No less important than muster rolls, balance sheets, high politics, diplomacy and the paraphernalia of war sat the personal welfare of crusaders: security of property and family left at home; discipline and rules of conduct on campaign; and their physical health in transit or in action. While it would be too glib to argue that a happy crusader made a successful crusade, this may not be too far from what contemporaries imagined. Happiness did not mean easy contentment. Stories of crusaders deliberately lingering over taking leave of their children to heighten the agony of departure, or others pointedly refusing emotional final views of the familiar landscapes of home, were designed to emphasize the element of sacrifice.1 The pain of separation acted as a form of strenuous devotional exercise that produced its own spiritual endorphins. Such emotions differed from anxiety about the safety of those people and places left behind or concerns about the conduct or well-being of fellow crusaders.
The defenders of Lisbon in 1147 apparently taunted crusaders that their wives at home were probably being unfaithful and their possessions plundered.2 While such fears operated as cultural clichés, they were nonetheless grounded in fact. Concern for security of property and those left behind is etched in crusaders’ charters and underpins central features of crusader privileges. The novelty of Urban II’s offer of Church protection for crucesignati initially generated some confusion. After pressure from ecclesiastical and secular lawyers, no doubt reflecting the demands of anxious and/or litigious crusaders, in 1123 the First Lateran Council confirmed that crusaders’ houses, families and possessions enjoyed papal and ecclesiastical protection on pain of excommunication for those who threatened them.3 Even if frequently honoured in the breach, the privilege addressed a central impediment to recruitment. Elaborate schemes were hatched to protect the integrity of estates during a crusader’s absence or in the event of his death. These provisions tended to include the explicit involvement and agreement of relatives, if only as witnesses. Kinsmen often provided the main threat to such arrangements, for instance over provisions regarding dower lands, which explained why many charters received the explicit approval of the crusader’s wife, some of whom were left legally (and sometimes administratively) in charge of their husbands’ estates. The records of English courts from the thirteenth century are littered with cases where wives sought to protect their dower rights as well as defending against wider encroachments on family property. Changes of ownership were regularly challenged by returned crusaders, or, if they had died, their heirs.4
Crusading added to the uncertainty of land holding within an increasingly competitive market. Dependants were left at material and physical risk. They could be stranded with inadequate funds in the face of creditors or even made destitute. In 1192, in an unlikely spasm of generosity, the English government bailed out two crusaders’ wives from Gloucestershire with 100 and 130 shillings respectively to support them in their husbands’ absence.5 Widows (occasionally unwittingly bogus as their supposedly dead husbands subsequently turned up alive) and heiresses suffered disparagement and forced marriages. Crusaders’ wives risked assault or worse. A number were murdered, for their possessions probably more often than for sexual motives. Henry III of England acknowledged the problem in 1252 when he secured Pope Innocent IV’s reiteration of the privilege of papal protection for crusaders’ wives against molestation.6 If the chroniclers’ scenes of distressed families bidding lachrymose farewell to crusaders are sentimental, those weeping had something to cry about. Despite the condescension of misogynist preachers castigating obstructive wives, these women in real life could encounter genuine hardship, a plight not improved by Innocent III’s relaxation of Urban II’s insistence that young married crusaders must obtain their spouse’s consent. Until then conjugal rights in law had been mutual, their unilateral denial frowned upon.7 However, the effectiveness of Church protection was contingent on the co-operation of interested parties and lay authorities. Occasionally these failed spectacularly, never more so than in the detention of Richard I in Germany while his lands were annexed by his enemies in France.
