The Second, preached by Bernard of Clairvaux, was a stunning failure, and later ones did little to regain territory. The last Christian stronghold in Syria fell in when the Muslims captured the city of Acre.
The major waves of the Crusades had ended. We find it hard to sympathize with the crusaders. Their holy wars seem like an incredibly unchristian waste of energy and time. The medieval mind, however, easily accepted the idea of fighting for—and dying for—a holy cause. Some crusaders were truly pious, while admittedly, others were just violently adventurous. When, in , the knights of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, the breach between Eastern and Western Christians became wide and lasting.
The major calls to crusade invariably sparked pogroms against the Jews. They also led to a greater interest in travel, map making, and exploration. In the s Christians are still living down a reputation created by bands of medieval pilgrims and soldiers intent on liberating the Holy Land. Click here for reprint information on Christian History. Sections Home.
Bible Coronavirus Prayer. Subscribe Member Benefits Give a Gift. Subscribers receive full access to the archives. Whereas Alexander freed warriors from penances freshly imposed in prospect of a dangerous campaign, Urban in envisaged long-accumulated penances; but in either case, the reference was to the expunging of penances specifically imposed in respect of specific sins. There is another, less familiar document which illustrates the nature of the penances that the popes expunged, as well as other facets of the background to the Crusade Early in his pontificate, Pope Gregory VII ordered the cardinals of the Roman church, by which he probably meant cardinal-bishops with senior urban clergy of Rome, to award an appropriate penance.
They imposed twenty-four years of penance, for twelve of which Peter would be outside the church, without benefit of the kiss of peace or save in the hour of death of communion.
They prescribed a regime, seemingly put together from penitential impositions customary at Rome, of rigorous fasts, abstinence, prayers, and vigils. Furthermore, he might not carry weapons, unless there were a special need to defend himself against enemies or to ride to battle against the Saracens evidence of the Roman clergy's awareness of warfare against Moslems When his father's wrath had died down, he was to embark upon a time of 'exile' in Jerusalem evidence for another aspect of the Roman clergy's awareness of Jerusalem and of the anomaly that it was in pagan hands But the most striking feature of Peter's penance is its burdensomeness; an eleventh-century penance was more than an Our Father and a couple of Hail Marys Not that Peter's penance was considered severe : to murder one's step-mother is, no doubt, an exceptionally grave sin which must attract a heavy penance; yet the cardinals claimed to be acting mildly magis misericorditer quam canonico rigore , and there was also provision for the Roman pontiff to temper their provisions if Peter was conscientious in their fulfilment.
But it was a heavy burden that Peter bore. With it in mind, one can appreciate the appeal of Alexander II, when he ordered men to shoulder penances only that they might be removed from those who went on. And how much more powerful must have been Urbans appeal at Clermont, when he raised the whole burden of penance from those whom he directed to Jerusalem, not as a place of exile, but as the goal in the noble work of freeing it militarily.
With Peter's regime in mind, it is superfluous to introduce the notion of indulgence into Urbans thinking at Clermont; it sufficed that, like Alexander II before him, he should simply relieve the sheer burden of contemporary penances like Peter Raymundi's Peter Raymundi's penance may serve as the starting-point for another line of thought about the reform papacy's spiritual preparation for the Crusade. His penance was cumbersome, incoherent, and also rather mechanical.
It is not surprising that one of Gregory VII's main concerns in his bid at his Roman synods, especially those of November and March , to effect the moral re-armament of Latin Christendom, was to order and direct the system of penance.
He was concerned to establish the difference between true and false penances. In , his criterion was simple and based upon current penitential tariffs : false penances were those not duly imposed according to the gravity of the offence pro qualitate criminum.
Gregory attempted no definition of true penances. To the knight or merchant or steward whose daily business could not be engaged in without sin but who also fell into major offence, he could offer true penance only if he also effectively suspended his avocation. Lest such a one should despair, Gregory could offer only the provisional advice interim that he should do some good deeds so that God might enlighten his heart towards penitence It was an unsatisfactory canon which Gregory evidently intended to reconsider.
A letter of November to the clergy and people of Brittany suggests that, by a year later, he had begun to think how best to deal radically with what he called the ingrained custom of false penitence. He offered no such definition of false penances as he gave in , but he clearly had in mind penances that were either lightly regarded or ignored. He turned his attention to 'unfruitful' penance, which he described as penance for a major sin which, because the penance was not taken seriously, left a man involved in the same sin or in some other which was about as bad.
This was pretence, not penitence; Gregory took the decisive step, in principle, of breaking the parameters of the current penitential system and insisting upon total amendment of life :. Whoever would be worthily penitent must return to the beginning of faith.
