“What is the function of orderly knighthood?” wrote the
twelfth-century English philosopher John of Salisbury. “To protect the Church,
to fight against treachery, to reverence the priesthood, to fend off injustice
from the poor, to make peace in your own province, to shed blood for your
brethren, and if needs must, to lay down your life.” This was a splendid ideal,
often put into practice during the Middle Ages. It lingers still in the
army-officer tradition of France and Germany, in the public-school tradition of
England. To medieval men, knighthood was more than a career; it was a spiritual
and emotional substructure for an entire way of life.
The knight, the chevalier, was a man who owned a cheval, who
served in the cavalry, and who guided his life by chivalry. His duty was to
fight the enemies of his feudal lord. Said the fourteenth-century French
chronicler Jean Froissart: “Gentle knights were born to fight, and war ennobles
all who engage in it without fear or cowardice.
Fighting was the gentleman’s trade. He had been bred to it
from babyhood, with all his education directed toward toughening his body and
spirit. His school was a guardroom in a military post; his home a castle,
perpetually prepared against assault. As a vassal he was frequently summoned to
wars of lord against lord, to be paid for his services with booty taken in the
capture of an enemy castle or with goods plundered from merchants on the roads.
Or he might receive a summons from his king, who found profit in making war.
“Only a successful war could temporarily fill royal coffers and re-endow the
king with fresh territory,” writes the scholar Denys Hay. “Every spring an efficient
king tried to lead his warriors on aggressive expeditions. With peace came
poverty.”
War was also the gentleman’s joy. Peacetime life in a grim
castle could be very dull, for the typical noble had almost no cultural
resources and few diversions besides hunting. Battle was the climax of his
career as it was often the end. The noble troubadour Bertrand de Born speaks
for his class: “I tell you that I have no such joy in eating, drinking, or
sleeping as when I hear the cry from both sides: ‘Up and at ‘em!’, or as when I
hear riderless horses whinny under the trees, and groans of ‘Help me! Help
me!’, and when I see both great and small fall in the ditches and on the grass,
and see the dead transfixed by spear-shafts! Barons, mortgage your castles,
domains, cities, but never give up war!” (It is true that Dante, in the
Inferno, saw the bellicose Bertrand de Born in hell, carrying his severed head
before him as a lantern.)
As Europe became more stable, central governments more
efficient, and the interests of commerce more powerful, the warlike ideal
faded. The military organization of society yielded to a civil structure based
on legality. In the late Middle Ages, knights found themselves out-of-date; war
fell more and more into the hands of base ruffian mercenaries, sappers and
miners, and artillerymen. The military traditions of the noble knight remained,
but were transformed into the pageantry of which we read in Froissart.
Commercialism altered the noble caste; around 1300, Philip the Fair of France
openly sold knighthoods to rich burghers, who thereby gained exemption from
taxes as well as social elevation. In our time, the chevalier has become a
Knight of Pythias, or Columbus, or the Temple, who solemnly girds on sword and
armor to march past his own drugstore.
The knight was originally the companion of his lord or king,
formally admitted to fellowship with him. Around the year 1200, the church took
over the dubbing of the knight and imposed its ritual and obligations on the
ceremony, making it almost a sacrament. The candidate took a symbolic bath,
donned clean white clothes and a red robe, and stood or knelt for ten hours in
nightlong silence before the altar, on which his weapons and armor lay. At
dawn, mass was said in front of an audience of knights and ladies. His sponsors
presented him to his feudal lord and gave him his arms, with a prayer and a
blessing said over each piece of equipment. An essential part of the ceremony
was the fastening of the spurs; our phrase “he has won his spurs” preserves a memory
of the moment. An elder knight struck the candidate’s neck or cheek a hard blow
with the flat of the hand or the side of his sword. This was the only blow a
knight must always endure and never return. The initiate took an oath to devote
his sword to good causes, to defend the church against its enemies, to protect
widows, orphans, and the poor, and to pursue evildoers. The ceremony ended with
a display of horsemanship, martial games, and mock duels. It was all very
impressive; the more earnest knights never forgot their vigils or belied their
vows. It was also a very expensive undertaking, so much so that by the
fourteenth century, many eligible gentlemen preferred to remain squires.
