FINDING THE BALANCE between piety and independence challenged knight-hood and all medieval writers who were certain they should speak to the chivalric ethos.1 Likewise, all modern investigators know that the presence and power of piety in chivalric life can never be doubted or downplayed. Yet we need to take into account the degree of independence (only briefly noted in the last chapter); its force shaped and complicated knightly piety. Much modern thinking and teaching about chivalry still tips the balance heavily toward the side of an uncomplicated piety among the knights, picturing them as unfailingly obedient sons of Holy Mother Church.2 We cannot understand chivalry if knightly independence within that framework of piety is not emphasized. Like buttresses relieving the overarching vaults of a great church, these elements of independence supported essential chivalric ideals, taking on the unavoidable strains. Interaction between piety and independence presents an exquisite balance of forces. We can initially see this balancing in a brief look at attitudes to tournament. A second case, requiring more discussion of the evidence, will focus on the knightly reception and reaction to crusade propaganda.
Tournament Triumphant
No scholar doubts that tournament was the quintessential knightly sport, cherished as one of the very elements inherent in chivalric self-definition.3 Chivalric insistence on tournament—heedless of clerical disapproval—thus provides significant evidence of knightly independence. Clerical opposition is likewise a well-established historical fact; the clerks had loathed and challenged tournament from the time they became aware of its existence as a form of mock warfare dangerous to its participants and so often to others who simply happened to be in the way of wide-ranging fighting. Caesarius of Heisterbach's spokesman in his Dialogue on Miracles unhesitatingly announced that “of those who fall in tourneys, there is no question that they go to hell, if they have not been helped by the benefit of contrition.”4 As it developed, tournament had acquired a reputation for social and sexual opportunities that could only provoke clerical wrath; a festering source of all seven deadly sins, some of them claimed.5 They continued to denounce it as an occasion for injury, death, and social disruption long after there was any real hope of eliminating so cherished an elite sport. We know who won this quarrel, but it is instructive to consider with what vigor and in what language the sides argued.
Thomas of Cantimpré can speak forcefully for the clerical side. An Augustinian and later a Dominican who studied with Albert the Great, around mid-thirteenth century he wrote a book with the wonderful title Bonum universale de apibus (The Common Good from Bees).6 A book of confession stories told by sinners to friar-confessors, it was probably written for the edification (as well as the amusement) of fellow confessors. So much for the “seal of the confessional.”7 One story came to Thomas from a fellow Dominican to whom the widow of the offending knight had made sorrowful confession.8 This powerful German knight, devoted to tournament, apparently had died in one; at least, Thomas says, “he died as miserably as he had lived (mortuus est autem miserabiliter sicut vixit).” His holy and devout widow, with much weeping (de rigeur for confession stories), told her spiritual father of a vision given her of her departed husband after his death. His exact location was not specified, but he was surrounded by a great gathering of demons who were performing a devilish version of the arming ceremony. They first outfitted him with caligas, heavy soldier's shoes—using spikes that penetrated from the soles of his feet to his head. Next came the knightly hauberk, secured to his body again with spikes that pierced him through, this time front to back and back to front. His great helmet was then nailed to his head, with spikes tearing through his body all the way to his feet. The shield they hung from his neck had a weight sufficient to shatter all his limbs. Apparently after tourneying, the knight had been accustomed to relax with a soothing bath, followed by recreational sex with some willing young woman. The demons in the vision dunk him in a tub of flames and then stretch him out on an incandescent iron bed where the sexual partner provided was a horrible toad (buffonis illius horribilis).9 His widow told her confessor that she was never quit of the terrifying vision.10
This story and many more like it thundered down upon the faithful from many pulpits; they were, of course, meant to be terrifying. Thick collections of surviving sermon exempla regularly provided preachers with ammunition for the war on knightly tournament, often characterized as accursed meetings and the spawning ground for sin.11 Sometimes in a typically clerical fashion, the writer plays with words to assert that tourneyers should better be called tormentors. These arguments roll on as late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. John Bromyard, a classic source, denounced tournaments in his great Summa Praedicantium (the Summation of Preaching, a manual mined for principles of religion and sermon stories, originally written by this English Dominican in the later fourteenth century). So much frivolous expense is involved, he writes, that “torneamentum est pauperorum tormentum (the tournament is the torment of the poor).” Many men are killed, and they become, he declares in a telling phrase, “martyrs of the devil (martyres dyaboli).”12
Of course by then the campaign was long a failure. Clerics had clearly lost the fight by the time of our two pious knightly authors, Lancaster and Charny, both of whom easily assume in their pious writings that tournament is a licit part of the chivalric life. Clerics may have clung to standard denunciations in manuals for sermons, but the knights had prevailed.
Crusade Ideology and Chivalric Ideology
Evidence on crusading propaganda and knighthood redoubles that from the determined chivalric continuance of tournament. The warriors selectively absorbed those ideas that fit within a framework of chivalric sensibilities. Of course it is easier to find clerical views outlined in theological and legal works. Yet we can recover the knights' views from crusade chronicles and can see their reflections in harsh strictures against them penned by clerics in sermons, confession manuals, and collections of miracle stories.
