This book is about how crusades were planned and organized, the application of reason to religious warfare. The culture of western Europe in the Middle Ages rested on the twin pillars of reason and religion. From the speculations of the learned and the politics of the ruling elites to the daily common puzzling at the point of existence or the problems of actually coping with the material world, faith informed behaviour and action while reason tried to explain why the supernatural made sense. Nothing illustrates this relationship more sharply than the history of the crusades.
This may at first glance seem eccentric. The crusades have frequently been portrayed as ultimate symbols of the power of credulity, witnessed by ‘millions of men who followed the pillar of cloud and fire in the sure and certain hope of an eternal reward’.1 They have encouraged a view of the Middle Ages as a period of naive energy and ignorance, ‘a story touched by the pathos of an ignorant group of Latins who undertook a journey to recover the Holy Sepulchre’.2 Most crusades to the prime objective, the Christian Holy Places of Palestine, failed, usually dismally. They have been portrayed as inept, failures of conception and implementation, hare-brained, feckless, extravagant mirages built on wishful thinking, not strategic reality, inspired by solipsistic cultural nostrums, not military or logistic common sense and cheered on by self-serving religious sophistry. Crusade armies may have comprised men accustomed to war but, the legend insists, they were led by commanders whose self-regarding vanity, meretricious ideology or greed were matched only by the absence of sound military intelligence or technological competence, the blind leading the deluded. What follows argues that in almost all respects this image is false. The intellectual as well as material effort involved in crusade organization contradicts such stereotypes. Viewed outside the frame of religious polemic or historical relativism, it becomes obvious that military expeditions as complex as the crusades were carefully, exhaustively and rationally planned.
Few periods of the past have suffered more from modern condescension than the rather patronizingly described Middle Ages, an imagined limbo of coarseness between the civilized worlds of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, a model carefully constructed by fifteenth-century humanists and lovingly polished ever since. These Middle Ages possessed value only as a mine from which nuggets of future modernity could be excavated by prospectors seeking thin veins of progress. Today, extremes of violence, bigotry, poverty, squalor or deprivation regularly attract the pejorative epithet of ‘Medieval’, although the worst famines tend to delve deeper in the lexicon of bogus history to earn the title ‘biblical’. Such labelling forgets that the most excruciating refinements in barbarism and inhumanity are historically recent. The period c. AD 500–1500 in Europe is dismissed, or occasionally praised, as an age of Faith, and thus, it is casually assumed, of ignorance. This misleads. Ignorance is no bar to reason, often the reverse. Modern society is not immune from the social force of religion. The assumption that faith or belief is antithetical to reason and vice versa is a canard given wings during the Enlightenment and the demolition of medieval (and, it might be remembered, classical) science. Yet no modern President of the United States would get elected if he publicly expressed the sort of rational religious scepticism shown by King Amalric of Jerusalem (r. 1163–74), who was concerned at the absence of any external, non-scriptural evidence for resurrection.3 Amalric’s doubts hint at medieval faith as neither unthinkingly passive nor hostile to rational explanation. Equally, while his premises and world view may differ from those of later philosophers, Thomas Aquinas (d.1274) was, in his method, just as rational as, say, David Hume (d.1776), even, it has recently been argued, when dealing with the problem of miracles.4 Nobody in the Middle Ages who thought about it imagined the world flat; intellectuals knew with near accuracy the circumference of the earth.5 Literal interpretations of Scripture never held a monopoly. Logical and empirical reasoning were characteristic features of the world of the High Middle Ages, as they are of ours. Not, it should be insisted, in the same way or in identical forms (an anachronism that dogs so much historical fiction and drama) but nonetheless recognizable as rationality, a process of trying to discover objective truth.
The example of crusade planning provides compelling testimony. Many of the ingredients allegedly typical of later warfare can be found in crusade leadership, their preparations displaying rigour and conceptual focus to match their successors’. Causes for war were identified and elaborate propaganda employed to persuade public opinion. Diplomacy garnered allies and secured routes of march, supply dumps, markets and free passage. Campaign strategies were agreed at meetings of commanders briefed by intelligence sources, manuals of military and legal theory, and maps. Command structures were established, if often only painfully and uneasily. Recruitment was methodical. In conjunction with lordship, shared locality and peer-group pressure, it was based on pay and contracts. The devolved private armies of late medieval and early modern Europe were mirrored and anticipated by the fragmented paid companies of crusade lords. Before departure, money was raised by innovative schemes of taxation and borrowing. Funding wars on credit was hardly post-medieval. It has been noted that while 31 per cent of the costs of Queen Anne’s War of the Spanish Succession (1702–13) were covered by loans, in the 1330s 90 per cent of Edward III’s wars were.6 From the start, crusade leaders frequently carried large debts both before and during campaigns. Pay scales and budgets were calculated. Transport, food supplies, logistics, materiel, even medical provision received careful and expert organization. Commercial fleets from the Baltic to the Mediterranean were mobilized or requisitioned. Internal markets within armies were created and regulated, if often ineffectually. Technology was employed, especially siege engines. On the Third Crusade, Richard I shipped with him to Palestine a pre-fabricated wooden castle and large throwing machines to be assembled on site.7 The cosmic rhetoric of crusade promoters was matched by ambitious concepts of grand strategy that incorporated schemes for reordering the Near East, seeking alliances across Eurasia and dabbling with ideas for economic warfare. Not all of these techniques and methods were efficient or effective. Few produced the ultimate victories sought. But irrational they were not.
