Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

On the advent of the Turks all was changed: the Holy Places became more and more difficult to visit, Christians were stoned and beaten, mulcted of their last pennies in extortionate tolls, and left to die of hunger or flung into dungeons for ransom.

The First Crusade

Tradition says that a certain French hermit called Peter, who visited Jerusalem during the worst days of Turkish rule, went one night to the Holy Sepulchre weeping at the horrors he had seen, and as he knelt in prayer, it seemed to him that Christ himself stood before him and bade him ‘rouse the Faithful to the cleansing of the Holy Places’. With this mission in mind he at once left the Holy Land and sought Pope Urban II, who had already received the letter of Alexius Commenus and now, fired by the hermit’s enthusiasm, willingly promised his support.

Whether Urban was persuaded by Peter or no is a matter of doubt, but he at any rate summoned a council to Clermont in 1095, and there in moving words besought the chivalry of Europe to set aside its private feuds and either recover the Holy Places or die before the city where Christ had given his life for the world. It is likely that he spoke from mixed motives. A true inheritor of the theories of Gregory VII, he could not but recognize in the prospect of a religious war, where the armies of Europe would fight under the papal banner and at the papal will, the exaltation of the Roman See. Was there not also the hope of bringing the Greek Church into submission to the Roman as the outcome of an alliance with the Greek Empire? Might not many turbulent feudal princes be persuaded to journey to the East, who by happy chance would return no more to trouble Europe?

Such calculations could Urban’s ambitions weave, but with them were entwined unworldly visions that lent him a force and eloquence that no calculations could have supplied. Wherever he spoke the surging crowd would rush forward with the shout Deus vult, ‘It is the will of God,’ and this became the battle-cry of the crusaders.

‘The whole world,’ says a contemporary, ‘desired to go to the tomb of our Lord at Jerusalem.... First of all went the meaner people, then the men of middle rank, and lastly very many kings, counts, marquesses, and bishops, and, a thing that never happened before, many women turned their steps in the same direction.’

The order is significant and shows that the appeal of Urban and of Peter the Hermit had touched first the heart of the masses to whom the rich man’s temptation to hesitate and think of the morrow were of no account. Corn had been dear in France before the Council of Clermont owing to bad harvests; but the speculators who had bought up the grain to sell at a high price to those who later must eat or die found it left on their hands after the council was over. The men and women of France were selling not buying, regardless of possible famine, that they might find money to fulfil their burning desire to go to the Holy Land and there win the Holy Sepulchre and gain pardon for their sins as Pope and hermit had promised them.

The ordinary crusading route passed through the Catholic kingdom of Hungary to Bulgaria and thence to Constantinople, where the various companies of armed pilgrims had agreed to meet. It was with the entry into Bulgaria, whose ‘orthodox’[14] king was secretly hostile to the pilgrims, that trouble began. Food and drink were grudged by the suspicious natives even to those willing to pay their way; whereupon the utterly undisciplined forces could not be prevented from retaliating on this inhospitality by fire and pillage. A species of warfare ensued in which Latin stragglers were cut off and murdered by mountain robbers, while the many ‘undesirables’, who had joined the crusaders more in hope of loot and adventure than of pardon, brought an evil reputation on their comrades by their greed and the brutality they exhibited towards the peasants.

Reason enough was here to account for the pathetic failure of the advance-guard of crusaders, the poor, the fanatic, the disreputable, drawn together in no settled organization and with no leaders of military repute.

Alexius Commenus, who had demanded an army, not a rabble, dealt characteristically with the problem by shipping these first crusaders in haste and unsupported to Asia Minor. There he left them to fall a prey to the Turks, disease, and their own inadequacy, so that few ever saw the coasts of their native lands again.