What Was Promised
Priceless spiritual benefits awaited the prospective recruit. Historians of crusade might quickly and justly point out that a carefully framed theology of penance was distorted in the lavish and unconditional promises which knights often heard in crusade propaganda. The canonically correct idea held that crusaders won only remission of temporal punishment (poena) for confessed sins, not the elimination of more basic guilt (culpa) for all sin. Yet as crusade preaching spread its message, as Carl Erdmann commented pointedly, “the world took no account of this distinction. Not one of the contemporary reporters of Urban's sermon at the Council of Clermont in 1095 reproduced the official terminology. What predominated instead was the general belief that the crusade procured forgiveness of sins and the soul's salvation.”13 Sermons generally offered crusaders just what they surely needed to hear and wanted to possess: unambiguous assurance of sins forgiven in this world and a safe passage through devilish perils to glory in the next. As James Brundage wisely cautioned,
The nature and meaning of the spiritual merits that soldiers could earn by participating in a holy war, as well as the theological implications of this idea, remained unclear for a very long time, both to those who held out promises of such merit and, even more, I suspect, to those who acted on these promises.14
The valiant fighters in the Song of Aspremont are assured, for example, that those who die fighting infidels will sit at God's right hand, their sins forgiven without confession.15 Writing of the crusaders marshaled against the Cathars, the chronicler William of Tudela said tersely, “once they knew that their sins would be forgiven, men took the cross in France and all over the kingdom.”16 Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay in his chronicle of Simon de Mont-fort's effort against the Cathars could record equally summary promises: at the siege of Castelnaudry the bishop of Cahors and a Cistercian monk promise the crusaders that if they were to fall in this glorious struggle on behalf of the Christian faith they would be given remission of all their sins, would be instantly crowned with glory and honor, and would thus receive a reward for their labors.17
Peter sometimes records more circumspect promises, as he does when narrating the beginning of the crusade: all those who, inspired by zeal for the true faith, took up arms for this task of piety would receive indulgence for all their sins from God and his vicar, so long as they were penitent and made confession. No more need be said. The promise of indulgence was published in France; a great multitude of the faithful took up arms under the sign of the cross.18
In his extended description of the decisive battle of Muret (1213), he seems more careful, but his blessing bishop almost enacts a cleric drawn from a chanson de geste. The bishop of Comminges recognized that his colleague, the bishop of Toulouse, would fatally delay the crusading army by providing individual blessing with a wooden crucifix. He thus seized the crucifix and blessed the body of warriors en masse with the words:
Go forth in the name of Jesus Christ! I am your witness, and will stand as surety on the Day of Judgment, that whosoever shall fall in this glorious battle will instantly gain his eternal reward and the glory of martyrdom, free of the punishment of purgatory, so long as he is repentant and has made confession, or at least has the firm intention of presenting himself to a priest as soon as the battle is over for absolution from any sins he has not yet confessed.19
It is easy to imagine the bishop shouting out his personal warranty to the massed warriors from his spot of high ground; yet all the qualifications may well represent fine print to the contract, emerging from the precise mind of the clerical chronicler. Perhaps little clerical labor was ever directed to correcting any excessive promises or misconceptions. It seems too much to expect careful correction from battlefield preachers who were convinced that God required them to launch a fully triumphant crusade.20
As Erdmann noted, lavish promises appear in accounts of the foundational sermon Pope Urban II preached at Clermont in 1095, calling for a great armed pilgrimage to the East.21 Reports of this sermon establish popularly perceived principles that lasted throughout the life span of crusading. We do not, in fact, know precisely what Urban said at Clermont. The accounts written in twelfth-century chronicles could scarcely have reproduced the actual words of the pope decades later.22 Yet these accounts give us motive ideas from a formative stage of crusading ideology. Through the following centuries these themes appeared in countless sermons, with the exempla that animated them sometimes taking on lives of their own in collections of miracles and moral tales; and the stories lived on also in chivalric literary texts. Such materials reveal common conceptions of crusading benefits.
Three major and closely linked themes appeared in these calls to action and fulsome praise of valiant crusaders. First, a theme of authority: ecclesiastical authority stands behind warfare that is most clearly licit and blessed in the sight of God. Willing obedience to answer the call and recognize the rightful voice that sounds it is the knights' first merit. By taking the cross—a most public and visible action—they acknowledge that the call to sanctified warfare comes to them from God through the clergy. Second, knights hear—whatever actually was said—that such fighting can earn spiritual benefits often amounting to remission of sins. Specifically, they are told that the severe and trying suffering which they are to expect on crusade is the mechanism of religious expiation and atonement. A third theme, however, is restrictive and admonitory: these penitential benefits gained by meritorious fighting are restricted to the work of those blessed by clerical authority. Especially in early days, knights are told bluntly that their characteristic practice of warfare at home, far from earning them any religious merit, is hateful in the sight of God; only the proper work of the subset of obedient crusaders confers potent spiritual benefits. The message becomes rather more nuanced over time, as we will see, but crusade is always upheld to knighthood as the ideal form of warfare, an outlet for warrior energies superior to the common practice of fighting with their coreligionists in Europe.
Clerical Direction Asserted
Clerical authority to initiate and direct holy warfare had a venerable history by the time Urban II preached at Clermont, whatever the novelties of that dramatic occasion. The trail of precedents stretched from the Christian Roman Empire through episcopal blessings on military campaigns during the Carolingian era. Precisely how effective these blessings proved as causal agents in any body of armed men could be debated by specialists, but most scholars might agree that a powerful valorization descended on the warriors.23 Although Pope Urban's famous crusade message of 1095 directed crusaders against a foe considered infidels, interesting earlier evidence comes from the Norman campaign to conquer Anglo-Saxon England. Whether or not William the Bastard actually received a papal banner from Alexander II (1061–73) as a sign of divine favor for his invasion in 1066, he does seem to have enjoyed papal backing.24 Yet William's fighting, if meritorious, was not considered penitential and did not enter into the economy of salvation for those engaged. After the conquest, a papal legate arranged a formal schedule of penance for those involved in the fighting in order to cleanse them of all sins committed on the campaign.25 Equally interesting evidence appears in a letter sent from this same pope to Spanish clerics in 1064. Through these clerics the pope urged the warriors fighting Muslims in the Reconquista to confess their sins and accept the penance imposed by their bishop or spiritual father. By apostolic authority, however, he then lifted the penance from them and granted a remission of sins. One form of penance—fighting for the faith—it seems, was being substituted for more traditional forms.26 This cumbersome process of assigning traditional penance only to replace it with meritorious crusade fighting is instructive. It was not, of course, the only pattern followed. Not many years earlier, Leo IX had led forces against troublesome Normans in Italy, and after this campaign some clerics asserted that those from the papal side who were slain had earned blessed martyrdom. When allied with the papacy, Norman forces in southern Italy and Sicily often fought under papal banners, or received them after victories.27 His even more prominent successor Gregory VII had famously thought of summoning the warriors of Europe into papal service as a militia Sancti Petri.28 If the relationship of divinely approved warfare to meritorious suffering as penance was at this point still in flux, behind the experimentation stands the assertion of clerical authority to speak for God in authorizing and directing warfare.
Close directive authority by clerics waned over the centuries. Subtleties and complexities of interpretation are best left to crusade specialists, but the general tendency for increasing control of the actual conduct of crusading by laymen seems clear. If clerical leadership under Innocent III directed the Fifth Crusade (1213–21), even that powerful pope had lost control of the Fourth Crusade; and another masterful pope, Gregory IX, could not steer the Barons' Crusade as he wished.29 And kings had their own ideas and priorities, as Philip II of France had demonstrated by his departure from the Third Crusade, as Louis IX in his piety demonstrated in the crusades that he directed. Sounding the call for crusading and providing the money demonstrate continuing clerical influence; conducting the warfare and setting goals increasingly reveal lay directive force.
