The most dramatic and quixotic of Gregory’s military plans was that of 1074, when he announced his intention to lead in person an army to help the Christians of the eastern Mediterranean, who were beleaguered by the Seljuk Turks, ‘to take up arms against the enemies of God and push forwards even to the sepulchre of the Lord under His supreme leadership’. The diplomatic context, involving a delicate and unstable triangle of Byzantium, the papacy and the Normans, was specific, in part a consequence of the Greek defeat by the Seljuk Turks at Manzikert (1071). However, the objects of the enterprise – apparently Jerusalem, the consolidation of relations with the eastern church, the demonstration of active papal leadership of the whole of Christendom, lay and ecclesiastical, east and west – as well as the rhetoric, pointed directly to the path his protégé Urban II later chose. The language was especially striking, with its persistent emphasis, not only on St Peter, as was usual in his calls to arms, but on Christ Himself:
the example of our Redeemer and the duty of brotherly love demand of us that we should set our hearts upon the deliverance of our brethren. For as He offered his life for us, so ought we to offer our lives for our brothers.
Gregory hoped he could ‘with Christ’s help carry succour to the Christians who are being slaughtered by the pagans’; preferable even to dying for one’s country, ‘it is most beautiful and glorious indeed to give our mortal bodies for Christ, who is life eternal’. He called on the faithful ‘to defend the Christian faith and serve (militare) the heavenly king’ thus ‘by a transitory labour you can win an eternal reward’.33 Similar Christocentric rhetoric suffused Urban II’s preaching of the First Crusade twenty years later. Before he became pope, Odo of Largery, as cardinal-bishop of Ostia from 1080, had been very close to Gregory VII, once described as his pedisequus, lackey or valet. Within the papal Curia in the early twelfth century, therefore among those who may have known those involved first or at most second hand, Urban II’s crusade was seen explicitly as completing Gregory’s abortive project of 1074.
Gregory’s scheme of 1074 displayed a broad sense of history. The pope placed his desire to help and be reconciled with the eastern church in the context of papal visits to Constantinople that had ceased in the early eighth century when the Carolingian Franks were adopted as the new protectors of the church in the west. The church’s legitimizing of war in the eleventh century was similarly influenced by a historical perspective. Just as Carolingian warriors gained in reputation by being seen as the champions of Christianity against pagan and infidel foes, so the perception of a turn in what had seemed an inexorable tide running against Christendom not only inspired gestures such as Gregory VII’s in 1074 and Urban II’s in 1095 but enhanced the status of those called upon to fight for the Faith. However important the just and holy war against enemies of the church in general, the highest justification for knighthood was the battle against the infidel, against Islam. The earliest vernacular French chansons de geste of the late eleventh and early twelfth century, which provide some insight into the mentality and idealism of the arms-bearing classes, while displaying little of the trappings of the crusade – war as penance, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, papal authorization – demonstrated the special status of war against the infidel, who stood both in practice and in literary type as the absolute antithesis to the Christian world, a dangerous alien aping of the familiar and the good. As the Song of Roland, the earliest surviving version of which seems to have been consolidated c.1100, put it in a notorious line: ‘Paien unt tort e chrestiens unt dreit’ (Pagans are wrong and Christians are right).34 The memory of the long struggle with Islam from the seventh century was not lost 400 years later. If anything, it had grown in symbolic as well as political significance, an exaggerated exercise in collective religious and cultural nostalgia. The context of western reactions to Islam in the eleventh century was of a period of active military confrontation on all frontiers which had been preceded by one of relative stability. The First Crusade occurred at a time of shifting fortunes along the borders of Christendom, which provided the opportunity to think of aggressive campaigns even before the request for aid from the eastern emperor in 1095.
ISLAM AND HOLY WAR
The ten years after the death of Muhammed at Mecca in 632 redrew the political and religious map of the Mediterranean and Near East. The ancient rivals of Christian Byzantium and Sassanian Persia who had fought each other almost to a standstill in a war that had lasted a generation (602–28) proved easy pickings for the Arab-led armies that swept from the Arabian peninsular to conquer the Fertile Crescent: Syria and Palestine 635–41; Persia 637–42; Egypt 640–42. In classical Muslim historiography, deliberately symbolic was the entrance into Jerusalem of the caliph (i.e. successor to the Prophet as Commander of the Faithful), Umar, in February 638. The caliph was not the field commander of operations in Palestine but, with the fall of Jerusalem imminent, he arrived to supervise proceedings. Having negotiated a peaceful surrender of the Holy City whence, Islamic tradition insisted, the Prophet had made his night journey to heaven, Umar entered the city, on a donkey or camel – the sources disagree – ostentatiously dressed in coarse, dirty robes, perhaps in deliberate contrast to the lavish parades favoured by the defeated Byzantines. The religious element in the triumph was clear to both Muslim and Christian commentators. Going to the terrace on which the Jewish Temple had stood, the supposed site of Muhammed’s celestial ascent but now reduced to a rubbish tip, Umar ordered the clearance of the site and the construction of a small mosque. Equally, in accordance with the surrender terms, the shrines, churches and synagogues of the Christians and the Jews were left untouched. This iconic moment resonated for centuries; it was entirely appropriate that the fullest contemporary history of crusading and the subsequent western settlements in Palestine and Syria in the twelfth century, by Archbishop William of Tyre, began with the Arab conquests and the failure of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius to resist them.35
The conquest of Jerusalem marked just one stage of Muslim expansion. Within a century of the Prophet’s death, Muslim rule extended from central Asia and north India to Spain. In the Mediterranean basin, Constantinople had survived the great siege of 674–7, but Byzantine sea supremacy had been shattered; Cyprus had been ceded to joint rule, Muslim control on the mainland of western Asia extended to Armenia and Cilicia, and the Byzantine provinces in north Africa lost by 698. In a lightning campaign, Visigothic Spain was overwhelmed by Arab-led Berber armies in 711–13. Although defeated by the Franks at Poitiers in 732, Muslim armies continued to harass southern Gaul for some years. Although the era of conquest was followed by civil war, religious schism and a collapse of political unity, with Spain and north Africa acquiring separate rulers, the Abbasid caliphs, established since 750 in Baghdad, retained the nominal loyalty of much of the Islamic world. More significantly, an international affinity was created by Islamic culture and, to a lesser degree, religion. The question of the extent of Arabization and Islamicization of conquered lands remains obscure and vexed, but it appears that the process was slow, uneven and, by the eleventh century, still incomplete. It is not certain whether there was even a Muslim majority in Syria or Palestine when the crusaders arrived in 1097.