He must be careful vigilantly to keep what he promised in baptism : to renounce the devil and all his pomps, and to believe in God by discerning what is right about him and by keeping his commandments Following this line of thought, Gregory enacted a decree at his Lent synod of which had an altogether new theological sophistication, moral force, and clarity of expression.
In a text which reads like a papal sermon, Gregory dismissed succinctly the false penance that men must avoid : as false baptism does not wash away original sin, so after baptism false penance does not erase a sin that has been committed. As regards true penance, the decree treated heinous sins like murder and perjury apart from the 'vocational' sins of merchants, warriors, and officials. It was upon heinous sins that the decree concentrated. It first demanded conversion : let each man turn to God.
It then required that a man should so turn to God as to abandon all his iniquities and henceforth to continue in the fruits of good works. As the climax of his statement, Gregory cited the Lord's word by the prophet Ezekiel : 'If the unrighteous shall be converted from all his sins and shall keep the whole of my commandments, he shall surely die and not live' cf.
In what reads like an explanatory gloss rather than Gregory's own words, it is affirmed that warriors, merchants, and officials who continue in sinful ways cannot be held to have turned to God or to have done true penance.
The decree as a whole reads as a warning that no man who deliberately remained in sins of any kind, whether by committing some grave offence like Peter Raymundi's, or whether in the course of of his avocation as warrior, merchant or official, or whether by regarding sins and penances with levity, could be deemed to have performed true penance There should be no mistaking the novelty, in terms of eleventh-century penitential practice, of what Gregory was now saying.
True penance, true penitence, called for the complete inner conversion of a man's whole life -the life of the layman no less than the monk. Gregory was foreshadowing the moral theology of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But our concern is with November When he became pope, Urban II professed a total commitment to follow in Gregory's footsteps : 'Believe about me', he wrote, 'just as about the blessed Gregory. I want to follow wholly in his footsteps.
Whatever he. There are indications that, at the council of Clermont, this was the case as regards penance. According to one twelfth-century memorandum of its canons, Urban, too, insisted upon the necessity of inner conversion :. Penance profits nothing save where there is compunction of heart. Therefore medicine cannot be given save to him who is penitent with his whole heart Other records confirm the testimony of this memorandum that Urban like Gregory insisted that penance for one sin does not profit unless there be penitence for all sins The Crusading canon of Clermont, too, may be set in the light of the development of thought that Gregory initiated in There is certainly a verbal similarity : Urban's requirement that a man should not set out 'pro honoris vel pecunie adeptione' uses language that Gregory used of the sin of perjury -'periurii pro cupiditate honoris aut pecunie facti'.
In two respects Urban seems in substance to have followed Gregory's line of thinking. First, Urban's requirement that a man set out for devotion alone pro sola devotione or, as he urged the citizens of Bologna in a letter dated 19 September which echoed the Crusading canon of Clermont, 'for the salvation of their soul alone and for the liberation of the church pro sola animae suae salute et ecclesiae liberatione '54 ,.
Secondly, Urban's provision at Clermont that the journey to Jerusalem should be reckoned 'for all penance', when taken with his expansion of it in the letter to the Bolognese that there would be remission of all penance for sins of which they had made 'true and full confession veram et perfectam confessionem ' , is reminiscent of Gregory's insistence that men should abandon all their sins. In such respects, Urban's thinking at Clermont seems to have grown from Gregory's attempt of to revitalize the practice of penance, not least among the laity.
A military expedition to Jerusalem which, subject to a right disposition in those who took part, would be reckoned for all penance was well calculated to appeal to knights who, in the words of contemporary charters, sought remission of their sins and purposed to save their souls Still more, it would appeal to those Gregorian-minded bishops and abbots upon whom Urban relied for the organization and success of his journey in France, and who were the willing agents of his purposes.
To sum up. After the battle of Manzikert, the reform papacy was impelled to respond to the afflictions of eastern Christians and to the predicament of Constantinople because it saw the church of Constantinople as the daughter of the church of Rome; Rome had a mother's duty to come to its rescue in its time of need.
Its duty to respond was intensified by the prevailing appraisal of Constantine the Great as a model emperor and as the benefactor to whom it owed, among other things, the Lateran palace and its endowment of relics. These relics were a daily reminder of Jerusalem and of the saving events there which made its being in heathen hands an especial scandal among the misfortunes of the eastern churches. The holy cross, with its overtones of Constantine's assurance of victory in battle, was a powerful symbol in recruiting for and in warranting warfare rightly undertaken.
