1

Images of Reason

Since the Reformation, critics and apologists alike have shared a fascination with the crusades’ combined extremes of religiosity and violence. Whether judged noble or deluded, courageous or brutal, honest or hypocritical, faithful or naive, committed or corrupted, crusaders’ religious mentalities have continued to excite interest.¹ Less attention has been paid to their intellectual hinterlands, mental capacities or education apart from military training. The modern image of a medieval knight too often resembles some cartoon cut-out of robust thuggery dressed up in gorgeous robes, shining (or bloodied) armour or extravagant gestures of martial or amorous gallantry, a wholly dated figure to be admired but only with a slight sneer of superiority. The crusader used to appear peculiarly alien because of his belief in salvation through fighting and in killing as God’s work. Perforce, this incomprehension has recently begun to change. Crusading organization reveals a different aspect. Successful warfare requires experience, cool heads and the ability to reason, conceptually and empirically, as readily understood in the Middle Ages as it is today.²

AN INFRASTRUCTURE OF REASON

The exercise of reason requires an active mental organization, enquiry and deduction. Mere observation of phenomena or passive collection of information lack meaningful rationality unless ordered so that conclusions can be drawn. Otherwise, the information gathered constitutes mere random anecdotage. Reason seeks truth through enquiry. It is no coincidence that the two fashionable buzz words of twelfth-century scholarship, philosophy, law and even government were inquisitio (enquiry) and veritas (truth). It has been said that the social centrality of rational enquiry ‘is a gift of the Later Middle Ages to the modern world . . . the best kept secret of western civilisation’.3 Reason can be applied to abstract thought and to empirical observation. Much modern rationality assumes its character as essentially intellectual, the gathering of evidence that aims to convince other rational people of a truth using a method that is transparent and available to all. In a society that understood the world to be God-created and divinely ordered, reason also possessed an ethical aspect – how best to live a decent life – alongside what Eugene Weber dubbed value rationality, or conviction, and formal, closed rational systems, such as law and the legal process.⁴ Rationality is neither static nor immune to social influence. Alexander Murray famously ascribed the rise of reason in medieval culture to social aspiration and mobility allied to the commercialization of the economy and the consequent increasing role of mathematics.⁵ Social and cultural context are central when assessing the exercise of reason in the Middle Ages. Reason may be absolute; its manifestations are contingent.

The opposite of reason is not ignorance, desire, appetite, emotion, experience or even denial but, as Edward Grant has suggested, revelation.⁶ Much intellectual effort in the High Middle Ages was spent balancing these two forces. Acceptance of the existence of God the Creator did not exclude rational investigation of His world, i.e. nature, any more than the conviction that there is no God prevents examination of religion. However, belief in God inevitably involved confronting His interventions that appeared to override the natural order He had created, i.e. miracles. While these signs of God’s immanence could be explained rationally, as Thomas Aquinas attempted, they were increasingly ascribed to a separate category of ‘supernatural’ events, a coinage of the thirteenth century in a backhanded compliment to the progress of the rational study of man and nature.⁷ It is a common modern mistake to assume that because a premise is now regarded as false or unacceptable, any reasoning from that premise must itself be tainted as irrational. The integration of the scientific, political and ethical philosophy of the Greek philosopher Aristotle into Christian thought constituted the major academic project of the thirteenth century in western Europe. It formed the basis for the theology of Aquinas, the most influential thinker of the age. Aristotle’s interpretation of the natural world may be untrue, but it is not irrational. Only if Aristotle had been acquainted with Copernican astronomy, Newtonian and Ein-steinian physics, Darwinian biology and the rest and then had persisted with his theories would they have been unreasonable. Refusal to accept objective evidence is irrational; trying to make sense of what you think you observe or know is not. As already mentioned, ignorance, lack of information, is not per se irrational.