Spiritual Benefits Won
Meritorious suffering in crusade warfare generated significant benefits, often discussed. Surviving crusade sermons quote the fundamental biblical passage on Christian asceticism, relating Christ's words closely to crusading: “If any-one wants to come after me, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.”30 The chivalric form of following Christ certainly called on knightly prowess and required endurance. Though other forms of pilgrimage were meritorious, the crusade was superior because of the greater sufferings it imposed—a point that Geoffroi de Charny would have appreciated. Humbert of Romans forcibly insisted that if all humanity makes the pilgrimage represented by life, crusade represented the outstanding form of pilgrimage. He based his claim, of course, on the greater asceticism involved in the armed pilgrimage of crusade. If other pilgrims expose themselves to hardships, the crusaders “expose themselves to death, and this in many instances.”31 Gilbert of Tournai details that crusaders praise God with heart, mouth, and works; and the works he has in mind involve “the labours of satisfaction (labores satisfactionem).”32 Through their suffering, as an able historian of crusading sermons observes, the knights “conformed” to Christ and enacted an extreme form of penance.33 In the vivid language Jacques de Vitry addressed to crusaders, “God the Father signed [Christ], to whose flesh the cross, that is fixed with a soft thread to your coats, was fixed with iron nails.34 “For,” as Eudes of Châteauroux insisted, “he who wants to catch the Lord needs to expose himself to every danger and labour.”35 And Eudes specifies that it is crusading knights who best follow Christ into danger and physical labor: “today, who but the knights more aptly and more evidently trust that Christ is their lord? They follow the Lord's call like noble birds and they form his army and his cavalry.”36
In stirring and pointed words imaginatively given to Urban II by the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, the pope pledges unqualified spiritual benefits to the crusaders:
I address those present; I proclaim it to those absent; moreover Christ commands it. For all those going thither there will be remission of sins if they come to the end of this fettered life while either marching by land or crossing by sea, or in fighting the pagans. This I grant to all who go, through the power vested in me by God.37
In the words supplied for Urban's sermon by Robert the Monk, the pope urges the knights in a similar if somewhat more comprehensive vein: “Embrace this undertaking for the remission of your sins, certain of the unfading glory of the kingdom of heaven.”38 Among those who reconstructed Urban's crusade sermon, Gilbert of Tournai used the most elaborate image:
Just as small fish hide beneath rocks, so they escape the storm and are not swept away by the current, so crusaders are saved, so to speak, hiding in a foreign and unknown land, whereas lovers of this world are swept away, while playing in the many eddies of worldly things, and die in their own country.39
William of Malmesbury may be the most eloquent reporter of words from Pope Urban II on this theme. His report pictures the pope urging his listeners to:
Devote a little exertion to the Turks, and your effort will be rewarded by the anchorage of everlasting salvation.…The motive force of your toils will be charity, that following the Lord's commands you may lay down your lives for your brethren; the reward of charity will be God's favour, and God's favour will be followed by eternal life.40
The crusaders can expect, after death in such service, “the compensation of a blessed martyrdom (habituri post obsitum felicis martirii commertium).” “Those whose lot it is to die,” he specifies, “will enter the halls of Heaven (Morituri caeli intrabunt triclinium).”41 In telling the crusaders they must follow a narrow way, Urban says, in William's version of his words,
It may well be that the path to be traveled is constricted, full of death in many forms, and overcast with perils; but this same road will lead you to the fatherland that you have lost, for indeed “We must through much tribulation enter into the kingdom of God.” Dwell, therefore on the crosses that await you, if you are captured; dwell on the chains and in a word all the torments that can be inflicted on you; await for the strengthening of your faith these horrible punishments, so that, if it should prove necessary, you may procure by the loss of your bodies the salvation of your souls. Do you fear death, men of great courage as you are, and of outstanding fortitude and daring? Nothing that human wickedness can invent to use against you can outweigh the glories on high, for “the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us.”…Thus our souls, set free by death, are either regaled with joys beyond all their hopes, or profit by punishment, than which they have nothing worse to fear.42
Jacques de Vitry pictured Urban preaching unambiguously that crusaders received “the remission of all sins with regard to punishment and guilt, and in addition eternal life.”43 Those who came to the aid of God now could be assured of “full remission of sins (omnium peccatorum integram remissionem)” and for the future “eternal life (vero vitam eternam)”44 The theologian in him insisted only on one qualification: contrition and confession of sins as the necessary first steps, to be followed by the penance of hard campaigning. In his terms, this hard service on the crusade became the penance that follows contrition and confession:
Those crusaders who prepare themselves for the service of God, truly confessed and contrite, are considered true martyrs while they are in the service of Christ, freed from venial and also mortal sins, from all the penance enjoined on them for their sins in this world and the punishment of purgatory in the next, safe from the tortures of hell, in the glory and honour of being crowned in eternal beatitude.45
Echoing an argument of St. Bernard, Jacques de Vitry proposed that the all-powerful God could, of course, have simply freed “his” land by a single shattering divine utterance. But he chose instead to honor his faithful men with the opportunity to join the cause, in the process saving many who would otherwise have been lost eternally.46
Crusade propaganda recognized—if only rarely—that ideal asceticism was not always fully in evidence among crusaders. A song written before the third crusade frankly tied romantic motives closely to crusading, proclaiming that through this fighting the knights great and small won not only paradise and honor, but also the love of their lady.47 Sometimes even clerics felt a need to prop up the waning ascetic sense of the crusaders. The author of the Chronicle of the Third Crusade, for example, claimed that a discouragingly hard fight at Arsuf was actually a “glorious day” on which crusaders were simply sorely tested. He mused judgmentally over the great sins the warriors must have committed to suffer such bitter misery and require a “great fire of tribulation to purify them.” Unsparingly, he grumbled that they might have accepted the harsh day “with pious longsuffering and without even a murmur of mental protest.”48
But the argument usually assumes the warriors know that all of their hardships, deprivations, and, for many, martyrdom are the specific means of gaining needed religious merit. Even setting off for crusade could be an ascetic, penitential exercise. Jacques de Vitry pictures a knight about to embark on his crusade who has arranged for his much-loved little children to be brought before him “in order that his departure might be made more bitter and his merit increased.”49
Encouraging stories show the crusading knights granted precious martyrdom at their request. A knight from the diocese of Utrecht, Caesarius of Heisterbach tells, “having vigorously served in war for the Saviour a whole year,” was ready to return home when in a vision he saw his squire, who had been killed before his very eyes in combat with Saracens, entering heaven in the form of a dove. Reflecting that on returning home he would only fall into old sins, the knight returns to the fighting with even greater bravery. He falls in battle and is decapitated, the head carried about in triumph by the Saracens. But the Christians build a church over the spot where the brave man fell.50 Another crusader, in a story told by Jacques de Vitry, even explains this great goal to his faithful black warhorse: “O black horse, good companion of mine, many a good day's work have I done mounting and riding you, but this day's work shall surpass all others, for today you shall carry me to eternal life.” When he had said this, he slew many Saracens and at length fell himself, crowned with happy martyrdom.51 Clearly even good warhorses understand the importance of what their masters are about. When a pious crusading knight hurries to the Mount of Olives, forgetting about practical details such as housing, his horse finds the best room and stands, blocking the door to secure lodgings for him.52
Of course good crusading service counted even if it fell short of happy martyrdom. One knight, snagged on hooks thrown over the walls of Jerusalem by crafty Saracens is left hanging there as a deterrent to missiles hurled against the walls. Although the captured man stoutly urges his comrades to continue casting stones so that he may win his martyr's crown, one stone hurled at the wall severs the ropes suspending the crusader and drops him to safety.53 Whether or not they died, the crusaders—as the author of The Chronicle of the Third Crusade confidently declared—endured such terrible sufferings and losses that “Each of them should be acknowledged to have borne a sufficiently horrible martyrdom, although they did so in various ways.”54
If the perils by land and sea were undoubted, the benefits were known and secure. Gilbert of Tournai provided a pleasing notion: just as the Knights Templar passed about without paying customary tolls, crusaders in general could walk through the high gate of paradise without any impediment (sine repulsa).55 A recruiting song for what became the second crusade told French knights,
Whoever goes with Louis now,
Need never fear the devil's horde.
