After the northern rebellions of 1069-70, William’s rule in England became much harsher. To ensure his power, he began a major programme of building forts and castles the length and breadth of his realm. He brought from Normandy a style of castle-building that resulted in fortifications much more impregnable than anything the Anglo-Saxons built. The Norman castle, later built of stone but in William’s time mostly of wood, were based on the ‘motte and bailey’ castle, erected on a high mound so that they rose threateningly above the surrounding countryside. Norman lords occupied these castles, which were built by English serf labourers. Once William was assured that England was quiet, he returned to Normandy after 1072 and seldom visited his English possessions thereafter.
Oderic Vitalis had asserted that William should be punished for the ‘barbarous homicide’ he had carried out during the harrying of the north. Of course, he never was punished – except, perhaps, in his own mind. On his deathbed in 1087, William the Conqueror is said to have admitted that he had persecuted the native inhabitants of England beyond all reason. ‘I am stained with the rivers of blood I have shed,’ he said. Perhaps it was partly contrition that led him to leave his English lands to his second son, William Rufus, a man thought to be less hard and ruthless than his elder brother, Robert, who became Duke of Normandy on the death of his father.
As for other participants, Edwin of Northumberland was killed by his own men during another, abortive, rising in 1071, after which Morcar was imprisoned by William. Although he outlived William, Morcar was returned to prison by the new king, William Rufus, and disappeared from history. Edgar the Atheling, who had never been much more than a hook on which to hang rebellious thanes’ ambitions, was reconciled with William in 1074 and spent the rest of his life as a minor courtier. He took part in the First Crusade.
The First Crusaders Take Jerusalem from the Infidel
From the time of its founding by the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century, Islam was remarkably successful in its waging of jihad, or holy war, to convert the peoples of Arabia and the eastern Mediterranean to what they saw as the true faith. Within a few years of the death of Muhammad in 632, the three greatest cities in the Christian Eastern Roman (or Byzantine) Empire – Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem – had all fallen to Islam. Syria and Egypt, also parts of the Byzantine Empire, and the Persian Empire had all been overwhelmed.
Largely because the Holy Places of Christendom were in the Byzantine Empire, the capital of which was Constantinople (now Istanbul), Western Christianity long ignored events in the area. It was not until the 11th century that Western Christianity awoke to the danger of complete annihilation that faced the Christian Church in the eastern Mediterranean and chose to do something about it.
Medieval religious enthusiasm was at its height in Western Europe when, in 1095 at the Council of Clermont, Pope Urban II called on the Christian laity to take up arms for the reconquest of Jerusalem, which had been in Muslim hands since 638. The pope was answering a call for help from the Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus, in despair that his once mighty and far-reaching power over the lands of the Near East had been reduced to little more than over the land around the walls of his capital.
At the end of the Council, the pope preached a sermon on the suffering of the Christians in the East to an immense crowd gathered outside the city of Clermont. He ended with a passionately worded appeal for men to enlist under the sign of the Cross of Christ. His call was answered with huge enthusiasm by hundreds in the crowd, many of whom began there and then to mark their clothes with the sign of the cross. Within weeks, they were joined and in a more professional manner by Frankish, German and Italian counts, dukes, and other rulers from many parts of Western Christianity. Thus the First Crusade began.
The enormous enthusiasm shown by the common people for Pope Urban’s call to arms under the banner of the cross turned into a huge pilgrimage across Europe and into Turkey, which came to be called the People’s Crusade. Leaving behind families, homes and livelihoods, about 20,000 men, women and children – most of them simple, poor folk from Germany, Flanders and France – set out from Cologne for Constantinople after the Easter celebrations of 1096.
The People’s Crusade was made up opf a motley and unruly vanguard, which was led by a preacher of great charisma, Peter the Hermit and included a few knights and fighting men. However, there was no leading soldier in their midst. They made the arduous, 3,000-km (2,000-mile) journey across Europe only to be ambushed and virtually annihilated by the Seljuk Turks near Nicaea (modern-day Iznik in Turkey) in October 1096. A contemporary account of the battle recorded how the Turks swept into the peasants’ camps and ‘destroyed with the sword whomever they found, the weak and feeble, clerics, monks, old women, nursing children, persons of every age’. The remnants either made their way back home or joined up with the contingents of crusaders who were by now arriving in Constantinople, no doubt spreading graphic accounts of what the Turks had done at Nicaea.
The military crusaders took more time over their preparations. Great lords began assembling armies in France and Italy, while Godfrey of Bouillon, Duke of Lower Lorraine, gathered together a large force from Germany and the Low Countries. Although the kings of England and France were not directly involved, both were represented: William II of England by his brother, Robert of Normandy, and Philip of France by his brother, Hugh of Vermondais.
Eventually, there were to be four main contingents making up the crusading force, each of which took its own route across Europe to their meeting point at Constantinople, where they joined into one vast force.
The first contingent set off in August 1096 and the fourth, led by Robert of Normandy and his brother-in-law Stephen of Blois, in October. Duke Godfrey, lauded by medieval bards as the perfect crusader, was to be the most prominent of the knights on the First Crusade, even being offered the crown of Jerusalem by fellow crusaders. About 4,000 to 5,000 mounted knights and squires, 30,000 foot soldiers and many thousands of non-combatants took part in the First Crusade.
With the average distance covered by a medieval army on the march being only approximately 24 or 25 km (15 or 16 miles) a day, it was clearly going to take the various armies descending on the Holy Land from across Europe many months of arduous marching to get there. For this First Crusade, the Christians could not get to Palestine by sea, as the forces of the Third Crusade were able to do in the following century, for they had no friendly ports at which to land.
It was not until May 1097 that the first of the crusaders, a force about 30,000 strong, came within sight of the city of Nicaea, which they successfully besieged. In early July, they were involved in their first battle of the First Crusade. They were attacked by the same Seljuk Turks who had had such an easy victory over the People’s Crusade – and who were expecting another one now. However, the Battle of Dorylaeum was a complete victory for the crusaders.