In fact a sense of inadequate understanding coupled with social ambition provided a spur in this period to intensified rational investigation in theology, philosophy and canon law. For example, the need to provide a rational proof of the existence of God, itself a commentary on actual or perceived medieval scepticism, was addressed by Anselm of Canterbury’s ontological argument in his Proslogion (1077/8).8 The formal technique of scholastic enquiry through the interrogation of authoritative texts to explore, explain and resolve contradictions and difficulties was pioneered by Peter Abelard, notably in his Sic et Non (i.e. ‘Yes and No’, c.1121) which included the classic formula for rational endeavour: ‘by doubting we come to inquiry and by inquiry we perceive the truth’. The first question posed was ‘Must human faith be completed by reason, or not?’⁹ This interrogative technique formed the basis of the scholastic method that came to dominate academic enquiry at the growing number of universities that appeared in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. University curricula rested on two modes of rational discussion, derived from classical education and together known as the Liberal Arts (artes liberales): literary, in the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic); and mathematical, in the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, the last really meaning astrology). Men educated in these disciplines played central roles in crusading, as advisers, organizers and active participants.

Reliance on rational enquiry rather than deferential acceptance of revealed Truth was not just an attribute of schoolmen (and a few women). The use, benefits and imperatives of rational thought were apparent across society. The period of the crusades, from the late eleventh century onwards, coincided with a secular embrace of rational habits of thought and performance. At its most basic this amounted to little more than admiring thoughtfulness and circumspection, elevated into a virtue, prudence, prudentia.10 This worldly wisdom could be attained by education, knowledge or experience, all useful whether in the merchant’s counting house, the architect’s or engineer’s workshop or as judge or juryman in a court of law. Church courts sought witnesses, consulted documents and heard arguments before the judge reached a verdict. Increasingly, in England for example, traditional forms of trial in secular courts – by ordeal or combat -were, partly in imitation of Church courts, giving way to the hearing of evidence and the oaths of witnesses, with jurors attesting to facts. Even the most bone-headed lord was expected to dispense justice that, however loaded, could not necessarily afford to be wholly arbitrary. Equally, in running estates, ruling tenants and asserting rights, reason provided a handy tool, familiar to crusade leaders and their knightly followers.

Rational proof was not restricted to courts of law. Relics are often cited by critics as one of the more bizarre and benighted aspects of medieval religion, the devotion to slivers of wood, loose-chippings, soiled rags and body parts as conduits for divinity and contact with eternity. Some of these anxieties were shared by the medieval Church authorities themselves. The efficacy of relics and their surrounding belief systems crucially depended on authenticity. Christian doubt and the demand for proof have pedigrees as long as Christianity itself, witnessed by the story of Doubting Thomas. One of the most famous episodes of the First Crusade shows how controversial and disruptive authentication could become and how urgent the need to find objective resolution. The seemingly miraculous discovery of the supposed Holy Lance (the spearhead that was said to have pierced the side of Christ on the Cross) at Antioch in June 1098 was credited by some with inspiring the crusaders’ crucial subsequent victory against the odds over the atabeg (or Turkic governor) of Mosul. Yet from the start sceptics questioned the relic’s status and the validity of the visions allegedly visited on its finder, Peter Bartholomew. These uncertainties, fuelled by political rivalries in the crusader camp, threatened to break up the expedition. An attempt some months later to decide the issue by a judicial trial by fire of Bartholomew ended, as such ordeals often did, with conflicting opinions as to the outcome. The trial consisted of Bartholomew walking through a corridor of flaming timbers carrying the supposed relic. His survival would prove the Lance was genuine. In the event, Bartholomew died after the ordeal. Yet his supporters insisted his injuries had not been caused by the fire but by his being mobbed afterwards. Years later, the bitterness created by the lack of an agreed verdict still flavoured chronicle accounts on both sides of the argument.11