Even if reassured that provisions for the home front were adequate, the crusader confronted another threat to individual well-being and the cohesion of the whole enterprise. The coalitions that gathered under the banners of the Cross were potentially lawless, literally so, lacking a common legal system or unitary ties of lordship. Crusade planners appeared sensitive to the problem. The collective leadership of the First Crusade developed a collegial process of making decisions, pooling finance and dispensing justice, often in consultation with the wider crusade community, the populus as one veteran dubbed it.8 At one stage, before the siege of Antioch, the high command appointed a ductor, Stephen of Blois, perhaps a sort of chief executive. However, these arrangements emerged from the circumstances of the campaign. There is little sign, beyond the appointment of Bishop Adhemar of Le Puy as the pope’s representative, of prior arrangements for a shared command or regulations of conduct between the various contingents.9 The experience of the First Crusade may have stimulated subsequent crusade organizers to pre-emptive action. Regulations governing everything from clothes, discipline and personal conduct to the sharing of booty became habitual accompaniments to Holy Land crusades, not just for those polyglot forces that constituted themselves as formal communes but also in the armies of great lords and monarchs. For an activity that stressed the link between the behaviour and morality of the fighters with military success, this was, perhaps, not unexpected.
In Quantum praedecessores, Eugenius III reiterated the Church’s protection of crusaders’ families and possessions. He emphasized the spiritual commitment required of crusaders, specifically enjoining against luxury in dress or behaviour.10 The regulations governing the commune sworn at Dartmouth in 1147 included a similar sumptuary injunction, but concentrated on settlement of disputes and criminal offences, imposing ‘leges severissimas’: ‘a life for a life, a tooth for a tooth’.11 A formal peace (i.e. an agreed ad hoc set of binding laws which if broken invoked penalties) among the army was established, with injuries and offences covered by the commune agreement to be punished. Prostitution was outlawed. Poaching the services of sailors and servants was forbidden. A system of communal meetings was instituted; justice was to be in the hands of constables who would bring cases to elected judges, or conjurati, two per thousand men. These elected officials were also to control the distribution of money, which included the sharing of booty and plunder, an obvious and perennial source of friction (as it proved when, after the fall of Lisbon, crusaders from Flanders and Cologne ignored this provision). The Dartmouth ordinances tackled the most prominent internal threats to an army’s effectiveness: order, discipline, justice and the division of spoils. As events during the voyage showed, the security of the system of resolving conflicts, not least the accountability and sustained collegial process of reaching decisions, prevented the expedition from falling apart. The failure of Louis VII to implement similar sworn ordinances, ‘laws of peace and other useful things necessary on the journey’, may have played a part in his army’s near-disintegration in Asia Minor, rescued only by the imposition of military discipline by the Templars, an enforced ‘unity of spirit’ which, an eyewitness argued, compensated for hunger and low morale.12
Whatever Louis VII’s regulations contained, those promulgated by Frederick Barbarossa on 28 May 1189 at the Virfelt plain on the Danube near modern Bratislava echoed the Dartmouth ordinances. From chronicle descriptions Frederick, with the agreement of his magnates, imposed a formal peace throughout the army, applicable to all regardless of status. Especial attention seems to have been paid to theft, cheating, fraud and violence. Penalties were draconian: assault punishable by the loss of a hand; breaking market regulations by beheading. Special judges were appointed to enforce these rules, obedience to which was sworn by everyone in the army, oaths being taken ‘in every tent’ as one account put it. While the accompanying vision of an army replete with almost edenic honesty may be rose-tinted, the German crusade was notable for its cohesion and effectiveness until Frederick’s death in Cilicia. The imposition of sworn obedience to laws, supported by the consent of the expedition’s leaders, compensated for the loose political allegiances within the German army, offering a common guarantee of security, equality and fair treatment across ranks and regional origins.13
The Angevin provisions for the Third Crusade, which survive in more detail, served a similar function, directed as much to the security of the crusaders as to the convenience of their commanders. They shared features with both the German and the Dartmouth ordinances. In February 1188, at a council held at Geddington in Northamptonshire, Henry II issued decrees for the Saladin Tithe, the implementation of the crusaders’ temporal privileges and for the conduct of crucesignati, banning extravagant dress, swearing, gambling and unattached women, except for respectable (i.e. aged) laundresses (who on campaign in Palestine doubled as de-lousers). These decrees represented what might be seen as the moral stage of crusade preparations, suitably elevated statements of intent to suit the propaganda campaign launched at the same time. To underline this, one decree determined that any money left by a crusader who died during the expedition would be divided between the army’s general fund, alms for poor crusaders and support of the deceased’s own followers. This provision effectively dispensed with customary testamentary conventions, further emphasizing the special status and unique commitment of those taking the Cross.14
