The First Holy War
During the Crusades, East and West first met--on the battlefield
For decades, Western historians held on to the idea that the Crusades were a colonial venture motivated by just about everything but the cross: greed, lack of opportunity in Europe, territorial expansion, or just plain aggression. Few gave credence to the idea that the Crusaders were motivated by genuine religious feeling. But recently Crusades scholarship has recognized that faith could move people to violence as easily as could greed or land. The best example is the First Crusade, called by Pope Urban II. Eager to unite warring Christians, on Nov. 27, 1095, he spoke to a massive crowd gathered near Clermont in France. Describing the cruelties inflicted by Muslims on Christian pilgrims trying to visit Jerusalem and the defeats suffered by the Byzantine Christians, he called on all of Western Christendom to rescue their Eastern brethren. "They should leave off slaying each other and fight instead a righteous war, doing the work of God, and God would lead them. For those that died in battle there would be absolution and the remission of sins," Runciman writes. "Here they were poor and unhappy; there they would be joyful and prosperous and true friends of God."
The response was tremendous. Urban's speech was interrupted by cries of "Deus lo volt"--"God wills it." Hundreds crowded up to Urban begging permission to go on the holy expedition. Soon tens of thousands of commoners and knights were heading off to the Holy Land. Across Europe, preachers called the faithful to sew crosses on their clothes, to mark them until they succeeded in their quest.
United under the cross and ruled by strict religious principles, the Crusaders were able to set aside their differences. "Among those people who spoke so many different languages there were the strongest pledges of concord and friendship," reads a Crusader's code written in 1147. "In addition to this they enforced the severest laws, for example that a death was to be demanded for a death, a tooth for a tooth. They forbade every kind of display of rich clothes; and women were not allowed to go out in public." The key to Urban's call was a revolutionary (and doomed) theology: salvation through the sword. "There is a very powerful devotional element," says Riley-Smith. "West European Catholics believed they could aid their salvation by fighting the infidel in the East. [Crusading is] as much a penance as fasting on bread and water. . . . This idea is without precedent in Christian history."
"Milk and honey." Jerusalem was the medieval Christians' equivalent of Mecca, Christ's tomb their quest. To take up the cross in the city's defense was a deeply spiritual act. And more: Ever on the edge of starvation, usually tied to a lord's land, superstitious peasants saw the journey as a road to heaven. "To ignorant minds the distinction between Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem was not very clearly defined," writes Runciman in History of the Crusades. Fiery itinerant preachers like Peter the Hermit, whose army of starving peasants had no place in Urban's vision of an orderly march on Jerusalem, promised paradise. "Many . . . believed that he was promising to lead them out of their present miseries to the land flowing with milk and honey of which the Scriptures spoke," Runciman writes.
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