The ideology behind the crusades.
In a series of threads I will explain what led to crusades and how they were justified at the time.
Part 1: The society of the three orders.
How the Catholic Church gave legitimacy to warrior aristocracy of Latin Christendom.
In a series of threads I will explain what led to crusades and how they were justified at the time.
Part 1: The society of the three orders.
How the Catholic Church gave legitimacy to warrior aristocracy of Latin Christendom.
The medieval crusades to the Levant are one of the most known yet also one of the most misunderstood events in history. To understand the crusades, one needs to understand the unique civilizational and ideological framework of Catholic Christendom of the time that led to it.
In 1095 the Council of Clermont took place where Pope Urban II called for what would be known as the First Crusade. The initiative was given by the Byzantine emperor Alexios I who requested military aid against the Muslim Seljuk Turks who had greatly endangered his empire.
In face of Muslim expansion over the lands of Eastern Christians, Pope Urban II then called for a military expedition that would result in an overwhelming support and enthusiasm from the Catholic Christians who assembled massive armies to reclaim the Holy Land from the Muslims.
This is common knowledge. But I want to bring attention to two important details that everyone overlooks. Two details that show just how specific medieval Catholic civilization was.
First, Pope Urban II who called for this crusade was not the only Catholic Pope at the time.
First, Pope Urban II who called for this crusade was not the only Catholic Pope at the time.
Pope Urban II's rival for papacy was the "Antipope" Clement III who was supported by the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV. This Antipope Clement III was elected following the Emperor's excommunication by Pope Gregory VII in 1080 and was finally consecrated in Rome in 1084.
Pope Urban II who was elected as Pope in 1088 as a successor to Gregory VII's line of Popes would actually spend most of his papacy outside of Rome. He toured northern Italy and France and continued the anti-Imperial cause of Gregory VII against the Emperor and the Antipope.
It's therefore understandable that the Holy Roman Emperor didn't rally behind the Pope's call for a crusade. But the second interesting detail is that not a single king joined the First Crusade either. It would be led by a council of reputed noblemen from all over Europe instead.
Yes despite the fact that the First Crusade was organized by Pope who many saw as illegitimate, and was not joined by a single king, it nevertheless assembled an army more impressive than any king in the West could raise. Why? Due to how unique Latin Christendom was.
It seems that the Byzantine Emperor was not able to fully understand this either. He expected a much smaller army of professional soldiers yet instead a huge army of Latin Christendom mobilized. They arrived to help but would only deepen the divide between the two Christendoms.
The Byzantines understood fighting for Christendom differently than crusaders did. They defined Christendom (Christianitas) as directly connected to their Roman Empire (Romanitas) as the heirs of the Roman Empire. It was the Empire that was responsible for defending Christianity.
The Byzantine Emperor as the protector of the Christians and the Church would raise a professional army and send it to wherever it was needed to be. There was no need for special ideological mobilization. It was similar to how any other empire in history fought.
But the concept of Christendom that the crusades promoted was understood very differently. The head of this Christendom was the Pope who commanded the Latin Christendom as a commonwealth of Christians separated among different states, and he was now calling for a war in its name.
In this way, the differences between Catholic West and Orthodox East were far from being just theological and didn't start with the Schism of 1054, but were even greater politically. Understanding what made the Catholic West so different is crucial to understanding the crusades.
Centuries prior to that, the Catholic Church in Rome actually wanted to have something similar as the Byzantine Empire. The Pope saw an opportunity and crowned Charlemagne as the Emperor of the Romans in 800, trying to rally Christendom behind his powerful Frankish Empire.
The Franks were a Germanic warrior race that has embraced Catholicism and managed to expand over a great deal of Western Europe. Yet it was a flawed empire. After the death of Charlemagne, it eventually split between his heirs in three parts with the Treaty of Verdun in 843.
Following Verdun, Catholic Europe was destined to become divided among several competing states. But this wasn't even the biggest problem the Catholic Church had. The greater problem was that without a powerful leader like Charlemagne around, order broke down in society.
The situation was the most critical in the western part of the former Frankish Empire, France. Lacking a strong central authority, warrior knights from the nobility were taking things into their own hands and raided the land, fighting between each other and terrorizing innocents.
The reality was that a powerful warrior aristocracy was emerging in the West. These noble knights benefited from military technology which improved heavy cavalry tactics and so a group of skilled knights on horses could destroy masses of unskilled levied infantry.
The Church hated these marauding knights. In their eyes they were semi-pagan rogues who were disturbing God's order. The Church responded by mobilizing the terrorized masses and organizing the first mass peace movement in history called Pax et treuga Dei, Peace and Truce of God.
