However, that is not the same thing as saying that the Jerusalem expedition attracted recruits for mercenary reasons. As a song composed at the time of the First Crusade put it: ‘There we must go, selling our goods to buy the temple of God and to destroy the Saracens.’57 The peasant-hating Guibert of Nogent recalled the economic and financial hardships they suffered in selling their homes, vineyards and fields to raise money for the journey: ‘everyone bought high and sold low’.58 A similar fate could not be avoided by knights and nobles. Whatever his hopes for future gain, a crusader began his journey suffering capital losses in converting landed property into cash and war materials. The agricultural depression of the mid-1090s only exacerbated the problem. Even for those who did anticipate a land of milk and honey, the scale of the initial investment was sobering: no money; no crusade.
As most wished to return – demonstrably so with those who left charters behind – and as most survivors did just that, putative profits of settlement and colonization were hardly an issue. Of course, the rewards of successful campaigning were accepted eagerly; opportunities for profit were taken with alacrity. Genoese crusaders were quick to establish privileged trading status with Bohemund’s new regime in Antioch in July 1098. This does not mean they had taken the cross with this intent uppermost in their minds; the risks of committing a fleet to such a venture were very great. It was not as if those who took the cross did not know where they were going or were ignorant of the costs involved; their own, their neighbours’ and their relatives’ experiences in war and on pilgrimage prepared them. The crusaders’ financial balance sheet on setting out contradicts any easy economic reductionism. Terrestrial profits were more realistically those of honour, prestige and relics. The cliché of younger sons being drawn to the Jerusalem adventure contains no truth. Almost by definition the leaders were, if not all eldest sons, possessed of significant patrimonies of their own; this applied not only to the so-called princes but to the vital second-rank nobles whose retinues formed the military backbone of the armies, such as Raymond Pilet, lord of Alès in the Limousin, who emerged as an independent leader within the army from the summer of 1098. The evidence of land-hunger is local and unconvincing; internal colonization and expanding the areas of cultivation within western Europe catered for the expanding population. What is known of individual crusaders demonstrates no special appeal for younger sons; rather the opposite. Whole families departed together; some sixty families contributing more than one member to the expedition have been identified.59 Having broken one of the supposedly immutable rules of medieval life by mortgaging or selling patrimonies, such men were evidently moved by considerations other than the obviously material.
The cultural aspirations of the arms-bearing aristocracy were directly engaged. The growing social dominance of a self-conscious military elite was answered in the call to Jerusalem depicted in terms of honour, reputation and family pride. Robert of Rheims had Urban appeal directly to these values:
Oh most strong soldiers and the offspring of unvanquished parents, do not show yourselves to be weaker than your forbears but remember their strength… upon you (i.e. the Franks) before all other nations God has bestowed outstanding glory in arms.60
Heroes of the Scriptures, such as the Maccabees, and of secular romance, notably Charlemagne, were held up as models for emulation. The Jerusalem expedition was perceived as an honourable duty by a class familiar with the raison d’être expressed in the Chanson d’Antioche: ‘He who fears death more than dishonour has no right to lordship’.61 In this war, the reward was social and religious justification, honour and eternal life.
It is hardly surprising that the surviving charters of departing crusaders, drafted by monks, should emphasize their overwhelming burden of sin. However, both lay and clerical observers confirmed this obsession. For Guibert of Nogent and his contemporaries, the key to the success of the Jerusalem expedition was that it offered the professionally and socially violent classes ‘a new way of earning salvation’ in holy war.62 Fulcher of Chartres, a priest in the army of northern French who set out for Jerusalem in the autumn of 1096, explained:
Let those who are accustomed wantonly to wage private war against the faithful march upon the infidels… Let those who have long been robbers now be soldiers of Christ; let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against barbarians. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward.63
Such pious generalities were translated into active reconciliation. There are numerous examples of lords and knights taking the opportunity of the Jerusalem expedition to resolve outstanding disputes with local religious houses, some of which had been pursued with considerable savagery, such as Bertrand of Moncontour and Nivelo of Fréteval in northern France or the castellans of Mezenc in the south, whose cruelty to local villagers shocked the hard-bitten Adhemar of Le Puy, who nevertheless absolved them for their Jerusalem journey.64 The tone of such deals may have exaggerated both guilt and penitence. While for some, the Jerusalem journey signalled a transformed life, many crusaders were and remained extremely violent. Thomas of Marle notoriously terrorized the Ile de France for years on either side of his march to Jerusalem; the pilgrim remained a psychopath. William viscount of Melun earned his nickname ‘the Carpenter’ because of his skills as a battlefield butcher. Stephen count of Blois, who fled the siege of Antioch and later died a hero’s death at Ramla in 1102, had killed men in private wars. On his return to the Chartres region, Raimbold Croton, a hero at Antioch and Jerusalem, castrated a monk in a land dispute. Such men were not immune to religious anxieties, rather their piety was robust and practical. The lay biographer Ralph of Caen’s famous portrait of Bohemund’s nephew Tancred agonizing over his violent life before the Clermont indulgence reconciled warfare with God’s commandments should be treated with scepticism; Tancred’s dilemma was neither new nor previously unresolved.65 Nevertheless, Urban’s remission of sins for such killers was a lifeline indeed.
The success of recruiting in 1096 remains mysterious. The dilemmas of secular rule and war were hardly novel. It is difficult to reconcile eleventh-century history with a view that hundreds or even thousands of powerful arms-bearers suffered from debilitating individual or collective guilt complexes that suddenly became critical, as a literal acceptance of their charters might suggest. There was an increased focus by the church and hence by congregations and patrons on the problem of salvation for sinners. Urban II neatly summed it up: ‘there are only two gates to eternal life; baptism and genuine penitence’.66 The supernatural was perceived as real and proximate. Hell, heaven and the place between where souls waited for redemption, if not as yet fully understood as purgatory, were not abstractions. Yet it needed a combination of pressures to excite the response of 1096. Alone, ideology is insufficient explanation.
Concentration on faith by itself is inadequate to explain the genesis or progress of the war of the cross ideologically, sociologically, politically or militarily. Jerusalem was not won by faith alone; faith alone did not send men to Jerusalem. The reductionism implied by the idea of an ‘age of faith’ requires questioning. The picture is more complicated. Faced with sermons repeatedly insisting on the basic merits and message of Christianity; with hagiography in which doubters featured regularly; with academics, such as Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), attempting to construct logically satisfactory explanations of God; and with innumerable anecdotes of lay (and some clerical) mockery of the pretentions of the church, it is hard to argue that we are dealing with an age any more credulous or unthinkingly accepting of religious truth than our own. One much-derided episode during the First Crusade concerned the story of a band of crusaders or pilgrims being led towards Jerusalem by a goose from Cambrai in northern France to Lorraine, where the creature died. The snobbish and irascible Guibert of Nogent dismissed the tale with contempt, as much social as academic, suggesting that the animal would have given more to the cause of Jerusalem ‘if the day before she had set out she had made of herself a holiday meal for her mistress’. Having earlier poured scorn on the credulity of the masses who believed they saw clouds at Beauvais forming (Guibert, who was there, thought they looked like a stork or crane), the abbot explained why he had mentioned the goose at alclass="underline" ‘we have attached this incident to the true history (historiae veraci) so that men may know that they have been warned against permitting Christian seriousness to be trivialized by belief in vulgar fables’.67 Reactions to the Jerusalem journey were hardly undiscriminating.