Further detailed ordinances were issued for conduct on campaign, some of which may simply have reflected wider contemporary military conventions, such as Richard I’s command before the storming of Messina in October 1190 that commoner deserters should lose a foot and knights be stripped of their belts, i.e. their status of knighthood, claiming this was the law.15 The ordinance for the Angevin crusade fleet in the summer of 1190, again promulgated with explicit consent of clerical and lay magnates, addressed discipline. Order was to be maintained by constables and marshals, with justiciars appointed with authority to enforce laws over the whole fleet, ‘English, Norman, Poitevin and Breton’, their judgments taking precedence over any regional legal customs. Murderers were to be thrown into the sea or buried alive on land. Assaults that drew blood would be punishable by mutilation; affrays that stopped short of bloodshed by keelhauling. Swearing would attract fines.16
At Messina in October 1190, faced with the behaviour of an actual rather than putative army, the Geddington decrees on gambling, debt exemption and legacies were modified. Recognizing the habits of the noble classes, knights and clerics were permitted to gamble, but only up to a limit of losses of 20 shillings a day, which implicitly curtailed winnings as well; any debts beyond that incurred a fine of 100 shillings per 20 shillings over the limit. Tellingly, kings and magnates were now exempted from all restrictions and their household servants permitted the same licence as clerics and knights, presumably so that their masters always had someone to gamble with. Punishments for illicit gambling by ordinary soldiers and sailors were savage -keel-hauling for seamen; three days’ whipping for the rest. All gambling debts as well as others incurred during the crusade were to be paid, regardless of the general crusaders’ immunity. Fights over wagers and gambling posed an obvious threat to morale, especially among possibly competitive groups of strangers gathered in crusading armies. The Geddington testamentary decree was also altered in the interests of wealthy crusaders whose patronage would be expected to extend even beyond death. Now crusaders were allowed freely to dispose by will of arms, horses and clothing, along with half of the other goods they had with them, the other half to be reserved, as before, for general purposes.17 It says much for the probity of Archbishop Baldwin and his executors that, on his death at Acre in November 1190, his money was divided, as he had wished, between paying for knights and sergeants on sentry duty and helping the poor, more or less in accord with the Geddington decrees.18 As with the other restrictions that challenged aristocratic habits, on clothing and gambling, attempts to control legacies proved short-lived; no such restrictions seemed to inhibit crusaders in the following century. Further measures proposed at Messina suffered similarly mixed fortune. While repeating the Dartmouth ban on poaching servants, other potential sources of friction were tackled by the attempt to regulate the internal markets for bread, wine and meat, their price, quality and profit margins. In support, a fixed exchange rate between the Angevin and English currencies was established. None of this, of course, prevented hoarding, profiteering and the inflation caused by too much money pursuing too few supplies in the cash-rich camp outside Acre.19
The Angevin ordinances fitted a pattern. Although most do not survive, similar ordinances governing law, justice and maintaining peace were common necessary accompaniments to crusades. In 1217, the fleet of Rhinelanders, Frisians and other Netherlanders under the count of Holland mustered once more at Dartmouth, where they too agreed to ‘laws and new rules (iura) establishing peace’. These included procedures for taking and sharing plunder.20 Few crusades passed without some arguments or violence over the distribution of spoils. These could involve high politics, as in the rows between Richard I, Philip II and Leopold of Austria during the Third Crusade; the rivalries and jealousies of national and regional contingents, as at Lisbon in 1147; the greed of individuals, as at Alcazar in 1217; or feelings of betrayal by a manipulative high command expressed by Robert of Clari over the fate of the plunder of Constantinople in 1204, speaking for perhaps the majority of crusading footsloggers who felt cheated by their commanders – a familiar complaint from the First Crusade onwards.21 Disciplinary ordinances demonstrated awareness of coalition armies’ requirements for unitary discipline and mitigation of perennial causes of friction, social, recreational and commercial as well as criminal. The harshness of punishments was bolstered by the degree of prior consent and sense of community on which the viability of these temporary legal systems rested, stitched together in rational, deliberate responses to specific problems of mixed crusade armies. Their effectiveness can be seen where they worked – at Lisbon in 1147, in the armies of Frederick Barbarossa and Richard I – and where they did not – in the French forces in Asia Minor in 1147-8. Commenting on the sworn ordinances, ‘laws of peace’, at Metz, Odo of Deuil concluded caustically: ‘because they did not observe them well, I have not preserved them either’.22