His soul will go to Paradise
With the angels of the Lord.…
Knights, please reflect upon this word,
You who in arms are most esteemed
Present your bodies to your Lord,
Who on the cross your life redeemed.56
Eudes of Châteauroux assured his hearers that a crusader “will be absolved from his sins instantly like the second thief on the cross.”57 Taking the sign of the cross effects this transformation by turning the recruit into God's mercenary, free from sin. The good men who stepped forward to be signed with the cross have undergone a veritable conversion. In the manner of monks (though not with their permanence or thoroughness), crusaders have escaped the world to become truly religious in the way that medieval people had long thought possible only to those who left ordinary secular life behind. Monks were sometimes thought to be barred from taking the crusading cross, since they have already undertaken a similar vow in pledging their lives to the cloister. Matthew Paris, for example, finds the abbot of St. Edmunds ludicrous for just such a misstep. “Forgetting that, with the cowl, he had undertaken perpetually to carry the cross of Christ, he assumed the ostensible sign of the cross to the derision of many.”58 Jacques de Vitry straightforwardly announced that he was preaching the crusade “to convert souls (propter animas convertendas),”59 while Eudes of Châteauroux declared that his crusade preaching was intended to produce “the sinner's conversion to God (conversionem peccatoris ad Deum),” a conversion that—like St Paul's—required “nothing short of renouncing everything (nichil aliud fuit quam omnium derelictio).”60 As both monks and knights, members of the order of the Knights Templar, of course, crossed the line between the lay and the religious status. God recognized their special order, one miracle story told: saying their liturgical hours in enemy territory, a group of Templars miraculously become invisible to attacking Saracens.61
An anonymous Mirror of the Laity (Speculum Laicorum) from fourteenth-century England—the story itself set in 1247—tells that a bishop of Ely advised a dying man to escape purgatory by taking the cross. After his death the man appeared to his brother in a dream and asked him to thank the bishop for such good advice. Correspondingly, any disbelief or interference with crusade preaching is dealt with sternly. This same text pictures a returned and disillusioned veteran of crusades actively discouraging recruitment; a dead comrade appears in a vision to reprove him, but in the conclusion of the story the naysayer falls from a height and bites off his own tongue.62
Equally important, the hard-won benefits were not limited to the crusader himself. Jacques de Vitry reminded crusaders that their sufferings can aid deceased parents who left their goods to them, if the crusading is undertaken in the intent of helping the relatives. Generalizing, he assures crusaders to
have no doubt at all that this pilgrimage affords you not only the remission of sins and the reward of eternal life, but that whatever good you do on this journey on behalf of your spouses, children and parents, whether living or dead, will profit them greatly.63
Eudes of Châteauroux similarly promised the crusader that “he can also help his loved ones who are in purgatory if he takes up the cross and makes this pilgrimage for them.”64 And Matthew Paris reports a good case of the successful transmission of this message. The countess of Salisbury, who was also abbess of Lacock, was given a vision on the night her son William Longespee was killed on the crusade of Louis IX in the mid-thirteenth century. She witnessed a knight in full armor being received by glorifying angels into the halls of heaven and heard a voice assuring her that it is her son, whose heraldic device she had recognized. Learning much later of his death, she offered her thanks to God who has allowed her to give birth to so manifest a martyr. Significantly, she adds a hope that his merits as a martyr will swiftly elevate her to the heavenly kingdom upon her own death.65
Most crusaders could at least feel sure they were wiping clean a slate spotted by their own grievous sin. Matthew Paris tells that Earl Patrick of Dunbar, a most powerful Scots magnate who died on St. Louis's crusade had joined the expedition “in order to be reconciled with God and St. Oswin. For he had injustly harassed the monastery of Tynmouth, a cell of St. Albans.”66 For other knights the need arose from a lifetime of less specific but equally troublesome sinning. Richard Lion-Heart himself spoke for them—through the chronicler of his crusade—when, in a speech before the Battle of Joppa he proclaimed to his men: “We should receive our approaching martyrdom with a grateful heart…giving thanks to God that we have found in martyrdom the sort of death we were striving for. This is the wages for our labours.”67 The most dramatic case of such ascetic merit, however, appears in the exemplum that tells of the knight who suffers from a Saracen crossbow bolt lodged in his skull. Though his friends tell him they could find someone to extract it, the suffering knight insists that the enemy bolt that has penetrated his skull be left there “to serve him as a trophy on the Day of Judgment.”68
Crusading Versus Warfare as Usual
If the clerics freely granted spiritual benefits to holy warriors, they broadly condemned fighting at home; their early crusade sermonizing was especially pointed, but even later messages promoted crusade as a higher form of fighting than knights generally waged. The contrast got a swift start: uncompromising denunciations of fighting as usual at home were regularly attributed to Urban's great sermon in its twelfth-century recreations.
Fulcher of Chartres imagined that Urban II admonished the knights in stark language:
Until now you have waged wrongful wars, often hurling insane spears at each other, driven only by greed and pride, for which you have deserved only eternal death and damnation. Now we propose for you battles which offer the gift of glorious martyrdom, for which you will earn present and future praise.69
They must do better:
Let those who are accustomed to wantonly wage private war against the faithful march upon the infidels in a war which should be begun now and be finished in victory. Let those who have long been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. Let those who once fought against brothers and relatives now rightfully fight against barbarians. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward. Let those who have been exhausting themselves to the detriment of body and soul now labor for a double glory.70
In addition to castigating their sexual licentiousness, Pope Urban, as William of Malmesbury pictures him preaching at Clermont, also denounced knightly violence:
Let us call it excess of appetite if you have taken every opportunity to ensnare your brethren, redeemed as they were for the same great price as you, and shamefully stripped them of their resources. But now, as you head for shipwreck among these dangerous reefs of sin, a haven of peace opens before you—unless you neglect it.71
By contrast, ordinary knights who have not made the decision to wear the cross are reminded by Jacques de Vitry that “Those who wear just any coat, which is called ‘pannuncel' in the French vernacular, are not really known as soldiers of Christ; they do not carry his arms.”72
Eudes of Châteauroux is even more blunt—Urban insists no thieves need apply:
Those who have stolen other people's things and do not pay what they owe do not take the cross in the right manner; it is better for a man “to follow the naked Christ naked” than to follow the devil.…The Lord does not want people serving him with absconded or stolen goods or with other people's belongings.73
Even imaginative chivalric literature, well known to valorize crusading, sometimes delivers warnings that have received less scholarly attention. If only occasionally, explicit messages announce that the warriors must stop fighting each other at home and turn their swords on what were termed the enemies of God. In Girart de Vienne (written about 1180, though projected into the Carolingian past) an angel stops the long feud between Charlemagne and Duke Girart. The heavenly messenger flatters the warriors' vanity as it clearly orders them not to fight each other but to concentrate on Muslim foes:
My noble knights, you have been honored deeply!