Even though it failed, the attempt to resolve the Holy Lance controversy was conducted in a rational, judicial manner to address doubts as impartially as possible in order to arrive at a transparent, agreed, objective understanding of God’s verdict. This mirrored the Church’s general policy to winnow out the diabolic snares of bogus, bought or stolen relics. One of the most enthusiastic and academic chroniclers of the First Crusade, Guibert of Nogent (c.1060–c.1125), composed a bravura demolition of the claims of the church of St Médard, Soissons, to possess one of Christ’s baby teeth. Relics were big business. By attracting paying pilgrims, an authenticated relic could make the fortunes of the church or monastery where it was exhibited. The problem became more acute after the capture of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which released a glut of relics onto the market, including quantities of duplicates of some already venerated in the west.¹² This was not new. The 1098 Holy Lance of Antioch had competition from the Holy Lance on display at Constantinople that the crusaders themselves could have seen only a year before. The flood of Byzantine relics after 1204 sharply exacerbated the problem. Those receiving looted items had to reassure themselves they were genuine and not obtained for money. Rostang, a monk of the great Burgundian abbey of Cluny, carefully recorded the circumstances that led to the donation to the monastery of the head of St Clement in 1206.¹³ To establish its credentials, Rostang received from the donor, a local lord, Dalmas of Sercy, a detailed oral narrative of how the head had been located and deftly stolen from under the noses of its Greek custodians. It makes for lively reading, but the point of the record was to prove the authenticity of the relic and the legitimacy of its new ownership. The problem of fakes was regarded as so severe and widespread that the Fourth Lateran General Council of the Church, held in Rome in 1215, promulgated a decree to control the relic industry. Newly venerated relics now required papal authentication. The aim was to prevent the faithful being deceived ‘by lying stories or false documents, as has commonly happened in many places on account of the desire for profit’, a desire from which the papal curia’s licensing system was not immune.14 It was just as well Rostang of Cluny had taken the trouble to write down the saga of St Clement’s head. Both Rostang and the Lateran fathers knew the importance of written records.

The twelfth century’s spread of recording documents profoundly affected the administration of justice and government, as written records gradually challenged memory as an accepted currency of recollection.¹⁵ The new culture of record is most obviously manifest in official archives and new offices of administration, such as the audit office of the kings of England called the Exchequer (c.1106–10), named after the two-dimensional abacus used to calculate the amounts of revenue obligations and receipts. Exchequer accounts were kept on parchment rolls.¹⁶ By the end of the century, judgments in lawsuits of the crown and diplomatic and other administrative documents were also beginning to be copied into central archives, and not just in England. What worked for kings was imitated by their wealthier subjects and society at large. By the early thirteenth century at the latest, crusade recruiting agents were writing down lists of those who had taken the Cross.¹⁷ Commanders appeared to have kept written accounts of their followers’ wages during the First Crusade a century earlier.¹⁸ In law, commerce and government, at high or local levels, the standard of proof and record became more objective and, in that sense, more rational.

Like writing, medicine, architecture and engineering allied the intellectual and empirical aspects of reasoning. While the theories of the second-century AD Graeco-Roman physician and philosopher Galen and the four humours still dominated theoretical assumptions about how the body worked, and the role of the learned physician was recognized as superior to that of the artisan sawbones, surgeons and barbers, western medicine developed certain practical procedures that, while almost never curing maladies, alleviated symptoms. Hospitals or hospices proliferated in this period in which palliative care and the use of medicinal herbs combined in a regime of non-intervention, rest and good diet. Some experiences led to modest advances in treatment, notably in regard to battlefield injuries, not least during crusades. Beside the academic precepts of university medical schools, such as that at Salerno in Italy, and the shared wisdom of practitioners and nurses, occasional bold, enquiring spirits conducted medical experiments. Basic surgical procedures were expected to succeed.19 However misguided or inadvertently homicidal, medieval doctors believed they were following rational guides. As cure was not something within their grasp anyway, the failure rate of their ministrations hardly deterred their continuance. However, some conditions could be approached in a more wholly intellectual rather than empirical manner. Discussing in the 1220s the suicide of an adolescent in Cologne, the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach drew a moral distinction between depression (‘sadness and desperation’, tristitia et desperatio) and madness ‘in which there is no reason’. Victims of the former could not expect divine forgiveness if they took their own lives, while the insane, those ‘out of their minds’ (mentis alienatio), merited charity. While Caesarius located the key difference in the presence or absence of reason, the recognition of distinctive teenage depression indicates a more general common sense, if harsh, observation of life.²⁰