There are perhaps two main reasons why the orderliness of crusade planning has been generally downplayed. Both are rooted in the nature of the evidence: the didacticism of literary observers compounded by the absence of bureaucratic records. A secondary historiographical explanation rests with historians’ understandable concentration on the drama of the campaigns rather than the prosaic methods that led to them. There have been some notable exceptions: among Anglophone scholars John France on the First Crusade; James Powell on the Fifth Crusade; William Jordan on Louis IX’s crusade of 1248–50; Alan Murray on a succession of German expeditions; John Pryor on crusade logistics; and Piers Mitchell on medicine.8 But even their interests have, sensibly enough, tended to be focused on the outcomes and consequences rather than the planning itself as a discrete activity. Others who have bothered to look closely at crusade preparations have been more concerned with what they reveal of participants’ inspirations and motives. In this they have followed the literary sources, the bulk of surviving evidence for the earlier crusades.
Medieval writers, of chronicles, histories or academic commentaries, tended to present the enterprises in a religious or providential light, to concentrate on the ‘why?’ and the ‘so what?’ rather than explicitly on the ‘how?’ Only after the final defeat and evacuation of mainland Syria and Palestine in 1291 did it become widely fashionable to pay serious independent attention to logistics.9 However, previous observers had not entirely ignored the mechanics of crusader warfare. Some clearly had a particular interest in such matters, such as Roger of Howden, an English royal official who went east with the Third Crusade.10 Similarly, in contrast to most clerical accounts in Latin, those in the vernacular by laymen, such as Geoffrey of Villehar-douin and Robert of Clari (for the Fourth Crusade) or John of Joinville (for Louis IX of France’s attack on Egypt in 1248–50), included more information on planning and organization.11 As knights and commanders, such things occupied them and probably interested them more than they did their clerical counterparts. Even so, logistical detail was included as part of the narrative rather than studied for any intrinsic interest of its own, or was presented as evidence of a leader’s especially admirable military acumen. Descriptions of crusades were dominated by models of bravery, chivalry and faith, with success and failure explained largely in moral terms, not the efficiency of planning or preparation. Similarly, preaching, recruitment and finance were assessed in terms of the probity of the propagandists, the devotion of the people and the honesty of the leaders rather than administrative acumen. Commentators tended to stick to a number of standard literary genres: the deeds of great men (gesta); the edifying collection of uplifting or admonitory lessons from the past (historia); linear narratives, often found in chronicles, that aped the historical patterns derived from the Bible; or chivalric adventure tales, epics and romances that revolved around abstract virtues - loyalty, bravery, generosity, etc. -of which crusaders’ actions provided suitable exemplars. The lack of attention to the humdrum techniques of assembling effective military campaigns lent crusading a false air of spontaneity or improvisation, an impression encouraged by the second limitation of evidence.
The study of administration relies upon the creation and survival of archival records. These can reveal in intimate detail the planning process. So, for example, from a small dossier of documents preserved in the Archives Nationales in Paris it is possible to follow the development of a proposal to raise money for a putative crusade to the Holy Land in 1311. The plan was written by Guillaume de Nogaret, one of Philip IV of France’s chief ministers and political fixers. One document in the dossier is covered in deletions, emendations and additions showing precisely how Nogaret’s original ideas had been toned down, probably by a drafting committee, to fit more smoothly the immediate political and diplomatic context.12 Without such material, understanding of Philip IV’s regime’s interest in crusading would be much more restricted. While, from around 1300, archives and libraries across Europe are littered with memoranda, tracts and treatises concerning the practical (and not so practical) means of organizing crusades, before then very little such material survives. Government records, with a few exceptions, are also notably exiguous. With rare interludes, such as Charlemagne’s literate court around 800, until the twelfth century, and then unevenly, the restricted writing culture largely shielded processes of planning as lords and governments, although using writing to communicate, did not routinely keep written records once they became redundant. As a result, we can usually only assess results, not intentions.