This fight shall be no more;
Not one more blow must be exchanged,
For the Lord our God prohibits it.
Instead, in Spain against the race of heathens
Your fierce prowess shall yet be known and needed;
Men shall know well your valor there and see it
Conquering for the love of God.74
Significantly, this advice is followed in the next laisse by a standard promise of divine pardon and grace earned by so pious a form of fighting.
Such specific warnings may wane somewhat in later centuries. The churchmen found themselves in a cruel dilemma over warfare at home. They needed to invoke divine blessing on kings who might secure necessary peace in Christendom. Yet under these monarchs, nascent states flexed every muscle in mutual warfare among Christians. Even rulers successful in reducing disruptive internal strife fought external opponents with equal vigor and claimed blessing and legitimacy for their fighting. Boniface VIII faced the classic dilemma when he tried to intervene in the warfare between Edward I of England and Philip IV of France.75 As standard policy, church leaders thus continued to stress crusade as a vastly superior form of warfare; they relentlessly urged kings and emperors and their powerful subordinates to abandon internecine strife and to move forward in unity against a common, non-Christian foe. The very existence of the goal, stretching back across centuries, is significant; but the failure of this hope for more peace at home is writ large in later European history. Of course, ecclesiastical leaders had long vastly complicated hopes for crusading as a vehicle of peace by preaching it against designated enemies of the faith within Europe. The warriors would fight and, whatever the circum-stances or the enemy, they would claim that they fought the fight God blessed. And they could secure clerical support at some level to effect their claims.
Chivalric Reception and Independence
How did these powerful themes touch knightly audiences? Did they accept the claim of merit through crusading rather than through quotidian squabbles over vengeance, property, or the armed service owed to superior lord or king? Personal statements giving the response of crusading knights are scarce. Yet helpful evidence is not totally lacking. Several crusade chronicles that seem especially close to a knightly point of view can give invaluable insight into what messages reached the knights and how they were received.76
Lisbon Crusade
One of the most useful sources is a somewhat neglected mid-twelfth-century chronicle, De Expugnatione Lyxbonensi.77 It tells the story of the siege of Lisbon during the summer and autumn of 1147 carried out by northern European crusaders who joined the king of Portugal, Alfonso I. These crusaders were primarily Anglo-Normans, Flemish, and Rhinelanders, along with recruits from Brabant, Brittany, and Scotland. This was one of the five European expeditions that we usually collectively classify as the Second Crusade. Giles Constable has aptly termed this chronicle “perhaps the most detailed surviving record of any military expedition in the twelfth century” and recognized its value as a crusading narrative.78 The author has been identified as Raoul, a priest who likely accompanied the Anglo-Norman contingent in the crusading force that took Lisbon—one of the few successes of the Second Crusade.79 Our author proves to be an excellent guide, as we will see; if he shows much familiarity with relevant ideas from canon law and from St. Bernard and other prominent writers on crusade,80 he is likewise close to the men of war whose actions he chronicles, and especially to Hervey de Glanville, the East Anglian knight who led the Anglo-Norman force. Raoul can understand their point of view and seems often to purvey it with clarity across the centuries. We can hear clerical crusading arguments and propaganda in this chronicle; we can hear crusader opinions, almost crusader voices. Jonathan Phillips argues that all speeches in the chronicle have been modified to support a set of themes useful in generating a new crusade decades after the overall Second Crusade proved a failure, especially ideas of unity and humility against divisive pride and greed. Yet the account remains invaluable; for, as Phillips notes, it provides a “snapshot of the ideas of an active and successful crusader from the mid-twelfth century.”81 If we find disagreement or disenchantment with crusading ideas in this source they can be considered all the more telling.
The entire treatise reads as an account of twelfth-century bonding of prowess with pious military asceticism. When a severe storm strikes the fleet en route, the leitmotif of pious penance appears at once:
How many there were who, becoming penitent and confessing their sins and short-comings with sorrow and groaning and atoning with a flood of tears for the perversion of their pilgrimage, however it had been begun, offered sacrifices to God upon the altar of a contrite heart.82
Landing safely at Oporto, the crusaders gathered in the cathedral to listen to a sermon preached by Peter, bishop of Oporto. Though he spoke in Latin, interpreters translated his words into the language of each crusader.83 Raoul, who could listen to the Latin (and may well have served as one interpreter), gives a complete Latin text. We could scarcely expect him to reproduce the bishop's message verbatim and can accept the case, already noted, for later modifications in the text; yet it remains a rare and precious account.84 The crusaders hear that even the rich among them
have exchanged all their honors and dignities for a blessed pilgrimage in order to obtain from God an eternal reward. The alluring affection of wives, the tender kisses of suckling infants at the breast, the even more delightful pledges of grown-up children, the much desired consolation of relatives and friends—all these they have left behind to follow Christ, retaining only the sweet but torturing memory of their native land.85
Crusade sermons often reminded the warriors that they were expressing their love for God and were receiving his love in turn. Maier writes, “The concept of the crusader experiencing the power of Christ's love at the moment of the passion was convenient for explaining the mechanism of the plenary indulgence promised to the crusader.”86 Even before a blow has been struck or received, the bishop of Oporto says, meritorious suffering has registered with God as they have come “through so many perils of lands and seas and bearing the expenses of a long journey.”87 Their “hardships and pain (laborem et penam)” have caused them to be “reborn of a new baptism of repentance (novo penitentie renati baptismate).” The image of new baptism is significant; monks and nuns were thought, as successors to the martyrs of the heroic age of Christian persecution under the Roman emperors, to have undergone a second baptism which brought them into a new life, cleansed and free of sin. Like the martyrs and the regular clergy, these crusaders are told that they have put on Christ by voluntarily taking on a mode of life that entails corporal suffering and deprivation.88 They have undergone a conversion experience bringing them into a new life.89