The corporate health sought by such regulations was of little consequence if an army lacked the bodily equivalent. Medical practice in medieval western Europe has often been seen as operating on different academic and practical levels – the educated physician and the artisan surgeon – with assumptions that neither was particularly rational nor effective. Recent research has cast doubt on many of these assumptions, with theoreticians observed as practitioners and not all medical interventions being useless or harmful.23 Warfare inevitably generated intense demand for effective surgery, the treatment of infection and nursing. The Mediterranean crusades not only provided extensive empirical evidence but also contact with other medical traditions. It is clear from western medical treatises that by the fourteenth century, to a limited degree, theory had embraced experience. Given that most non-surgical medicine before the nineteenth century dealt with alleviation not cure, the record of medieval physicians may not have been quite as dire as their stereotype insists. With battlefield injuries, they achieved some effectiveness. However, most medical care remained largely palliative, with the emphasis on nursing rather than intervention, although one could lead to or combine with the other.
From the start, crusaders took their doctors with them. At least one of them was a laywoman, Louis IX’s physica in 1248–50, Magistra Hersende, possibly the Parisian woman (‘une bourjoise de Paris’) John of Joinville recorded (without acknowledging her professional status) as cradling the sick king when he was captured (he was suffering from dysentery). Louis took a clutch of medical advisers with him to Egypt, both physicians and surgeons.24 He was following long precedent. When Godfrey of Bouillon badly wounded himself in fighting a bear during the march across Asia Minor in 1097, doctors (medicos) were on hand to treat him, almost certainly by cauterizing what seems to have been a serious arterial wound.25 Western medics appear in Outremer from the earliest days of the Frankish settlement, and can be traced on almost all the major eastern crusades thereafter, usually associated with a great lord or specific regional contingent, although some physicians and surgeon-barbers probably travelled as entrepreneurial freelancers hoping, with some certainty, that their skills might find employment. Medical support on the battlefield and on the march was not restricted to the personal physicians of the great. Italian cities employed doctors to travel with their armies and navies. Bologna employed Hugh of Lucca and a Master Robert to attend the city’s troops at Damietta during the Fifth Crusade. Hugh had been retained for 600 Bolognese lire a year; Robert was on contract for 50 gold bezants for the first year and 100 each year thereafter. Both were evidently smart, academically trained physicians, the top consultants of their day. Hugh later contributed to a Chirurgia, a surgical textbook by one of his pupils, Theodoric Borgognoni, that contained advice on treating weapon injuries of the sort Hugh would have seen on crusade.26
Crusade armies provided some communal nursing facilities. With typical thoroughness, in 1189 Frederick Barbarossa prepared ambulance wagons (vehicula) ‘for sick travellers so that the infirm should not delay the healthy and the crowd of sick and destitute should not perish on the way’.27 At the siege of Acre, crusaders from Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen built a field hospital out of wood and canvas salvaged from breaking up the ships they had arrived in. Dedicated to St Mary, this improvised medical centre developed in a few years into the Teutonic Order, which, like its model the Hospitaller Order of St John, combined nursing and military functions.28 A similar field hospice dedicated to Thomas Becket was established by English crusaders, probably Londoners, inspired by a clergyman, William, chaplain to the dean of St Paul’s. During a storm on the way east, he swore a vow to found a chapel in honour of St Thomas if he managed to reach the Holy Land safely. (The horror of seasickness for landlubber crusaders should not be underestimated; both James of Vitry and John of Joinville left vivid, agonized accounts of their sufferings; chaplain William’s was far from the only storm-driven plea for heavenly intervention.) At Acre, William buried the dead and nursed the sick, his chapel evolving quickly into a formal religious hospitaller institution, later also becoming militarized.29 These initially ad hoc arrangements contrast with the more considered preparations of Italian cities and secular lords.