The wrath of God was called upon all knights, upon their arms and even upon their horses. This movement Peace of God desired a strong monarch who would be able to assert control over the unruly knights of the warrior aristocracy. But it was ultimately not successful.
In the Latin West, there was no central authority that could raise professional armies strong enough to confront the warrior aristocracy and impose a strong centralized rule. If a strong ruler wanted to gain significant power, he had to rely on the warrior aristocracy himself.
The Church had to come to terms with the existence of warrior aristocracy. A new ideal of a Christian society had to be developed which would include and give legitimacy to these warrior nobles and define their place and purpose in relation to the Church and Catholic religion.
This presented a certain problem as the Church had to find a way to justify why a Christian society needs a ruling class trained and dedicated to nothing else but waging war. So their existence was justified as protectors of the clergy and the peasants, and Christendom as such.
And this is how the society of three orders was born: clergy (oratores, "those who pray"), warrior nobility (bellatores, "those who fight") and the workers (laboratores, "those who work"). These orders were to cooperate between each other for the good of Christendom.
As Adalberon of Laon put it very simply in early 11th century: "the clergy (praying Church), nobles and chivalry (the fighting church), and, third, the labouring people (church of toiling), the last one supporting the others, and all supporting the whole edifice of mankind."
The hierarchy which placed nobility as superior was also justified in the same way. Gerard of Florennes, bishop of Cambrai, commented in 1023 that "there are distinctions between men, an essential inequality which could be compensated only by charity, mercy and mutual service."
In principle this meant that the Church created a society where the role of the warrior society was sanctified and had a sacred purpose of protecting the Christian society, while the Church provided the spiritual guidance, and the rest of society had to work to sustain it all.
The development of this ideology had very important implications for the role of the Church. First, it placed the Catholic clergy on the top of hierarchy of society because they concerned with the most important thing, the salvation of souls. The role of nobility came second.
But even more importantly, it also provided a foundation for opposition to an absolutist/despotic type of monarchy. Even a king or an emperor was now only one of bellatores, and bellow the clergy. The Christendom should be run as an aristocracy and ultimately headed by the Pope.
The idea of a society of Three Orders didn't specifically mention an emperor anywhere. In fact, it undermined him. And this proved crucial in the 11th century as the Catholic Church was faced with remnants of the Imperial idea of Charlemagne it once supported.
A century earlier, in the eastern part of the former Empire of Charlemagne, a strong ruler was crowned the Emperor of the Romans in 962 in the same manner. This man was Otto the Great and his state would became known as the Holy Roman Empire, claiming the legacy of Charlemagne.
There in the east of the former Empire of Charlemagne, the powerful Ottonian and Salian dynasties would rule over the strongest Catholic state of the 11th century. They believed they should have the power to appoint bishops and even the Pope himself. Like true Emperors.
This led to yet another event that would divide the Catholic Europe, the conflict between the Emperor and the Pope. This bitter power struggle made the Church finally discard the Byzantine-like Imperial project to strive for a Christendom dominated by the Pope.
The conflict between the Emperor and the Pope was primarily an ideological conflict. The Popes undermined the Emperor in the eyes of the Christendom and the aristocracy, sometimes inspiring his own aristocracy to rebel against him like in the Great Saxon Revolt of 1077.
Pope Gregory VII, the great champion of papal supremacy, employed international political diplomacy against the Emperor, maintaining good relationships with other European powers, particularly the Normans in England and in the south of Italy, relying on them to protect him.
The Normans had been the darlings of the papacy for a while. Their conquests of England and Sicily were both blessed by Pope Alexander II who gave them a papal banner. The Sicilian campaign was particularly important for ideological prestige since they fought against the Muslims.
And here we see the important role the Muslims played in affirming the Papal supremacy. If the Pope wanted to portray himself as the head of Christendom, a good way to show this was by directing armies to expand and protect Christendom. The Muslims were the obvious target.
In this way, the Popes were assisting in reclaiming Christian lands in the same ways the Byzantine Emperors tried in the past. The institution of papacy could justify its political role for the Christendom this way in opposition to the Emperor. But there was still a big problem.
The problem was that the powerful Emperor could elect his own Antipope, force his way to Rome with his army, and put his papal candidate in power there. This was what happened in 1084 when Emperor Henry IV enthroned Antipope Clement III in Rome and forced Gregory VII to flee.
While the Normans helped Gregory VII to get back to Rome, after they reclaimed Rome for the Pope, the violent and rowdy Normans terrorized the city with their excesses. As they left, the unprotected Pope Gregory VII had to flee again to escape the wrath of the Roman people.
This showed the main problem of this political scheming against the Emperor. It made the Pope look like another ruler who plays typical power struggle games. To become the true head of Christendom, the Pope would have to rally entire Europe behind him for a much bigger cause.