When the actual fighting begins, the bishop assures them, their violence will not count against them: “for in law it happens that whatever anyone does in self-defense is held to have been done lawfully.”90 Apparently one criterion for just warfare, however, is that they have given up their violence at home “by which the property of others is laid waste (quibus rapiuntur aliena),” and are taking up arms now to punish the impious, a duty which the righteous can perform with good “conscience” (bono animo).91 “Indeed there is no cruelty where piety towards God is concerned (Non est vero crudelitas pro Deo pietas),” says the bishop, quoting St. Jerome to the arms-bearers before him. He similarly marshals evidence from the Hebrew scriptures, from St. Augustine, and from other Church Fathers to prove the righteousness of the fighting about to begin. God has graciously allowed these men to cease their pillage and misdeeds at home—”concerning which there is no need now to speak in detail (de quibus non est modo dicendum per singula)”92—and has given them not new acts, but a new purpose; for their sin lies not in waging war but in the misguided goal of plunder. How this distinction does not disqualify the “pilgrims” whose lust for loot provides a mini-theme of the text is not made perfectly clear. The bishop ends his sermon, however, with assurances that money will be supplied in so far as the resources of the King of Portugal's treasury permit.93 This reported language of a crusade sermon delivered in mid-twelfth-century Portugal dramatically recalls the words and themes at least attributed by twelfth-century chroniclers to Urban II at Clermont, in 1095, and repeated by all his successors as crusade preachers.94
As if to underscore divine approval for the episcopal message, a hopeful sign appears during the voyage down the coast to Lisbon. The crusaders see great white clouds coming down from the region of the Gauls (a Galliarum partibus) which encounter foul, black clouds over the Iberian mainland. They identify the white clouds with their own expedition, of course, and see a representation of the enemy in the dark and dirty cloud formation. From the decks of their ships the fascinated crusaders watch the “battle” in the sky and rejoice as the bespattered dark clouds move “in flight” toward the city. “Behold, our cloud has conquered! Behold, God is with us” they shout in relief and triumph.95
A second sermon reported by Raoul explicitly blesses their cause at a critical moment in the campaign: the crusaders' great siege tower, enveloped in prayers and sprinkled with holy water, is about to be pushed forward against the walls of Lisbon. The speaker was “a certain priest” who was almost certainly the author of the treatise.96 If the sermon is indeed his, the full text provided may come even closer than the account of the bishop of Oporto's sermon to the meaning conveyed in 1147, even if it does not give words actually spoken. He begins reassuringly, telling the warriors that each has a guardian angel, whose special care can prudently be regained, if it has been lost, through penance. But the message soon turns more theoretical, to basic issues of the role of Christ in redemption. Christ became man, he reminds his martial audience, so that through patient human suffering he might provide salvation for humanity. Either unaware of Anselm's argument of a generation earlier (discussed in Chapter 6) or consciously turning aside from its analysis, he addresses the argument made by their Moorish enemies that other options for salvation existed, so that Christ did not have to become human and suffer as a man. God is free in his actions, Raoul asserts, but chose to enter human form and take on human suffering. “But the Son of God, according to the belief and worship of the universal church, became man in order that as such he might endure human sufferings (ut in eo humana pateretur).” And he continues (in a passage that would have warmed the heart of Henry of Lancaster, had he known it, two centuries later), Christ's coming and passion
is a medicine for men of such strength that its potency passeth understanding. Oh, medicine that healeth all sickness, reducing swellings, restoring corruptions, cutting away the superfluous, preserving the necessary, repairing losses, correcting distortions.97
The preacher tells his beloved brethren “who have followed Christ as voluntary exiles and have willingly accepted poverty” that they must understand that “the prize is promised to those who start but is given to those who persevere.”98 They must “put on Christ once more (reinduite Christum)” and “cleansed by the new baptism of repentance (novo penitentie abluti baptismate)” advance on the city. It is, he tells them after all “through the inspiration of the Spirit that we have invaded this suburb in which we still remain (impetu Spiritus ducentis suburbium hoc in quo manemus invasimus).”99 Coming to his peroration, the preacher urges his brothers: “at last arouse yourselves and grasp your arms (Expergiscimini aliquando, fratres, et capescite arma).” Dramatically, he elevates the piece of the True Cross that he holds in his hand. He assures them,
if it should happen that anyone signed with this cross should die, we do not believe that life has been taken from him, for we have no doubt that he is changed into something better. Here, therefore, to live is glory and to die is gain.100
He promises his hearers that he will himself share in their trials and labors (in tribulationibus et laboribus vestris particeps) and hopes for a share in their rewards (premiorumque vestrorum). He closes with a prayer that the God of peace and love will direct them. In response, the crusaders fell upon their faces with groans and tears and rose to be signed with the cross. “And so, at last, with a loud voice, calling on God for aid, they moved the [siege] engine forwards…towards the wall.”101
One need not doubt the piety. The tears and groans were undoubtedly heartfelt. Yet the emphasis in the minds of the crusading warriors may have moved along rather different lines, without their denying any word spoken in sermons by the bishop or now by their priest. Evidence of this knightly line of thought appears in the narrator's report of a speech given by one of the leaders, the knight who is clearly the narrator's hero, Hervey de Glanville. He reports that Glanville spoke “somewhat as follows” to his fellow Anglo-Normans. The issue he stresses is unity of purpose and action among the crusaders, drawn as they were from so many lands and moving toward more than one goal. Glanville reminds his fellows that “so great a diversity of peoples is bound with us under the law of a sworn association.” They must therefore act together “in order that in the future no stain of disgrace shall adhere to us who are members of the same stock and blood.” Warming to his subject, he asks,
Who does not know that the race of the Normans declines no labor in the practice of continuous valor?—the Normans, that is to say, whose military spirit ever tempered by experience of the greatest hardships, is not quickly subverted in adversity, and in prosperity, which is beset by so many difficulties, cannot be overcome by slothful idleness; for it has learned how with activity always to frustrate the vice of idleness.…Brothers, take heed, and attend to the reform of your morals.102
These morals, it emerges, are faithfulness to sworn obligation in a time of crisis threatening unity. Through the “sin of a violated association” they will become “the objects of universal infamy and shame.”103
Their pilgrimage is not founded, as it should be, on love (karitate), he warns, in a passage that begins to sound more theological. But the love to which he refers is the steady comradeship of warriors bound together in a sworn cause, anxious to win honor and determined to avoid shame. “Spare shame to your race. Yield to the counsels of honor. (Parcite generis infamie vestri. Assentite consiliis honoris vestri.” He ended his peroration by humbling himself at the feet of the leaders of the knights. All wept with joy and cried out “God help us! (Deus, adiuva nos).” The reunited crusaders negotiate with the king of Portugal, whose charter promises them that only after the city “has been ransacked to their full satisfaction (ad eorum voluntatem perscrutatem)” need it be handed over to the king and his officers.104 The vigor praised in the speech as the opposite of dread idleness will yield much profit.