Yet early medieval rulers at all levels, with their officials, agents and cronies, planned: for war; for governing; for exploiting material resources of land and commerce; for the administration of justice; for the control of subjects; or for the production of coinage. The physical results prove it. Great public works, such as Offa’s Dyke or Charlemagne’s incomplete Rhine-Danube canal, did not build themselves any more than churches, palaces, castles or city walls. The regular street plans of medieval London, Winchester or Oxford were not the product of some random building spree. Diplomats and merchants did not wander the landscape blithely hoping for coincidental encounters with politicians or trade. Noble households and armies were not assembled, maintained and fed by accident. The rotation of crops in village fields did not happen by chance. Law courts operated immemorially on precedent and convention before becoming confined by written record. So much is obvious. Narrative sources from all corners of Christendom frequently mention assemblies, conferences and council meetings, the occasions for planning, even if the detail of what was planned and how is largely omitted. Until the twelfth century, with the partial exception of England’s royal administration, how civil or military projects were organized can only be reconstructed indirectly, from chronicles and histories, fiction, a few letters preserved for their style or significance of correspondent, visual art and archaeology. What documents do survive tend to be skewed towards matters affecting the Church and/or the transfer of property. None of these constitute very good sources for the mundane act of organizing men and resources. Yet the absence of written records of planning does not mean it did not occur. The great monuments of administrative endeavour, such as Domesday Book (1086), the English accounts, called the Pipe Rolls of the Exchequer (from the early twelfth century, surviving continuously from 1155) or the fiscal records (computa) of the counts of Catalonia (late twelfth century), did not emerge ab nihilo.13 Although administrative historians sometimes find this difficult, the absence of written records or, importantly, written record-keeping does not necessarily imply a lack of previous efficiency, complexity or sophistication. Nor, conversely, does their appearance necessarily imply novelty or innovation in much except itself, i.e. record-keeping. The planning of the crusades bears this out, both before and after the deceptive watershed of written records.
Without government archives, there is a tendency to resort to ‘they must have done x or y’ arguments, reducing any assessment of the efficacy of planning to a deduction from the outcome. Thus William of Normandy’s planning of the 1066 invasion of England has been held up as a model of efficient and effective preparation. It was; and would have been even if William not Harold had been killed at Hastings, and the Norman army had been driven back into the sea. Yet it is unlikely that historians - then or now - would have thought so if the Normans had not been victorious. Though Harold was defeated, his planning - although not necessarily its execution - may have been just as remarkable in its own way. We know of William’s preparations not only from panegyric court historians and some fragmentary later documentary detail, but also from the visual evidence of the Bayeux Tapestry. In its detailed and careful depiction of the assembling of arms, armour, supplies, shipping and horses, as well as its scenes of conferences between commanders, the tapestry provides unequivocal testimony to the importance given at the time to the administrative effort behind the heroic campaign and to the centrality of the planning process from council chamber to the battlefield.14 In essence, such pictures are not so very far from modern images of generals poring over maps, staff officers scrutinizing budgets and supply orders, or newsreels of factories manufacturing munitions or armies massing for war.
Writing in the early years of the fourteenth century, reflecting on the experience of two centuries of wars of the Cross, the Armenian prince, historian and ethnographer Hetoum (or Hayton) of Gorigos identified four prerequisites for a successful crusade to recover the Holy Land: an appropriate cause; sufficient resources; knowledge of the enemy’s capacity; and suitable timing. These were the matters that ‘reason requires anyone wishing to make war on his enemies to consider’.15 The absence of medieval planning is a myth, a consequence of poor written evidence and a certain medieval cultural contempt for the bureaucrat and official. The lack of rationality in medieval warriors is another fiction. Both distortions envelop the crusade like heavy batter. Some responsibility rests with clerical commentators and clerics at the time, eager to portray commitment to the Cross as a Damascene conversion or epiphany. The prosaic reality of complex negotiation and laborious preparation usually made for poor didactic copy in medieval cloisters as in Hollywood studios. Across medieval Eurasia, war was woven into the fabric of society, a defining identity for the social and political elites. The crusades, although not simple, were simply wars. Those who launched and led them appreciated that their prospects depended, like most other wars, on at least seven associated but distinct considerations: establishing a convincing casus belli; publicity and propaganda; recruitment; finance; transport; a plan of campaign as far as could be predicted; and a wider geopolitical strategy. Each will be examined in turn. But first something must be said about the planners and warriors themselves and their culture of reason.