In the conflict between sacerdotium and regnum, the imperial associations that, through Constantine's withdrawal to the east, gathered about the pope in the west, led the pope to claim a leadership in promoting peace in the Christian west and in extending it to the Christian east. This involved diverting the energies of the military classes to a warfare which was envisaged as centring upon Jerusalem and as extending to the walls of Constantinople.
If it was for the pope thus to promote peace and order among Christians, so, by a duty that complemented. Those who were directed to Jerusalem 'for devotion alone' appear to have been given to understand that their penances were set aside on account of a total conversion. They are certainly not a full survey of the origins of the Crusade, the deeper roots of which lay, not at Rome, but more generally in western society But, considered together, they suggest a conclusion that I should like to draw.
Especially through the part that Gregory VII plaved in revising papal ideas about penance, Urbans preaching at Clermont was probably able to derive much of its force from his anticipation of developments that historians have associated with St Bernard and the Second Crusade.
The First Crusade as Urban proclaimed was, no less than the Second, intended both to free the east from the heathen and to free from sin the soul of the individual Crusader As Gregory VII's association in of inner conversion with true penance indicates, the time was ripe for such a combination of ideas.
Gregory's final decree about penance helps to explain how the creative genius of Urban II was able to marshal the forces of the west for the novelty of an armed pilgrimage which would free the sepulchre of the Lord at Jerusalem and bring help to afflicted Christians from Jerusalem to Constantinople.
The Origin of the Idea of crusade by M. Baldwin and W. Goffart Princeton NJ, Will, Acta et scripta quae de controversiis ecclesiae Graecae et Latinae saeculo undecimo composita extant Leipzig and Marburg, , p.
Thaner, MGH Libelli, 1. Fuhrmann, MGH Fontes iur. Hinschius Leipzig, , p. Mombritius, Sanctuarium seu Vitae sanctorum, new ed. A new edition is in preparation ; see W. Schwartz and T. Mommsen, GCS 9 Leipzig, , p. Valentini and G. Zucchetti, Fonti per la storia d'Italia, 81, , 4 vols Rome, , 3. The only printed text of the original version is in : D. For the recensions and a stemma of MSS, see C. Jean Mabillon et de D.
Thierri Ruinart, ed. Thuillier, 3 vols Paris, , 3. Rome, , no. Halphen and R. Poupardin Paris, , p. Schmale and I. Schmale-Ott Darmstadt, , p. For further discussion, see H. Wadle, 'Heinrich IV. Fleckenstein Sigmaringen, , p. For centuries, the Muslim world had been divided between two major caliphates: the Abbasid at Baghdad modern-day Iraq , which espoused Sunni Islam, and the Fatimid caliphate at Cairo, which followed Shia Islam. In , the Holy Sepulchre, which housed the tomb of Christ himself, had been vandalised by the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, who led a campaign of persecution and prevented pilgrims journeying to Jerusalem.
In recent decades, the Byzantines had also been troubled by a new wave of aggressors: the Seljuk Turks, against whom they had suffered a cataclysmic defeat at the battle of Manzikert in Relations had been rocky in recent years between east and west, not least because a former pope, Gregory VII, had formally excommunicated the Byzantine emperor.
He might well have had in mind that Gregory VII had earlier also issued unsuccessful appeals to help Byzantium. So Urban II had appealed to the knightly classes of medieval Europe.
But the result was not what he had anticipated. Alexius was dismayed at the disorderly rabble that had appeared. These were not the fearsome western Christian knights he had hoped for! He advised Peter the Hermit to await the arrival of the better-armed main contingents, but was not heeded. At the beginning of August, many crossed the Bosporus and marched towards the city of Nicomedia modern Izmit.
Some, Germans and Italians led by a nobleman named Reinald, captured the castle of Xerigordos before being besieged by Muslim forces and taken captive, or dying of heat and thirst. Others, without their leader, Peter, who had returned to Constantinople, marched out of Civetot, were ambushed by the Turks, and captured.
These warriors, some more reluctantly than others, swore an oath of allegiance to him before crossing into Asia Minor, accompanied by Byzantine forces. All hoped for penance, glory, adventure and land.
The first target the crusaders besieged was the Turkish-held town of Nicaea. Its governor, Kilij Arslan, immediately fled the scene and his attempt to gather a relief force was unsuccessful. Manuel Butumites, the crafty Byzantine commander, had struck a deal with the Turks that restored Nicaea to Alexius. The westerners were far from happy, but there was nothing they could do about it.
After the pair quarrelled, however, Tancred rejoined the main army while Baldwin marched north to the town of Edessa. Although its citizens made him joint ruler with their own lord, Thoros, Baldwin staged a coup and the county of Edessa became the first crusader state.
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