Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (65 page)

Above all were the church towers and pointed steeples which rose triumphantly higher than any other man-made structure in Catholic Europe; where they stood close to the palaces of kings or princes, no turret of the palace dared outstrip their closeness to the heavens. Even that great architectural historian Sir Nikolaus Pevsner, notoriously uncompromising champion of twentieth-century modernism in architecture, once observed in a moment of unusually lyrical concession that twentieth-century architects had 'not been able to create anything anywhere both as elegant and as powerful as a late medieval steeple'.
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Perhaps the most perfect of all is the cathedral of Chartres, which, by a succession of miraculous escapes and the protection afforded by intense local pride, has preserved its twin spires, its sculpture and its stained glass almost unharmed from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Chartres Cathedral is a hymn to the glory of God and of the Mother of God, the shrine of whose tunic it was built to protect (so far, successfully). It rides its hill over the plains of northern France with no rival on the horizon, visible to its pilgrims further even than the bounds of the diocese ruled by its bishop (see Plate 31).
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The universality of the Gothic style is one of the symptoms of the way in which Gregory VII's vision of a single Catholic Church seized the Western Church in the two centuries after his turbulent tenure of the Throne of St Peter. Monarchs might resist the claims of the Bishop of Rome, bishops might ignore his authority when it suited them, but from the forests of Scandinavia to the cities of Spain cathedrals arose which did their best to ape the models provided by Chartres and St-Denis (see Plate 32). In their wake, the humblest parish church was likely to provide its own little local exuberance as far as its means would allow. The Gothic style is so characteristic of the Latin Catholic West that it comes as a visual shock to find it in alien settings, but there it is in the church which for many was the heart of the Christian world: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the shelter for the Crucifixion site and tomb of the Saviour. Equally surprising to a traveller to the eastern Mediterranean is to stumble on French Gothic cathedrals in the Levantine sunshine of the island of Cyprus, in the cities of Famagusta and Nicosia. Stripped of their present Muslim minarets, which come from a later and radically different phase of their existence, they could be transported to a town of northern Europe, and sit there without any sense of incongruity. How have such buildings got this far east? Their presence is the witness to one of the greatest but ultimately also the most tragic of all adventures within the life of the Western Latin Church: the Crusades.

THE AGE OF THE CRUSADES ( 1060-1200)

When Cluny Abbey fostered European pilgrimage to St James in Compostela, it was offering ordinary people the chance of access to holiness, like so much of the Gregorian Revolution. After all, the great attraction of pilgrimage was that it opened up the possibility of spiritual benefit to anyone who was capable of walking, hobbling, crawling or finding friends to carry them. But Cluny was also annexing to that thought another new and potent idea. St James had become the symbol of the fight-back of Christians in Spain against Islamic power. It is still possible in Hispanic cultures as far away as Central or South America to watch (as I have done in Mexico) Santiago's image triumphantly processed on horseback, with a second image, the corpse of a Muslim, pitched over his saddle.