Crusade armies did not habitually leave their wounded or infirm behind; it would be bad for morale even though coping with them could slow down progress, exposing nursing columns to enemy attack. Like Frederick Barbarossa, Richard I provided for the wounded and sick beyond his immediate entourage, regarding it as part of a commander’s duty. During his stay in Palestine he apparently set up a form of hospice at Ramla in 1191-2. In battle he provided shelter for the wounded at his so-called ‘Standard’, a sort of fortified cart, heavily armed, defended by a company of crack troops, surmounted by the royal banner fixed, for ease of identification, to a very long pole, probably a recycled ship’s mast.30 These expedients raise the question of the role of the Hospitallers of St John, whose great hospital in Jerusalem would have been familiar to all twelfth-century visitors to the Holy City before 1187. The order also operated field hospitals for the armies of the Franks on Outremer. There are hints of institutional protectionism that encouraged the formation of the new national nursing stations by visiting crusaders.31 More likely, sheer numbers overwhelmed local resources. The Hospitallers’ main medical function was nursing, providing the sick and needy, including pregnant women, with shelter, accommodation, food and basic hygiene. However, they and crusade doctors did essay some active treatments.
The fatality rate among the knights on long crusades, such as the First, Third or Fifth, has been estimated at between 25 and 35 per cent, the causes more or less equally divided between injuries and disease or malnutrition. The overall rate and the preponderance of disease over injury were probably higher for the lower ranks.32 Disease was an endemic problem of military camp life, some conditions, like scurvy, linked to diet; others to insanitary conditions. Interest in the causes of infection can be found in Joinville’s detailed description of the malady that struck the French army in the Nile Delta in 1250, which he ascribed, not unreasonably, to eating eels that had feasted on putrid corpses (in fact it was most probably scurvy).33 Diet was of especial interest to physicians and nurses, detailed prohibitions and prescriptions appearing in twelfth-century Hospitaller statutes, including advice to eat quantities of fruit but not pulses or cheese. More active intervention was common. Trepanning, with an apparently acceptable survival rate; basic surgery to remove arrows; more skilled operations to extract broken bone fragments, again with an assumption of competence and success; bloodletting for crush wounds; the setting of broken bones; and washing wounds with wine or vinegar all feature in anecdotes or textbooks based on medical practice. Some empirical medical experimentation was possible. An autopsy was conducted on a slaughtered dancing bear to help determine the best treatment for a deep wound suffered by the ex-crusader Baldwin I of Jerusalem. This persuaded the doctors not to bandage or cover the wound, allowing the infected pus to drain out. Baldwin survived.34 Archaeology has shown that medieval warriors could overcome serious fractures and other wounds; sawbones were not invariably killers, although Richard I’s death in 1199 from gangrene after a botched attempt to remove a crossbow bolt should dispel too positive a view of medieval surgical prowess.
Crusade organizers took medical and nursing provision seriously. When preparing what transpired to be an aborted crusade in the 1330s, Philip VI of France received a treatise devoted to two apparently incompatible, but in practice proximate, features of crusade warfare. Physician to the great, Guy of Vigevano’s Texaurus Regis Francie (1335) advised the king on the best diet, how to avoid poisoning, and on the health of ears, eyes and teeth. Additionally, Guy described, with detailed illustrations, a number of elaborate if improbable war machines: prefabricated moveable siege engines; devices for getting horses across water; and wind-propelled vehicles for desert use.35 Crusading was ever father to ingenuity. Guy’s coupling of medicine (he was at the time the queen of France’s doctor) with military hardware reflected an obvious truth. The most effective preventatives of harm, injury, disease or death on crusade were food and drink, but also arms and armaments.