Architects, engineers, masons and carpenters did not rely on guesswork or avoid conceptual planning. The early twelfth-century treatise De Diversis Artibus, while not devoid of eccentricities (such as advising tempering metal tools with the urine of small red-headed boys), recognizes the need for the exertion of reason in describing techniques of painting, metallurgy and glass making. Processes from bell founding to constructing an organ are pursued logically. Discussion of metal work is prefaced by a description of how to build a workshop and furnace.²¹ The relevance of such metallurgical techniques to warfare is obvious: armour, weapons, horseshoes and nails. The importance of carpentry and the demand for skilled engineers to construct siege machines is no less evident. The history of the crusades is peppered with accounts of such engines and their builders. Some of the latter were clearly professionals. At the siege of Nicaea in Asia Minor in May and June 1097, a Lombard ‘master and inventor of great siege machines’, to construct a protective shield, or ‘cat’, for the besiegers, was paid 15 pounds of Chartres money (worth perhaps a quarter that of pounds sterling, so a sum still equivalent of a very decent annual income).²² Some experts combined practical engineering skills with elite education. In 1218, during the Fifth Crusade’s siege of Damietta in the Nile Delta, an amphibious siege tower, a sort of floating fortress, was devised by Oliver of Paderborn, Paris-educated academic, propagandist, chronicler and later cardinal.23 Whether the arithmetic and geometry of the Quadrivium assisted his engineering or it provided a private hobby is unknown. However, such skills were clearly not considered déclassé. Professional masons enjoyed relatively high social status. Architects attracted considerable reputations. The Frenchman William of Sens, a ‘most cunning craftsman in wood and stone’, won an international competition to become the designer of the remodelled Canterbury Cathedral in the 1170s.²⁴ An English master mason, Maurice, graduated from working on the keep at Newcastle in the 1170S to being the presiding engineer (ingeniator) at Dover Castle. There he was paid one shilling a day, suggesting an annual income that placed him almost in the knightly class. In addition, he received financial gifts from the king.²⁵ Such men and their professions also enjoyed a very particular gloss of reflected esteem. God the Creator appeared iconographically as the universe’s architect, complete with a pair of compasses.²⁶ Jesus Christ had been a carpenter.

However, this was not a world of untrammelled freedom of thought. Rationality was accepted as useful but not elevated into a secular godhead. Limits appeared to where speculation and enquiry could go. Even though rational argument was employed by theologians, for example in staged theological debates between Jews and Christians,²⁷ the contest between reason and revelation claimed victims. Abelard was excommunicated for heresy.²⁸ In the later thirteenth century, the University of Paris spent much time and effort trying to define how far rational philosophy should impinge on theology, famously over the question of whether God could do anything that is naturally impossible. Against the official majority line, some Paris philosophers thought not.²⁹ Thought policing represented only one rather esoteric aspect of the mental framework that constrained reason. Another limit was exposed by divination and prediction. Rational enquiry was reckoned to be necessary to understand the natural world in order better to control it. If the world operated in an ordered, observable fashion, its future movements and events should, through the application of reason, be able to be predicted. Magic, alchemy and astrology were practised as rational enquiries into the operation of the natural world by some of the best brains of the period. Adelard of Bath (c.1080–after 1151) wrote or supervised the production of works on Euclid, Boethius, natural science, the abacus, falconry and translations of Arabic texts on astronomy and astrology. He travelled extensively around the Mediterranean in search of texts. In the spirit of empiricism, he insisted on the primacy of reason rather than ancient authorities or the Bible to understand how things worked. Yet he also allegedly used to cast horoscopes, decked out in a special green cloak and ring.30 For Adelard and his contemporaries, divination and reason were not opposites but aspects of the same intellectual endeavour of rational enquiry, as they were, much later, for Isaac Newton, another noted student of alchemy.

The failures of prediction if anything undermined confidence in the primacy of reason, ironically leaving revealed truth, scriptural exegesis, inherited nostrums, guesswork and prayer as alternatives to fall back on. In his treatise De commendatione fidei (mid/late 1170s) Baldwin of Forde launched a direct assault on the predictive use of reason, evidence, experiments and experience, for example in medicine or among sailors and farmers. Part of his attack was directed at the habit of ‘prudent men of the world’ making predictions about war and peace ‘in accordance with what they remember having heard and seen’, a medieval version of the adage that generals tend to fight the last war, not the one they are actually fighting. ‘In all cases and others like them in which human skills play a part the judgement is uncertain . . . a doubtful outcome and a changeable result.’ Baldwin’s target was the reliance on ‘human skills’ (humana ingenia) and assumptions of cause and effect. ‘The experiments of medics are false, evidence is ambiguous, the advice of men untrustworthy, and human providence uncertain.’ In mid-career, Baldwin had joined the Cistercians, an Order congenitally suspicious of the rational debates of the schoolmen. He concluded his critique by asserting that the revelation of the Spirit of God and the holy prophets are ‘above all human reason and above all natural things’.³¹