The knight was bound to serve his master in his wars, though
in the early period of feudalism for only forty days a year. Wars were, then,
necessarily brief – raids rather than actual wars. Few pitched battles occurred
unless one party sent a challenge to fight at a set time and place. The
commander’s purpose was not to defeat the enemy but rather to harm him by
burning his villages, massacring his peasants, destroying his source of income,
while he raged impotently but securely in his castle. “When two nobles
quarrel,” wrote a contemporary, “the poor man’s thatch goes up in flames.” A
chanson de geste of the period happily describes such an invasion: “They start
to march. The scouts and the incendiaries lead; after them come the foragers
who are to gather the spoils and carry them in the great baggage train. The
tumult begins. The peasants, having just come out to the fields, turn back,
uttering loud cries; the shepherds gather their flocks and drive them toward
the neighboring woods in the hope of saving them. The incendiaries set the
villages on fire, and the foragers visit and sack them. The distracted
inhabitants are burnt or led apart with their hands tied to be held for ransom.
Everywhere alarm bells ring, fear spreads from side to side and becomes
general. On all sides one sees helmets shining, pennons floating, and horsemen
covering the plain. Here hands are laid on money; there cattle, donkeys, and
flocks are seized. The smoke spreads, the flames rise, the peasants and the
shepherds in consternation flee in all directions . . . In the cities, in the
towns, and on the small farms, wind-mills no longer turn, chimneys no longer
smoke, the cocks have ceased their crowing and the dogs their barking. Grass
grows in the houses and between the flag-stones of the churches, for the
priests have abandoned the services of God, and the crucifixes lie broken on
the ground. The pilgrim might go six days without finding anyone to give him a
loaf of bread or a drop of wine. Freemen have no more business with their
neighbors; briars and thorns grow where villages stood of old.”
With the coming of large-scale wars, such as William’s
conquest of England, and with the crusades, the rudiments of strategy began.
Military thinkers reflected on the role of cavalry and infantry, the choice of
terrain, the use of archers, and the handling of reserve units.
The supreme cavalry tactic was the charge at full gallop
against a defensive position. Terrified peasants would break and run before the
oncoming menace of iron men on wild beasts. Nevertheless, the charge had its
dangers for the attackers; in broken or swampy terrain it was ineffective, and
a concealed ditch could bring it to naught. Stouthearted defenders could
protect their position with rows of sharpened stakes planted at an angle
between them and the enemy. In the face of such an obstacle, the most intrepid
steed will refuse. If the defense possessed a well-drilled corps of bowmen,
these would greet the charging knights with a hail of arrows or bolts. But they
had only a few moments. The effective limit of an arrow was only about 150
yards, and good armor would deflect all but direct hits. A sensible archer
aimed at the horse, for a knight once dismounted was at a serious disadvantage.
Once the cavalry charge was over, the battle became a series
of hand-to-hand engagements. As the armies engaged, the archers retired,
leaving the battle to the knights. The issue was decided by the number killed
and wounded on either side; the side with fewer casualties held the field. The
number of knights killed in battle was remarkably small, however; prisoners of
distinction were held for ransom. There was even a curious traffic in captives,
who were bought and sold by merchants on speculation. Non-ransomable prisoners
were stripped of their precious armor, and then they were often finished off
with a dagger to save the cost of maintaining them.
The medieval army, until the thirteenth century, consisted
almost entirely of combatants, with very few of its men concerned with the
auxiliary services and supplies. Medical services hardly existed, and soldiers
had to forage for themselves, for the army was expected to live off the
country. Usually about a third of the troops were mounted knights, although the
proportion varied greatly with circumstances. Some of the infantry were
professional soldiers, but most were peasants impressed for the campaign. They
wore whatever armor they could provide, usually heavy leather jerkins
reinforced with iron rings, and they carried shields, bows and arrows, swords,
spears, axes, or clubs.
The knight’s equipment represented a compromise between
offensive and defensive demands, or between the need for mobility and the need
for self-protection. For offensive purposes, the queen of weapons was the
sword. The knight, who had received it from the altar after a night of prayer,
could regard it with holy awe as the symbol of his own life and honor. Certain
swords are celebrated in legend, Arthur’s Excalibur, Roland’s Durendal. The
pommel of the sword was often hollowed, to contain relics; to take an oath one
clasped one’s hand on the sword hilt, and heaven took note. To suit individual
tastes, there was much variation in the sword blade, grip, and guard. The most
popular model had a tapering blade three inches wide at the hilt and thirty-two
or thirty-three inches long. It was equally effective for cutting or thrusting.