It is obvious that the crusaders think of their hard service as ultimately blessed by God. But without denying the piety, it seems equally obvious that in the pressure of the moment their vocabulary is more likely to turn to shame and honor, to the “sin” of disloyalty to sworn obligation, than to more abstractly theological arguments or terminology. We cannot, however, think of their religion as merely a cover for truer motives. It is also important to remember how readily they seem to have listened to the intense argument of Raoul who did indeed wax theological, and how readily, and in tears, they were signed by the cross as the priest held in his hand a piece of the instrument of Christ's ultimate meritorious suffering.
It is likewise interesting that our author reports the debate between Christian and Muslim representatives as the fate of the city hangs in the balance. Unlike Muslims in some chansons de geste, in which they are reduced to cartoon-like figures, these foes seem worthy and smart. They put their finger on the sore spot and charge against the crusaders a massive self-deception. “Labeling your ambition zeal for righteousness, you misrepresent vices as virtues.”105
The speeches and sermons Raoul provides help us to understand how malleable language is made to serve purposes that—at least from the perspective of a modern reader—differ significantly from an original spiritual content and intent. Here “poor pilgrims” declare that they are following Christ in suffering and poverty, by sustaining the hard labors of travel and the harder labors of conquering and acquiring loot—all reckoned as acts of spiritually meritorious penance earning divine love. For the historian, this use of pious language is significant, even if our reaction to it is unavoidably modern.
St. Louis's Crusade in Egypt
If the Lisbon chronicle is unusually informative, thankfully, it is not unique. A century later another crusade inspired an equally informative account. Jean de Joinville's biography of Louis IX (Vie de Saint Louis) devotes most of its pages to insightful and hair-raising stories of that king's crusade in Egypt in 1248–54.106 He reports Louis's opinion that human greed is so common that “very few take thought for the salvation of their souls, or the claims of personal honour.”107 This seemingly casual statement by the king captures two of the major values at stake in this biography: achieving salvation and retaining honor. Despite his frank doubts about the motives of most men, Joinville thinks that in the mind of the king the two values are intertwined (as they were in the thinking of Geoffroi de Charny a century later).108 They recall ideas of meritorious suffering leading to salvation and of chivalric war-fare as the key to honor. Although these ideas could work well together in knightly minds, we will see that spiritual values do not easily share space with the proud and touchy self-assertion central to knightly identity.
Joinville leaves us in no doubt that as an aid to achieving salvation, crusading is ideally a form of quasi-martyrdom enacted through suffering in imitatione Christi.109 He continually refers to the “trials and troubles (persecucions et tribulacions),”110 of the crusaders, the suffering and the fear that make them “sick at heart (en grant melaise de cuer),”111 even the martyrdom achieved by many, “which caused great mourning in this world, and great rejoicing in paradise (que maint grant duel en furent en cest monde, et maintes grans joies en sont en paradis).”112 One of the most telling moments comes when, in captivity and in constant fear of death, the crusaders are addressed by an ancient man with hair as white as snow. Joinville says he
asked us if we believed in a God who had been taken prisoner for our sake, wounded and put to death for us, and who on the third day had risen again.113
Receiving the positive answer he expected, the venerable man delivers his message:
Then he told us we ought not to be disheartened if we had suffered these persecutions for His sake: “For,” said he, “you have not yet died for Him, as He died for you.”114
In the very preface to his book, Joinville has not only already announced that he will relate Louis's “great deeds of chivalry and his great feats of arms (ses granz chevaleries et de sez granz faiz d'armes),”115 but adds that the king's chivalric striving and suffering ranks him among the martyrs:
It seems to me that those who omitted to place King Louis among the martyrs have paid him insufficient honour, in view of the great sufferings he endured in the six years I was with him on crusade, and more particularly because he followed the example of Our Lord in taking the cross. For if Christ died on the cross, why, so to speak did he, for it was as a crusader wearing that holy sign that he passed away in Tunis [on his second crusade, 1270].116
Joinville repeats the sentiment in opening his book proper, noting that “as our Lord died for the love he bore His people, even so King Louis put his own life in danger…danger that he might have avoided.”117 We learn that the Queen Mother, Blanche of Castile, mourned her son as dead from the moment she learned he had taken the cross.118 Louis himself not only fought and endured the rigors of campaign, when supervising the refortification of Jaffa, he humbly carried hods full of earth, Joinville reports, “so as to gain the promised indulgence (pour avoir le pardon).”119
Joinville himself suffered alongside the king, beginning at his moment of departure from his home, as he set off along a route that would take him to shrines with holy relics on the way to the coast. Leaving home and family at his castle of Joinville was an agony for him, as our twelfth-century preacher had recognized it was for the Lisbon crusaders:
all the way to Blécourt and Saint-Urbain I never once let my eyes turn back towards Joinville, for fear my heart might be filled with longing at the thought of my lovely castle and the two children I had left behind.120
Even the prospect of sailing the Mediterranean, as he reflected on reaching the coast, had its own perils: “For what voyager can tell, when he goes to sleep at night, whether or not he may be lying at the bottom of the sea the next morning.”121
No one who follows Joinville's vivid narrative of the harrowing events during the crusade in Egypt can question his identification of the crusade with bodily discipline, suffering, and mortification of the most extreme form. Alongside heroic images of Louis, resplendent in armor, masterfully leading the way,122 he gives realistic descriptions of Louis suffering so unceasingly from dysentery that his underclothes must be cut away, of crusaders dying of grievous wounds, of the anguished cries of men having their swollen, diseased gums cut away so that they can chew food, of his own inability, in captivity, to listen with care to a fellow crusader hurriedly confessing his sins to him in terror as their enemies approach with huge axes, ready to decapitate them.123
Yet the knightly honor also emphasized in Louis's statement, quoted above, must be kept in mind. It can serve not only as a relief from the flood of realistic scenes of suffering, but as a key to the knightly approach to religion. At about this same time, the author of the Song of the Cathar Wars, William of Tudela, reported the prayer he thought was on each man's lips before battle: “Ah, Lord God of Glory, by your most holy law keep us from shame, do not let us be disgraced.”124 The independent set of standards, noted in Henry of Lancaster and Geoffroi de Charny, and in the Lisbon crusade chronicle, appears again here in the steady importance attributed to a chivalric ethos and the inclination to shape even pious practice to its requirements.125 Honor must be preserved, come what may.