This did not make Baldwin an intellectual Luddite. His move to the Cistercians led to rapid promotion to abbot, bishop and finally to the see of Canterbury (1184–90), where he became locked in a vicious dispute with his own monks over the use of the diocesan income. He acted as a diplomat and arbiter in political disputes at the highest level. The waspish writer Gerald of Wales, who knew Baldwin well, rather uncharitably circulated the neat aphorism about him: ‘most fervent monk, zealous abbot, lukewarm bishop, and careless archbishop’. His relegation of reason below revelation was entirely commonplace in the higher echelons of the educated clergy. Yet in practice he did not entirely dismiss the importance of experience. According to Gerald, who travelled with the archbishop, while touring Wales preaching the Cross and recruiting for the Third Crusade in April 1188, in a steep valley near Caernarvon, Baldwin insisted his party dismount and walk ‘in intention at least rehearsing what we thought we would experience when we went on our pilgrimage to Jerusalem’.32 Even for the slightly dour monk-archbishop, provided reason and empirical evidence did not come between man and God, they remained useful tools, not least in the transcendent cause of the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre.

THOUGHTFUL WARRIORS

The thinking knight was a recognized and respected type. Isidore of Seville, the great encyclopaedist of late classical learning in the medieval west, associated heroism with two qualities of rhetoric: sapientia and fortitudo, wisdom and strength or bravery, in military terms knowledge and skill. Later writers embroidered the duality: measured and rash; cautious and bold. In the Song of Roland, the seminal vernacular verse epic of the early twelfth century, these complementary attributes were embodied in the companions in arms Roland and Oliver: ‘Roland est proz et Oliver est sage’ the one pure in defiance, headstrong but unassailably noble; the other pragmatic, less extravagantly heroic. One of the earliest chronicle accounts of the First Crusade, an anonymous work known as the Gesta Francorum et aliorum Hierosolymitanum (‘Deeds of the Franks and other Jerusalemites’, compiled by 1104), lists the qualities of Bohemund of Taranto, one of the book’s heroes, as an outstanding general: wisdom (or perhaps experience/knowledge) and prudence, followed by power of personality and presence, strength, success, expertise in battle plans and skill at manoeuvring troops. Alongside conventional warlike epithets of courage, strength, bellicosity, etc., Bohemund is frequently characterized as wise (sapiens) and prudent (prudens) and twice as most experienced or skilled (doctissimus).33 While bled of specific nuances, the choice of epithets was hardly meaningless, especially as the story of the crusade was littered with examples of the folly of human agency: the disasters that accompanied the first wave of crusaders in 1096 under Peter the Hermit; the near disastrous separation of the crusade contingents before the battle with the Turks at Dorylaeum in July 1097. In the very popular revised embellishment of the Gesta Francorum by Robert of Rheims (1106/7), the image of Bohemund as the thinking soldier is reinforced: circumspect, prudent and intelligent (literally ‘capacious of mind’), astute, perceptive (literally ‘seeing much’), very wise and eloquent.³⁴ Another editor of the Gesta Francorum (in c.1105), Baldric of Bourgueil, includes a scene in which Bohemund argues for the importance of prudence (prudentia) in dealings with the Greeks. ³⁵Technical expertise in the art of war, ars bellica, beyond simply the ability to split skulls, was presented as admirable.³⁶ Only the hero of these narratives – Bohemund – is so regularly afforded these qualities.

