[227] Ibid. According to Henry of Huntingdon (p. 218), the king’s original order had been to proceed to London.
[228] Eadmer, p. 52.
[229] A.-S. C., a. 1095; Florence of Worcester, ii, p. 35.
[230] A.-S. C., a. 1095; Henry of Huntingdon, p. 218.
CHAPTER IV
THE CRUSADE
The year 1096 marks the beginning of a new era in the history of western civilization as well as in the life of Robert Curthose. On 27 November 1095,[1] Pope Urban II had preached his momentous sermon before the assembled multitude at Clermont, and ‘the gates of the Latin world were opened’[2] upon the East. “It was the miracle of the Lord in our time,” writes Henry of Huntingdon, “and a thing before unheard of in all the ages, that such divers peoples and so many distinguished princes, leaving their splendid possessions, their wives, and their children, set forth with one accord and in scorn of death to seek the most unknown regions.”[3]
It was natural that the stirring words of Pope Urban should find a ready hearing among the ‘untamed race of the Normans.’[4] The great adventurers of their age, they were destined to play the most vigorous and aggressive, if not the most devout and single-minded, part in the supreme adventure of the Latin world in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the situation of Duke Robert at home was such that new fields of opportunity and adventure offered peculiar attractions to him. Lacking the indomitable energy of his great forbears and the Norman genius for organization, government, and law, surrounded by enemies both within and without his dominions, his tenure of the duchy had become a heavy burden. His war with William Rufus still dragged on. Disloyal barons continued to desert to the English cause; and twenty Norman castles were said to be in the Red King’s hands. Prince Henry, long firmly established at Domfront, and now backed by the strong arm and the long purse of his older brother, had gained control of ‘a great part of Normandy’; and the ‘soft duke’ had fallen into contempt among his turbulent subjects. Disobedience and disorder were everywhere on the increase, and the unarmed population lacked a protector.[5] An expedition to the Holy Land at the head of a splendidly equipped band of knights, with new scenes and new adventures and plenary indulgence for past sins, offered a welcome prospect of escape from the trying situation in which Duke Robert found himself in the spring of 1096.[6]
Yet the First Crusade was a papal, not a Norman, enterprise.[7] At the provincial council of Rouen which was convened in February, 1096, for the purpose of ratifying the canons of the council of Clermont, there is, oddly enough, no evidence that the projected Crusade was taken under consideration by the Norman clergy.[8] The initiative of the Pope, on the other hand, was clear-cut and vigorous, and his activity can be traced with some fulness. From Clermont Urban proceeded on a tour of western France; and passing northward through Poitou and Anjou early in 1096, he arrived at Le Mans in the middle of February and was at Vendôme near the end of the month. Then turning back southward, he was still occupied with the Crusade in a council at Tours in March.[9] The Pope seems not to have entered Normandy at all; but he was close to the border while in Maine and at Vendôme, and it is not improbable that it was during this period that he took the first steps towards launching the Crusade in the Norman lands.