The steel blades were made of layered strips of iron, laboriously forged and
tempered. Much learned discussion dealt with the relative merits of blades from
Toledo, Saragossa, Damascus, Solingen, and Milan. Two-handed swords had their
vogue, but the soldier who used one had to be very strong. Since neither arm
was free to carry a shield, he was likely to be undone by an agile adversary
while he was preparing his blow. These swords were best used for judicial
beheading.
The lance or spear was the traditional weapon of the
horseman, and it lingers to our own times as a symbol of the mounted knight. In
1939, the Polish cavalry, with ridiculous gallantry, carried lances into battle
against German tanks. With a ten-foot steel-pointed spear, a charging knight
could overthrow a mounted enemy or reach over a shield wall and pin his victim.
But his spear was nearly useless after the first clash; the knight had to throw
it away and take to the sword or battle-axe, which could deal cruel blows even
through armor, often driving the links of chain mail into the wound, where they
would fester and cause gangrene. Some knights carried a mace, or club, the most
primitive of weapons, made all the more fearsome by the addition of deadly
spikes. The mace was the badge in battle of William the Conqueror and Richard
the Lion-Hearted, and it was also, as the scholar William Stearns Davis points
out, “the favorite of martial bishops, abbots, and other churchmen, who thus
evaded the letter of the canon forbidding clerics to ‘smite with the edge of
the sword,’ or to ‘shed blood.’ The mace merely smote your foe senseless or
dashed out his brains, without piercing his lungs or breast!” By one of
history’s pretty ironies, the mace survives as a sanctified relic, borne before
the president at college commencements by the most ornate member of the
faculty.
Arming a knight was a slow process. In time, as the weight
and complexity of armor increased, the chevalier was unable to prepare himself
for conflict unaided. He had to sit down while a squire or squires pulled on
his steel-mailed hose, and stand while they fitted the various pieces,
fastening them with a multitude of straps and buckles. First came an
undershirt, made of felted hair or quilted cotton, to bear the coat of mail, or
hauberk. This was an actual shirt, usually extending to mid-thigh or even below
the knee and composed of steel links riveted together. If well made, it could
be very pliable and springy and could even be cut and tailored like cloth. A
superb hauberk in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is composed of
over 200,000 links and weighs only about nineteen pounds. Cruder coats of mail
could weigh two or three times as much. Despite its strength, the hauberk did
not fully protect the wearer against a mighty blow. It was also subject to
rust; as a result very few early hauberks have survived to our own time. One
method of derusting was to put the coat of mail with sand and vinegar into a
leather bag and then toss it about. Our museums have adapted this technique for
cleaning hauberks by making powered tumbling boxes.
Defensive armor steadily became more elaborate, with coifs
to cover the neck and head, elbow pieces, knee guards, and greaves. Because the
face remained vulnerable, helmets increased in weight and covered more and more
of the face until they came to resemble cylindrical pots with slits for the
eyes. As usual, security was gained at a cost. The knight had to bandage his
head, for if he took a fall, he might easily sustain a brain concussion.
William Marshal, a famous English champion who lived at the end of the twelfth
century, won a tournament, and afterward could not be found to receive the
prize. He was finally discovered at a blacksmith’s, with his head on the anvil
and the smith hammering his battered helmet in an effort to remove it without
killing the wearer. In a hot fight on a hot day, the sun beat down on the
helmet; perspiration could not be wiped away, one could not hear orders or
messages or utter comprehensible commands, and if the helmet was knocked askew,
one was blind. There are many examples of death from heat stroke or from
drowning after a fall into even a little stream. At Agincourt, many French
knights fell into the deep trampled mud and suffocated. Moreover, the pot
helmet concealed one’s identity; hence knights painted bearings on their
helmets and shields. Thus, heraldry began.
In the fourteenth century, the hauberk yielded to plate
armor, which was fitted to the figure and often magnificently decorated. A full
suit of plate armor weighs sixty pounds or more. Just the helmet and cuirass of
one French knight at Agincourt weighed ninety pounds. If properly articulated
and well oiled, plate armor permitted much freedom of movement. A famous
fifteenth-century French athlete could turn a somersault wearing all his armor
but his helmet and could climb the under side of a scaling ladder using only
his hands. But no matter how well equipped, the armored knight was still
vulnerable. A base villein could stab his horse, a pikeman could hook him in
the armpit and bring him down, and once dismounted, he was in a sorry state. He
moved clumsily. His buttocks and crotch were unprotected to permit him to hold
his seat in the saddle. If he fell on his back, he had to struggle like a
turtle to right himself. A light-footed adversary could readily lift his visor,
stab him in the eyes, and finish him off.
