly, but to discover why this faith induced them to go crusading. Some respectable text books in their chapter on the Crusades tell us that the Crusading spirit declined after the First Crusade because faith itself declined: but in their chapterson art and on the monasticlife one learnsthat it was the same faith which in the XIIIth centuryinspired the Gothic cathedrals, and produced a St. Francis or an Aquinas. We have therefore to explain not a decline of faith, but a change in its outward manifestation. While in the XIth century men were ready to wander far afield in search of the chance of a better life, which for the first time they had begun confusedly to believe possible, in the event they came up against too many obstacles and difficulties. In the XIIIth century the same faith received as its due cathedralsraised by townspeople who had made good their right to a good life at home. These are some brief suggestions which there is not room to develop in this article. They indicate that one ought to study the Crusade as a social phenomenon. None of the elements of which it was made up was peculiarto it. Like all great historicalmovements it bears certain family resemblances to others, for instance to the great migrations in antiquity and sometimes in modern times which were undertakenin response to a divine call. What makes it unique

AN INTRODUCTIONTO THE FIRST CRUSADE

29

is the combination of very diverse elements, which, came together, changed, and fused into a new pattern. Such a study will bring out what was original in the movement, not by virtue of some chance inherent quality, but because it was a unique combination of factors which together produceda result differentin kind from anything that they could have achieved separately. To sum up: the internal development of the Moslem world in the XIth century provoked in the East a resumption of the religious offensive of Islam in a new form to the detriment of Byzantine Christendom, but without affecting Christians in the old Moslem conquests or western pilgrims in Palestine. But the Byzantine defeat and internal developments in the West led the western world to ascribe to their grievances an importance which they had not had before in western eyes. It was in the West that there was first conceived, with no new provocation from Islam, the policy of a Holy War against it, in part the result of papal action. The Papacy saw in the Crusade a means of working for the re-union of Christendomunder its own leadership, one of the objectives of the Reform Movement as the Papacy conceived it, and a necessity if the Papacy was to continue to resist the Empire. The combination of these various constituent factors explains how it was that an expedition was launched againstJerusalem,where local circumstances no more justified it at that particular moment than at any earlier time.
Strasbourg.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES

Claude Cahen.

The questions dealt with are too general for it to be possible to give detailed references. These can easily be found in the classical treatises covering the various branches of general history. The fullest are to be found in Glotz, Histoire Generale t. II, and in Fliche and Martin, Histoire de l'Eglise, t. VIII, I944. I shall therefore only indicate here some of the more recent and rarer publications. First, for the whole situation in the East, the bibliographical " references will be found in my article: En quoi la Conquete turque appelait elle la Croisade ?" (Bulletin de la Faculte des Lettres de l'Universite de Strasbourg, Novembre 1950) of which the first part of this article is to some extent a reproduction. For the latter part of this article see:for Spain: M. Defourneaux, Les Franfais en Espagne auxXIe etXIIe siecles, Paris I949 (with bibliography). P. David, " Gr6goire VII, Cluny et Alphonse VI," in Etudes historiques sur la Galice et le Portugal, Paris-Lisbonne, I947, PP. 341-439. R. Menendez Pidal, La Espana del Cid, fourth edition, Madrid, I947.

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for Sicily: Amari, Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, second edition, a cura di Nallino vol. III, Catania I937. etc., for North Africa: Georges Marcais: La Berberie ct l'Orient au Moyeiz-Age, Paris I946. Ch. A. Julien: Histoire de l'Afrique di Nord, second edition revised and corrected by A. Le Tourneau, Paris 1951. C. Courtois, " Gregoire VII et l'Afrique du Nord," Revue Historique 1945. R. S. Lopez, " Le Facteur 6conomique dans la Politique africaine des Papes," ibid. 1947. for Byzantium: Stephen Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. I, Cambridge 1951. Jugie, Le Schisme byzantin, Paris 1945. Every, The Byzantine Patriarchate, London 1947. Grumel, " Jerusalem entre Rome et Byzance," Echos d'Orient, 1939. Charanis, " Byzantium, the West and the origin of the First Crusade," Byzantion 1949. A. Krey, " Urban's Crusade, success or failure?" American Historical Review 1946-47. E. Joranson, " The spurious letter of Alexis to the count of Flanders," ibid. 1948-49. Hill, " Raymond of St. Gilles in the Pope's plan of Greek-Frankish Friendship," Speculum 1951. B. Leib, Rome, Kiev et Byzance, Paris 924. W. Holtzmann, " Studien zur Orientpolitik der Reforminpapsttum," Historische Vierteljahrsschaft 1924. idem, "Die Unionsverhandlungen . . . ," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 1929. for Rome and the West: C. Erdmann, Die Entstehung der Kreuzzugsgedanke, Stuttgart, 1925. P. Rousset, Les Origines et les caracteres de la Iere Croisade, Neuchatel, 1945. Y. Lefebre, Pierre l'Ermite et la Croisade, Amiens 1945. Delaruelle, " Essai sur la formation de l'idee de Croisade," Bulletin de Littirature ecclisiatique 1941-45; I953-4. This list does not claim to be exhaustive.

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