Joinville himself and, through his witness, many others constantly speak of the imperatives of honor, the need to follow a course of action that will avoid shame and disgrace. More than once King Louis or Joinville must settle disputes about prickly points of honor that could lead to French knights fighting among themselves, even with the enemy plentifully at hand to threaten them.126 When, for example, one of the king's sergeants merely pushed a knight in Joinville's service, complaint of this dishonor was made to the king, who at first tried to laugh it off. Joinville threatened to leave the king's service (and thus quit the crusade) if justice were not done. As a result, on royal orders the offending sergeant appeared in Joinville's quarters barefoot and wearing only a shirt and drawers, holding a naked sword in his hand. Kneeling before the offended knight, he offered him the sword for use in chopping off the guilty hand at the wrist, if he so pleased. Joinville formally asked the standing knight to forgive the offense, he agreed, and the ceremony was complete.127 But even if the sergeant's hand was never in serious danger, we should not miss the point that, given a less wise or flexible monarch, offended honor could have taken the Sire de Joinville and his men out of the crusading campaign.128 Even the high and spiritually beneficial goal of fighting God's enemies could not be pursued if honor were sullied. It seems worthy of note that Joinville not only refused to join Louis's second crusade but in the process inverted the standard argument that as Christ had died for the knights, they must be willing to die for him. Joinville says his people at home are so oppressed by officials that, Christ-like, he must stay home to defend them and would, in fact, offend God if he became a crusader. Pressed by the King of France and the King of Navarre to join the second crusade proposed by Louis IX he responded:
To this I replied that while I was in the service of God and of the king overseas [in Louis's first crusade], and since I have returned home, his Majesty's serjeants and the King of Navarre's had so ruined and impoverished my people that there would never be a time when they and I could possibly be worse off. I told them that if I wished to do what was pleasing to God I would remain here to help and defend the people on my estates. For if, while seeing quite clearly that it would be to their detriment, I put my life in danger by venturing on this pilgrimage of the Cross, I should anger our Lord who gave His own life to save His people. I considered that all those who had advised the king to go on this expedition committed mortal sin.129
Even if we can guess that Joinville had experienced quite enough of crusading on his first “pilgrimage,” we need to recognize how much more his statement reveals. An independent and self-reliant sense of piety appears in sharp relief. No matter who says the contrary, another crusade is not a pious undertaking.130 Most strikingly, the usual formula about Christ and his men is turned upside down. Joinville will follow Christ not by taking the cross but by staying away from crusade and tending to injustices troubling his own people at home. This is scarcely a line of argument that would have appealed to Jacques de Vitry or any other preacher of the crusade.
His narrative of the fighting in Egypt also shows that the prowess which secures honor is so admired that even clerics are praised for acting as men of valor, whatever the ecclesiastical prohibitions against their shedding blood. Did the knights have the famous Archbishop Turpin of the chansons in mind?131 As the crusaders retreated toward Damietta, the bishop of Soissons realized that he felt no desire to return home, but only a great desire to be with God. The story could come from a sermon exemplum or an epic. “So he made haste to be with God, by spurring on his horse and rushing to attack the Turks single-handed. They…cut him down with their swords, and thus sent him to be in God's company among the number of the martyrs.”132 Earlier, a priest in Joinville's service had won his secular lord's fulsome praise by arming himself and single-handedly driving off eight Saracens, piercing one through the body with his lance. As Joinville reports with pride, “From that time onwards my priest was very well known throughout the army, and one man or another would point him out and say: ‘Look, that's my Lord of Joinville's priest, who got the better of eight Saracens.'”133
If they did not fight with their own hands, those clerics closely in tune with knightly standards could at least clear the way for the lay warriors. At a critical moment in the expedition to Jaffa, knowing that Gautier, Comte de Brienne and Comte de Jaffa, was under sentence of excommunication by the Patriarch of Jerusalem (the issue being ownership of a tower in Jaffa), the bishop of Ramleh took charge, declaring, in a scene that, again, could have been lifted from a chanson de geste:
Don't let your conscience worry you because the patriarch won't absolve you, for he's in the wrong, and you're in the right. I myself absolve you in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And now let's at them!134
The result was that “they dug their spurs into their horses (ferirent des esperons)” and attacked.
In an even more tense moment, as Joinville and his knights realize that they will be captured by their enemies and are only debating to which party of Saracens to yield, a cellarer in his employ suggests that they not surrender at all. “We should all,” he counsels, with words that, once again, could have been drawn from a sermon or miracle story, “let ourselves be slain, for thus we shall go to paradise (Je suis d'avis que nous nous laissions nous tuer; ainsi nous irons tous en paradis).” Tersely, Joinville comments, “But we none of us heeded his advice (Mais nous ne le creumes pas).”135
The value of this evidence from the Lisbon and Egyptian crusades is heightened by its congruence with evidence from chansons de geste.136 As pictured in the Couronnement de Louis, the Chanson de Guillaume, the Chanson de Roland, the Charroi de Nîmes, knights showed a remarkable independence of spirit. They interpreted the hard campaigning and warfare of their profession, even when carried out against non-Christian enemies, in terms more compatible with lay aristocratic social norms than with clerical treatises and sermons. They thought of themselves as serving their lords or the lord king as guarantor of the order of their world rather than the pope. They defended a region, a realm, a homeland, more than a religion or moral ideal. If fighting the enemies of the faith was laudable, they insisted on the worth of chivalric combat per se. Such views reveal, as Jean Flori says,
une chevalerie plus aristocratique et laïque que les clercs l'auraient voulue…une chevalerie que ne concerne pas nécessairement la croisade telle que l'envisageait le pape…une chevalerie qui prend conscience de son existence et de sa force et qui se forge une idéologie qui ne se confond pas totalement avec celle que tentait de lui inculquer l'Eglise.137
In the astute view of Matthew Strickland, “in the majority of warfare, the knights seem to have paid scant heed to the Church's strictures on conduct.”138
The literature that they patronized—works better conveying chivalric ideas than any other source—thus stands alongside chronicles particularly close to the knights. Both present a picture of knighthood absorbing crusading exhortations through a distinctly lay, aristocratic filter. The result was bound to be ideas shaped by significant chivalric independence no less than undoubted piety. Crusade was surely the most pious form of knightly labor; but in the minds of warriors it was not the sole licit form of that labor. Far from having a unique quality or standing as the stark opposite to most of their fighting, it graced one end of a continuum of their hard, pious labor in good causes. Understanding that all honorable fighting of the good knights constituted their true labor, we will not be surprised at the Lisbon Chronicle, at Joinville's narrative, at Geoffroi de Charny's matter-of-fact comments on crusade or Thomas Malory's respectful narration of the Grail quest as one of the really special episodes in the history of knighthood that he relates before going on with his story.
This degree of knightly independence is worth emphasizing because it performed such major social or cultural work. Without it, how would the spokesmen for chivalry (and this must be a mixed set of clerics and knights) have managed to square the circle? How could they have manipulated the malleable language of religious imagery or imagined that the hard work of campaigning, the discipline and the risks of hands-on cutting and thrusting, could be a form of imitatio Christi, even when both sides in a fight were Christian?