Literary type mimicked reality. One First Crusade commander, Baldwin of Boulogne, later King Baldwin I of Jerusalem (1100–1118), had been well educated in liberal studies (liberalibus disciplinis), although, as a younger son originally destined for the Church, he was an exception.³⁷ Just how exceptional, in an age of high mortality, is unknowable. More significant, perhaps, was the evident value placed on soldiers displaying careful thought, i.e. rationality, if not necessarily academic ability. A trawl through eleventh-century chronicles by P. van Luyn found that the epithet prudens only began to be applied to knights at all in the generation of the First Crusade, but then it became the single most frequent description. Thereafter the image of the thoughtful warrior became commonplace.³⁸ In a crusading context there was a special non-military reason for this. The clerical promoters of the crusade sought to present the enterprise as a means whereby the habitual violence of the increasingly assertive knightly class could be channelled towards a common good and personal salvation. For this conversion to possess any validity, in law or literature, it had to be a conscious transformation, a genuine, rational, considered choice. This emerges from numerous recorded deals by which monasteries provided departing crusaders with cash in return for property. The laymen are regularly described (by the monks, not the laymen themselves) as choosing the Jerusalem journey to expiate their sins and save their souls. The most famous literary expression of this model is Ralph of Caen’s early twelfth-century account of the crusading deeds of Tancred of Lecce, Bohemund’s nephew. On the one hand, Tancred is depicted as a homicidal thug. But he is also said to have possessed an animus prudens, a sensible soul or mind which allowed him to doubt his secular military vocation and accept the offer of redemption through commitment to the crusade.39 Tancred was not alone. Thoughtful, contemplative warriors were not solely figments of propagandist imaginations. Henry II of England apparently hated the wars he was compelled to fight.⁴⁰ Over thirty years ago, Alexander Murray drew attention to the number of founders or other members of religious orders in the eleventh, twelfth and early thirteenth centuries whose conversion to the cloister involved, at some level, a conscious rejection of their own warrior culture, a list that includes the great Abbot Hugh of Cluny (1049–1109), Bernard of Clairvaux (d.1153) and Francis of Assisi (d.1226).⁴¹ As with Tancred, the precise accuracy of these frankly hagiographic accounts is less relevant here than the fact that audiences were invited to recognize these heroic stereotypes as true to life.

We are not here talking about just anyone who could wield a sword, axe or spear. From the second half of the eleventh century, especially in the Francophone regions of western Europe, the term for a heavily armoured cavalryman, miles, or knight in English, gradually became associated with class not function. Nobles were increasingly defining themselves through their military identity, witnessed on their seals and monuments, in the development of heraldic badges that spoke of grand lineage as well as individual status, or in the growing enthusiasm for tournaments, a mixture of role-play, training and the assertion of social exclusivity. Nobles referred to themselves as knights (miles) in witnessing contracts and were ubiquitously described as such by chroniclers. The association of social power and knightly rank was evident from battlefield to law courts, where knights acted as judges and jurors; to administration, with knights serving as central or local agents of kings, princes and barons; and to the emergent literary genre of vernacular epic and romance. Although equipping and training a professional mounted warrior required wealth or patronage, the assertion of knightly prominence went beyond economic power. The function of fighting on horseback in full armour became the badge of a cultural as well as social elite, one characterized by habits of taste, expectation and behaviour. Broadly, while recognizing regional variations in the nature, degree and pace of change, by the end of the twelfth century these cultural attributes had coalesced into a delicate but clear code of conduct, chivalry. Entry and membership were defined by the ceremony of dubbing a knight, an act that set a clear separation between the knightly and others. In 1100 all nobles were knights, but not all knights, milites, were noble. By 1200 this had changed; all dubbed knights were by general acceptance noble and therefore socially, if not always economically, superior to other, excluded, freemen, even those who fought on horseback but lacked dubbed status.42

The image of the thoughtful knight was credible because of the education such nobles could receive. Anselm of Ribemont, a second rank commander on the First Crusade, sent letters home, no doubt dictated to a scribe, and was noted for his very great love of learning. Another knight on the First Crusade, Pons of Balazun, helped compile a chronicle of the expedition.⁴³ One of the knights who stormed Jerusalem on 15 July 1099, the Norman Ilger Bigod, had been a pupil at the abbey school of Bec under the great theologian Anselm, later archbishop of Canterbury. Ilger, who stayed in Syria as marshal of Bohemund’s troops in Antioch, was later said to have corroborated the authenticity of Syrian relics by consulting written texts. Bohemund himself almost certainly spoke Greek to the extent he could pun in it. Gregory Bechada, a knightly follower of another First Crusade veteran, apparently knew Latin and spent a dozen years translating an account of the crusade into the southern French vernacular ‘so that the populace might fully comprehend it’. Three generations later, Henry II of England was apparently conversant with many languages ‘from the coast of France to the river Jordan’.⁴⁴ Linguistic skill was then far more an aristocratic accomplishment than now, partly the natural consequence of an internationally mobile nobility and clergy, lack of national frontiers and polyglot regions. The empire of Henry II stretched from the Cheviots and Dublin to the Pyrenees; that of his German contemporary Frederick Barbarossa from the Baltic to central Italy. Those born to rule were provided with the requisite education. Noblewomen such as the mother and wife of Stephen of Blois, another First Crusade commander, were often well educated, acting as encouragers and disseminators of learning in their families and occasionally as rulers in proxy for male kindred or in their own right. With the culture of writing penetrating legal systems and administration, increasing numbers of laymen were required at the very least to become what has been described as ‘pragmatic readers’, i.e. possessing the ability to read and understand official documents in Latin. The government of Henry I and Henry II in twelfth-century England increasingly depended on laymen to act as royal justices and financial officials. All three heads of Henry II’s administration, called justiciars, were laymen, two of them of knightly not baronial origin. Local royal agents, such as sheriffs in England or baillis in France, also had to be able to read to do their jobs, even as they asserted their social status through their warrior credentials. While in northern Europe levels of literacy grew as the culture of writing took firmer hold, formal lettered education was probably more common in southern France and Italy. It has been well observed that everyone’s lives depended in some respect on reading and writing, even if by others; and everyone knew someone who could read.45