The shield was generally made of stout wooden boards, nailed
together, bound by casein glue, and covered with heavy hide surrounded by a
metal rim. Often it had a metal boss in the center to deflect the opponent’s
sword blade. Foot soldiers carried round shields, but knights usually bore
kite-shaped shields, which protected the legs.
To carry the steel-clad knight into battle or tourney, a
heavy, powerful horse was needed. Such chargers were rare and costly in days
when fodder was scarce and animals usually thin and small. Horse farmers bred
them deliberately for size and strength. The Arabian strain was popular, and a
white stallion was the most prized of all. Riding a mare was considered
unknightly. To sustain the clash of battle, the horse needed long and careful
training. His rider, cumbered with sword, shield, and spear, usually dropped
the reins and guided his mount by spurring, leg pressures, and weight shifting.
The great weapon of infantry – and of Mongol and Turkish
cavalry – was the bow and arrow. The short bow is very ancient, the property of
most primitive peoples the world over. As we see in the Bayeux tapestry, it was
drawn to the breast, not the ear; at short range it could be lethal. The
six-foot longbow, shooting a three-foot “clothyard” shaft, was apparently a
Welsh invention of the twelfth century; it became the favorite weapon of the
English. Only a tall, strong man with long training could use it effectively.
There is a knack: The bow-string is kept steady with the right hand and the
body’s weight is pressed against the bow, held in the left hand one pushes
instead of pulling, using the strength of the body more than that of the arm.
At short range, the steel-headed arrow could penetrate any ordinary armor. A
good archer could aim and deliver five shots a minute.
At the end of the twelfth century, with the general adoption
of the crossbow as a weapon, the age of mechanized warfare began. The crossbow
is a short instrument of steel or laminated wood, mounted on a stock. One draws
it usually by setting its head upon the ground and turning a crank against a
ratchet. A catch holds the drawn bow until one is ready to trigger the short,
thick arrow, called the bolt or quarrel, which has great penetration at short
range. The church deplored the use of this inhuman weapon, and many considered
it to be unknightly. While a good longbowman could beat a crossbowman in range
and rapidity of fire, with the new weapon the half-trained weakling could be
almost the equal of the mighty archer.
The medieval art of war was
centered upon the castle or stronghold, the nucleus for the control and
administration of surrounding territory as well as the base for offensive
operation. Within its walls, a little army could assemble and prepare for a
little war. It was designed to repel the attacks of any enemy and to shelter
the neighboring peasants fleeing with their flocks and herds before a marauder.
The earliest castles of medieval times – such as those William the Conqueror
built in England – were of the motte-and-bailey type. They were mere wooden
structures with a watchtower, set on a mound, or motte, and surrounded by a
ditch and palisade. Below the mound was a court, or bailey, within its own
ditch and stockade, spacious enough to provide shelter for the domain’s staff
of smiths, bakers, and other workers, and refuge for peasants in time of alarm.
The motte-and-bailey castles were replaced by stone structures, many of which
we still visit. The first datable stone donjon, or keep, was built in France at
Langeais, overlooking the Loire, in 994. Stone construction had to await the
progress of technology, effective stonecutting tools, hoisting devices, and
winches. Once the techniques were mastered, castle building spread fast and
far. A census taken in 1904 lists more than 10,000 castles still visible in
France.
One could see the castle from afar on its commanding hill,
or if it was in flat country, perched on an artificial mound. Sometimes the
building gleamed with whitewash. The visitor passed a cleared space to the
barbican, or gatehouse, which protected the entrance. Receiving permission to
enter, he surrendered his weapon to the porter and crossed the drawbridge over
the dank, scummy moat, the home of frogs and mosquitoes. Beyond the drawbridge
hung the portcullis, a massive iron grating that could be dropped in a flash.
Such a portcullis was discovered at Angers. Although it had not been used for
500 years, its chains and pulleys, when cleaned and oiled, still functioned.
The castle’s entrance passages were angled to slow attackers and were commanded
by arrow slits, or “murder holes,” in the walls above. At Caernarvon Castle in
Wales the visitor has to cross a first drawbridge, then pass five doors and six
portcullises, make a right-angled turn and cross a second drawbridge.