The next Pope Victor III ruled briefly and inherited all the problems of Gregory VII. Close to his death in 1087, at a council of Benevento he excommunicated the Antipope Clement III and at the same time called for a campaign against Muslim pirates in Tunisian port of Mahdia.
This Mahdia campaign of 1087 had all the ingredients of a crusade as it united the rival Italian maritime republics of Pisa, Genoa and Amalfi who sacked the Muslim city of Mahdia. The participants of the campaign were given a form of indulgence for their sins.
Urban II would become the new Pope just months after the Mahdia campaign and surely realized the significance of it. Among other things, it proved that Catholic Italian maritime republics were now the masters of the Mediterranean sea and could conduct oversea campaigns.
Urban II continued the politics of the papal supremacist Gregory VII. When he became Pope, the Muslims were the least of his problems. As shown at Sicily, Mahdia and in Spain where Christians had just conquered Toledo, slowly but surely they were being pushed back in the West.
Yet in the Byzantine East the Muslim Seljuk Turks were an existential threat which made the Byzantine emperor Alexius I approach Pope Urban II at the Council of Piacenza in 1095 with a request to send Western knights to help him against the Turks. Why was the Pope eager to do it?
The Council of Piacenza took place during Pope Urban II's tour of Italy and France where he campaigned against the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV and Antipope Clement III. What better way to assert his authority over Christendom than rallying it for a huge military campaign?
In the months after the Council of Piacenza to the Council of Clermont where he finally called for a crusade, Urban II propagated this campaign to the nobility of the Latin West. The provinces where he went would provide the highest number of crusaders.
The Pope's campaigning was successful because already decades prior to that, the Church had already propagated Christianity to warrior aristocracy as a warrior religion. The Song of Roland, the stories of heroic battles against Muslims. All of this was already there.
The idea of Christianity as a warrior religion which brings special rewards to those who die as martyrs fighting for it was not made to mobilize against Muslims specifically, but to unify Christendom. The Muslims were just the most convenient enemy to rally Christendom against.
In elevating the fight against the Muslims, the Church was able to condemn knights of Latin Christian nobility fighting against each other to a greater effect, by playing up the idea they were part of the same struggle against a greater enemy which brings greater rewards.
This mindset had already been there for decades with great success as the Muslims were pushed back from many areas of the West by the Christian knights. But unlike in the past, Urban II realized that the Latin West had the possibilities to conduct a large overseas campaign.
Urban II also knew the warrior aristocracy of the West well. He knew that he could ignore their rulers and speak to them directly, inciting their warlike desire to fight and seek adventure. He assembled the most hungry lions from the ranks of knights who would lead the crusade.
The foundation laid by the idea of society of three orders also paid fruit. What started as a theory of society became a reality. These warrior knights were the bellatores of Christendom. They had to fight. This was their duty. It was their sacred duty to fight in this holy war.
The response was immense and Emperor Alexios I was shocked at the size of army that came to help him. The Byzantines were understandably worried when they saw the might of the crusader army. This undermined their legitimacy as the Empire and their concept of Christendom.
To undermine the Byzantine legitimacy in the East following the Schism of 1054, the crusaders established the Latin Patriarchate of Antioch and the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, bringing these ancient Churches under the authority of Catholic Pope and away from Constantinople.
In this sense, the First Crusade was a massive power move by Urban II. He showed both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Byzantine Emperor that he could raise a stronger army than them. The success of the crusade was a victory of papal supremacy over both the West and the East.
Pope Urban II did what the both Emperors should have been doing, defending and expanding the borders of Christendom. And he could do this because of the decentralized nature of Latin Christendom as a warrior aristocracy, by calling to arms the warrior knights directly.
A great factor in all of this was the fact that the First Crusade was such an overwhelming military success. The crusaders encountered numerous difficulties, conquered cities much bigger than those in Western Europe and won against all odds. They became part of legends and myths.
These legends would then fuel the ideology of crusades among warrior aristocracy and lead to the birth of chivalry. This was another great victory for papacy because it meant that this warrior aristocracy was now finally christianized and followed certain civilizational behavior.
In the future crusades, the kings would also join. They pretty much had to. The crusades became the foundation of the civilizational identity of the medieval Latin West. They brought the decentralized Europe together and formed a sense of unity and common purpose.
The crusades basically put the civilization of the Latin Christian West on the map. It did not have big cities or an imposing centralized empire and it has been underestimated because of it, in the same way middle ages still are. But it was just a very unique civilization.
The purpose of my threads on ideology of crusades is not to defend nor attack the crusades but to provide insight into this misunderstood and unique civilization of medieval Latin Christendom. The next thread will be on how they turned Christianity into a warrior religion.
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