Higher up the social scale, great lords and kings could not function effectively if they lacked basic literacy. Some, like the Beaumont twins in England and Normandy, achieved more. Waleran of Meulan (1104–66) and his twin Robert of Leicester (1104–68) were famously well educated and academically precocious, even if their youthful performance in holding their own in disputation with cardinals in 1119 when they were young teenagers dazzled more brightly because of their status as the sons of Henry I’s recently deceased leading minister and the indulged favourites of the king himself. Waleran read and researched Latin documents, possibly composed Latin verse and, with his brother, lived at the centre of an active literary and philosophical circle. He also defined himself as a military figure, was a pioneer of the use of heraldry and fought on the Second Crusade. Robert appears to have been of a more philosophical and legal bent, praised as a learned and meticulous administrator who ended his career as Henry II’s justiciar, noted for his forensic skill.⁴⁶ While the Beaumont twins may have been exceptional both socially and academically, education in knights and commanders was not seen as incongruous. By the mid-twelfth century wealthy aristocratic laymen were reading, commissioning books and having them dedicated to them. The patronage of the noble knightly classes underpinned the explosion of vernacular poetry and prose. Some, like Geoffrey of Villehardouin, Marshal of Champagne, or the Picard knight Robert of Clari, composed vernacular chronicles of their own (in each case accounts of the Fourth Crusade, 1201–4, on which they both fought). Of course, beyond the basics of reading, further education was a matter of choice. Many members of the ruling classes, then as now, ignored things of the mind for less cerebral pastimes. While Dalmas of Sercy, the purloiner of St Clement’s head, was described as very well educated (valde literatus), his companion on crusade was considered just a good chap (virum fidelium et bonum socium).47 Walter Map, a gadfly observer of the court antics under Henry II, despaired of the general indifference and disdain towards learning displayed by the English aristocracy. Yet his alleged interlocutor was Ranulf Glanvill (d.1190). A layman of knightly origin who had fought for his king and was to die at the siege of Acre on the Third Crusade, Glanvill had acted as a sheriff, royal justice and, at the time of the conversation with Map, was the king’s chief minister, a man of action and learning.⁴⁸