One traversed the enormous walls, sometimes fifteen or
twenty feet thick, to reach the inner bailey. The walls were topped by runways,
with crenelated battlements to protect defending archers and with
machicolations, or projections with open bottoms through which missiles or
boiling liquids could be dropped. At intervals, the wall swelled out into
bastions, which commanded the castle’s whole exterior. If by some unlikely
chance an attacker succeeded in penetrating the interior, he could not be sure
of victory. The different sections of the parapets were separated by wooden
bridges, which could be destroyed in a moment to isolate the enemy. In the
winding stairways within the walls, there were occasional wooden stairs instead
of stone ones; these could be removed, so that an unwary assailant, hurrying in
the gloom, would drop suddenly into a dungeon.
The heart of the defensive system was the keep, a tower
sometimes 200 feet high and with walls twelve feet thick. Underground, beneath
the keep, were the oubliettes, dungeons opening only at the top and used for
prisons or for storing siege provisions, and enclosing, if possible, a well.
Above were living quarters for the noble and his guardsmen, and at the top, a
watchtower with a heraldic banner flying from it.
The stoutness of the castles is made evident by their
survival on many hilltops of Europe and Syria. During World War II, some
sustained direct hits by high-explosive and incendiary bombs, with little
effect. At Norwich and Southampton, the medieval walls were hardly harmed by
bombardment, whereas most of the houses built against them were destroyed.
But the castles were not impregnable. Remarkable siege
engines were invented, especially by the Byzantines – battering rams, catapults
that hurled stone balls weighing as much as 150 pounds, arbalests, or gigantic
crossbows. Miners would patiently and dangerously dig a tunnel under the moat,
under the very walls. The tunnel was propped with heavy timbers and filled with
combustibles. These were ignited, the props were consumed, and with luck, a
section of the wall would fall into the moat. At the same time, archers drove
the defenders from the battlements. Soldiers ran forward with bales of hay,
baskets of earth, or other material, to fill the moat. Others followed them
across this causeway and hung scaling ladders against the walls, with shields
held over their heads to deflect missiles. To climb a ladder holding the shield
on one arm and keeping a hand ready to grasp the dangling sword is no small
achievement. An alternative method of attack was to construct a wheeled wooden
siege tower as high as the wall, with a commando party concealed on the top
story. The tower was pushed up to the wall, and a drawbridge dropped, on which
the gallant band of assailants crossed to the battlements. It was in this
manner that the crusaders took Jerusalem.
The casualties in storming a castle were usually enormous,
but lives were regarded as expendable. There are many examples of successful
attacks on supposedly impregnable castles and towns. Richard the Lion-Hearted
captured Acre with his siege machines in 1191. Edward, Prince of Wales, “the
Black Prince,” took Limoges in 1370 by mining and direct assault. Irritated by
the resistance, he commanded that more than 300 men, women, and children be
beheaded. “It was great pity to see them kneeling before the prince, begging
for mercy; but he took no heed of them,” says Froissart, with hardly a hint of
reprobation. In general, however, the defense of castles and walled towns was
stronger than the offense. By far the best way to reduce a stronghold was to
find a traitor within the walls, and if one could not be discovered, then to
starve out the garrison. But a prudent castellan kept his fort well stocked
with a year’s supply of food, drink, and fuel. Hence, sieges could often be
very long, lasting as much as two years, and were almost as exhausting to the
besiegers as to the besieged.
The dwindling of feudalism and of the nobles’ independence
and the introduction of gunpowder and siege cannons in the fourteenth century
made the castle obsolete. Gentlemen abandoned the discomforts of life in an
isolated stone prison without regret. They much preferred a spacious manor
house or a residence in town among their own kind.
War was waged on the high seas as well as on land. In time
of need, the monarch would simply commandeer his nation’s merchant vessels.
These might displace 200 tons or more; by the fifteenth century, we find even
1,000-tonners. A crusader’s ship could transport 1,000 soldiers with their
horses and equipment. The ingenious Frederick II built for his crusade fifty
vessels, similar to modern landing craft, with doors at the waterline, so that
knights could disembark on horseback. In the Mediterranean, the Byzantines,
Venetians, and Genoese favored long, narrow galleys, very maneuverable and with
formidable beaks for ramming the enemy.
The admiral built on his merchant ships a forecastle and a
sterncastle, from which his archers could fire down on the enemy’s decks. His
purpose was to sink his opponent by ramming, or if that did not work, to
grapple and disable him by cutting his rigging and then boarding. For
hand-to-hand combat, he was likely to carry quicklime to blind the defenders,
and soft soap mixed with sharp bits of iron to render their footing precarious.
The Byzantines mounted catapults on their ships; they also introduced the West
to Greek Fire, apparently a mixture of petroleum, quicklime, and sulphur. The
quicklime in contact with water ignited the bomb, a primitive napalm.
The medieval art of war found its great exemplification in
the crusades. The organization of an expeditionary force calls into question
familiar logistics; the prosecution of a distant war demands new strategies and
tactics; out of battles with strange foes in far lands emerge new weapons, new
techniques of warfare. The crusaders learned much from the Byzantines’
well-drilled, professional infantry, from their advanced weaponry and
engineering. The crusaders’ vast castles in the Levant were constructed according
to traditional Byzantine principles of fortification.
The crusades were a great historical novelty; they were the
first wars fought for an ideal. Naturally the ideal was promptly corrupted and
falsified. But the fact remains that the crusades were conceived as a service
to the Christian God, and the crusaders thought themselves, at least
intermittently, the consecrated servants of holy purpose. The crusades were
many things, but originally they were a beautiful, noble idea.
The idea of a crusade owes something to the Old Testament,
something to the Muslim example of a jihad, or holy war. It owes something,
too, to the inflammatory preaching of illuminate monks, and a great deal to the
beginning of the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Moors; this combined
the triumph of the faith with the acquisition of rich properties. But the chief
stimulation of the idea came in news from the East.
By the end of the first millennium, the Near East had
attained a kind of stability, with the Byzantine Empire and the Arabs holding
each other at a standstill. The pilgrim route to Jerusalem was kept open and
secure, and the Holy City, itself in Muslim hands, was operated as a sanctified
tourist attraction for both Muslims and Christians. The comfortable balance was
upset by the Seljuk Turks, who captured Jerusalem, defeated the Byzantine
Empire in Asia Minor in 1071, and harassed the Christian pilgrims. Hard pressed
by the Turks, the Eastern emperor, Alexius Comnenus, at length appealed to the
pope and to the West for military aid against the pagan foe. He asked for a
mercenary army that would recapture his territories in Asia Minor and pay
itself from the proceeds. He was not much interested in the Holy Land.
The pope who launched the crusade was Urban II, a French
noble who had humbled himself to become a Cluniac monk and then had been
exalted to the papal throne. He was a vessel of holy zeal, wise in men’s ways.
Emperor Alexius’s appeal stirred in him a vision of a gigantic effort by
Western Christendom to regain the Holy Sepulcher. The union of military
resources under the pope’s control would end the wars of Europe’s princes,
would bring peace in the West, and in the East, Christian unity in spiritual
purpose; it might even link – under papal leadership – Eastern and Western
churches, long painfully at odds. The times were propitious for the realization
of such a dream. Faith was ardent and uncritical. Europe’s population was
increasing, men were restless, looking for new lands, new outlets of energy.
They seemed to be begging for a worthy use for their idle swords.
At the Council of Clermont in south central France in
November 1095, Pope Urban, tall, handsome, bearded, made one of the most potent
speeches in all history. He summoned the French people to wrest the Holy
Sepulcher from the foul hands of the Turks. France, he said, was already
overcrowded. It could barely support its sons, whereas Canaan was, in God’s own
words, a land flowing with milk and honey. Hark to Jerusalem’s pitiful appeal!
Frenchmen, cease your abject quarrels and turn your swords to God’s own
service! Be sure that you will have a rich reward on earth and everlasting
glory in heaven! The pope bowed his head, and the whole assembly resounded with
acclaim: “Dieu le veult!” – “God wills it!” Snippets of red cloth were crossed
and pinned on the breasts of the many who on the spot fervently vowed to “take
the cross.” It was a spectacle to rejoice the heart of any revivalist.
Astutely, Pope Urban had roused men’s emotional ardor for the faith, and as if
unaware, had tickled their cupidity. All his hearers had been bred on Bible
stories of the rich fields and flocks and blooming meadows of Canaan; they
confused the actual city of Jerusalem with the Heavenly City, walled in pearl,
lighted by God’s effulgence, with living water flowing down its silver streets.
A poor crusader might find himself tempted by a fief of holy land; and if he
should fall, he was assured, by papal promise, of a seat in heaven. The pope
also offered every crusader an indulgence, or remission of many years in
purgatory after death. Urban appealed, finally, to the strong sporting sense of
the nobles. Here was a new war game against monstrous foes, giants and dragons;
it was “a tournament of heaven and hell.” In short, says the historian
Friedrich Heer, the crusades were promoted with all the devices of the
propagandist – atrocity stories, oversimplification, lies, inflammatory
speeches.