‘Rex illiteratus, asinus coronatus’, ‘an unlettered king is a crowned ass’, was a popular saying in the twelfth century.⁴⁹ Rulers, certainly by the twelfth century, were expected to possess reading literacy, at least in their vernaculars. Presiding over written administration, capacity to engage with this form of business was essential. Solicitous parents hired smart tutors. Some kings, like two of the leaders of the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa, king of Germany and Richard I of England, understood Latin.⁵⁰ Richard came from a remarkably academic family. His great-great-grandfather, Fulk IV le Réchin, or Fulk ‘the Sour’, count of Anjou (1067–1109), composed a chronicle of events of his own times.⁵¹ His son, Count Fulk V (1109–29; king of Jerusalem 1131–43), although famously absent-minded, was praised for his patience and circumspection in military affairs.⁵² He – or his wives – also seemed to believe in education for his sons: Geoffrey le Bel, count of Anjou (1129–51) and kings Baldwin III (1143–63) and Amalric of Jerusalem (1163–74). Geoffrey could read Latin, once during a frustrating siege consulting a copy of the late Roman manual on warfare by Vegetius. A contemporary eulogy noted his dedication to arms and to learning (studiis liberalibus), describing him as ‘excellently educated’ (optime litteratus).53 He made sure his son, later Henry II of England (1154–89), followed suit with a first-class education from internationally renowned scholars.⁵⁴ Geoffrey’s half-brothers, born after Fulk V relinquished Anjou in favour of becoming king-consort in Jerusalem, were cut from similar cloth. Baldwin III left a reputation as an intellectual, expert in the law, enjoying reading, listening to history and learned conversation. This praise may have owed something to convention, as his more lugubrious brother, Amalric, is described in almost identical terms. However, Amalric, as we have seen, was unafraid to question fundamental theological orthodoxy. He too believed in getting the best tutor for his son, the future Baldwin IV (1174–85), appointing William, later archbishop of Tyre. William, a Frank born in Jerusalem, had received a de luxe education in the schools of Paris and Bologna and later wrote a detailed history of the western settlements in Syria and Palestine, one of the most outstanding historical works of the Middle Ages.⁵⁵ If the court of Jerusalem nurtured intellectual monarchs, so too did those of their European relatives. Henry II, Geoffrey le Bel’s son, spoke Latin and French, enjoyed reading and delighted in showing off his learning and quick wit. One witness described his court as ‘school every day, constant conversation with the best scholars and discussion of intellectual problems’.⁵⁶ In turn, Henry ensured his sons were well schooled and literate, education that left its mark at least on some of them. Richard’s intellectual skills (‘Nestor’s tongue and Ulysses’ wisdom’) were regarded by one eulogist as unusual in a knight, but were widely noted and admired, not least his enthusiastic interest in music.⁵⁷ John appears to have shared his Jerusalem relatives’ interest in the law and legal procedures, while the illegitmate Geoffrey, a future archbishop of York, briefly acted as his father’s chancellor, i.e. the head of his writing office.⁵⁸

The extended Angevin dynasties in Europe and Palestine were not entirely atypical. Their standards both reflected noble practice and inspired imitation and were far from unusual among the great noble as well as royal families of the time. These families provided the commanders and planners of the crusades, men of experience and learning, with a culture of informed, circumspect militarism, well able to conceive and plan complex military operations. Relatively, many medieval commanders may have been better educated than some of their nineteenth- and even twentieth-century counterparts. They also had access to the advice of educated clerics, almost all of whom came from the same aristocratic, military social milieu. The papal legate on the First Crusade, Adhemar of Monteil, bishop of Le Puy (d.1098), had direct military experience before and during the campaign.59 The attraction of the crusade for some of the most impressive intellects of the period tells its own story, from Bernard of Clairvaux through the brightest stars of the University of Paris and Innocent III to the great academic friars of the thirteenth century, including Albert the Great, crusade preacher and translator of Aristotle. Crusades were planned and accompanied by some of the sharpest minds available. While not ensuring success, their involvement secured a buffer against unreason.

When another lively intellectual, Gerald of Wales, sought to provide a (largely unoriginal) manual for princely behaviour, he insisted on prudentia as of the greatest practical use in war. In this he included skill at marshalling troops, the ability to anticipate enemy tactics, acquaintance with technical manuals (presumably with Vegetius in mind) and knowledge of past wars through the study of history. He went further by urging the practical importance of formal learning for successful generalship. Among all the victorious princes of world history the two that stood out, he claimed, were Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, both men of outstanding academic erudition (litterarum eruditione). To drive the point home, he added the example of Charlemagne (768–814), the great, iconic early medieval conqueror of most of western Europe, and his tutor Alcuin. It may be less than surprising that an academic was advising the powerful to rely on academic learning for worldly success. Equally, Gerald’s opinions, while those of a marginalized, embittered and failed church careerist, were derivative and largely conventional.⁶⁰ His alliance of reason and war was consonant with current intellectual opinion and with the social realities of the time, as were his examples with popular taste. To Gerald’s contemporaries, as to those who first conceived of a war to conquer Jerusalem over a century earlier, Charlemagne was the prototype and ideal of the holy warrior, in legend the first to liberate the Holy Sepulchre from the infidels.⁶¹