The Cluniacs' investment in the pilgrimage routes to Compostela was a major influence on the balance of power between Christians and Islam in Spain. Thanks to the effective collapse of the Muslim caliphate of Cordoba in 1031, the Christian cause was becoming increasingly successful, and that was one reason why the crowds swelled across the pilgrimage trails to Spain. The order allied itself closely with the Christian kings of Leon-Castile and Aragon-Navarre who were winning victories against the Muslims. A network of Cluniac houses grew in Christian Spain, and among the Cluniac monks who came to lead the Church in Spain was one who rose to be primate of the Spanish Church as Archbishop of Toledo as well as papal legate (representative) in Spain: Bernard, abbot of the chief Spanish model of Cluny, the monastery at Sahagun. The Cluniacs became familiar with the idea that God might wish Christians to initiate war against his enemies, and under Popes Gregory VII and Urban II, the latter of whom began his career as monk and then prior of Cluny, the Western Church took a dramatic new direction in its attitude to war.
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While Christian leaders had once simply tried to stop Christians from being soldiers (see pp. 156-7), now the Church came to see warfare as something it might use for its own purposes. The notion of holy war, crusade, entered Christianity in the eleventh century, and was directed against the religion which from its earliest days had spoken of holy war, Islam. The Carolingians had done their dubious best to present their campaigns in northern Europe as wars for Christianity (see p. 349), but the difference now was that Christian warfare could actually be seen as the means to win salvation. The first impulse in this was sparked by a spectacular if wholly unusual outrage: in 1009 the mentally unstable Caliph al-Hakim of Egypt ordered the systematic demolition of Constantine's Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Although the Caliph's campaign against Christianity was relatively short-lived, and a curtailed substitute building was completed in the 1040s, Christian indignation at the destruction gradually grew through the century. It was stimulated by the general growth in pilgrimage, but especially by the opening up of a new land route to Jerusalem via Hungary, which meant that more and more people witnessed the damaged site.
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Churchmen began suggesting that a solution to such grievances might be a reconquest of the Holy Land. But before that became a practical possibility, Christianity won a great victory in the central Mediterranean, in the island of Sicily, which had been contested between Muslims and Christians since the early days of Islam. The victorious armies were led by warriors whose ancestors had come from the north, a restless Scandinavian people whose northern origins were commemorated by their name, Normans. They carved out niches for themselves in widely separated parts of Europe: northern France ('Normandy'), as far east as the plains of what is now Ukraine and Russia, and most ambitiously, after 1066, the whole Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England. But the Normans' achievements in Italy were perhaps their most significant. The papacy had at first regarded their arrival as a threat, and Pope Leo IX had allied with Argyrus, governor of the Byzantine dominions in southern Italy. Leo also showed his interest in Sicily by appointing the increasingly influential Cardinal Humbert (see p. 374) as Archbishop of Sicily in 1050 - at the time, a purely symbolic gesture, since there was no Latin presence in the island, but one fraught with significance for the future.
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In the short term, the Pope's predictive powers seemed unimpressive: the Normans soundly defeated Argyrus in 1053 and took Leo prisoner after his disastrous rout in battle in south Italy. This unsurprisingly led to a spectacular reversal of policy by the Pope and his advisers (among whom Hildebrand and Humbert the Archbishop of Sicily were by now the most prominent). In 1059 the Pope recognized the Normans' new acquisition of wide territories in southern Italy, some of which were actually still in the hands of Muslims or Byzantines, and in 1066 there was to be a similar papal blessing for Duke William of Normandy's speculative invasion of England. Like the Franks before them, the Normans seemed to be a good investment for the papacy, and in Sicily they made spectacular conquests from 1060, setting up a Norman kingdom there which was to prove one of the most productive frontiers of cultural exchange between Byzantines, Muslims and Catholic Christians in the Mediterranean world. In 1063, in a gesture of thanks for a gift of four camels, Pope Alexander II sent the Norman King Roger of Sicily a banner which he intended should be associated with Roger's military victories. Gestures such as this were turning the conquest of a wealthy island into something more like a sacred cause. By the end of the century, both Muslim commentators and Pope Urban II were looking back on the Norman seizure of Sicily as a precedent for the greater campaign for the Holy Land itself.
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It was Gregory VII who first sought to turn Western indignation about the Holy Land into practical action. He tried and failed to launch a crusade to the Holy Land in 1074; no one believed his claim to have already gathered an army of 50,000 men, for it was not at all clear where they were all assembled.
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His successor Urban II was a good deal more tactful and respectful of lay rulers than Gregory and did better - this despite the fact that there was no great immediate crisis to rally the West against Muslim aggression; in Spain, warfare continued to flicker on the frontier of the two religions, but that was nothing new. What Urban did have was a direct appeal for military help from the Byzantine Emperor Alexios Komnenos. It was by no means the first such request from Alexios, but now the Pope seized on it as an excuse for action. At a council of churchmen and magnates called to Clermont in France and in a flurry of papal letters accompanying it around 1095, Urban described renewed but completely imaginary atrocities against Christian pilgrims by Muslims in Jerusalem, so that he could arouse appropriate horror and action would follow. The effect was sensational: noblemen present hastened to raise their tenants to set out on a mission to avenge Christian wrongs in the East. In this state of heightened excitement, the Pope took time to consecrate the high altar of his old monastery of Cluny, dedicating the final enlargement of that gargantuan building; so the culmination of Cluny's glory can never be separated from the launch of the Crusades (see Plate 29).
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A great momentum had by now developed behind the papacy's assertions of its power. Noblemen and humble folk alike flocked on the proclaimed crusade because they were excited by the Pope's promise that this was a sure road to salvation. Urban made it clear that to die on crusade in a state of repentance and confession would guarantee immediate entry to Heaven, doing away with any necessity of penance after death: papal grants associated with this promise were the origins of the system of indulgences, later to cause such problems for the Western Church (see pp. 555-7). Not all the armies were led by kings or nobles, although that was generally the case with the forces which genuinely had the organization to make it to the Middle East. The Pope's message was now riding on currents of apocalyptic excitement which even the papacy could not control. The mainstream armies which he inspired did not behave as bestially as those raised by a charismatic preacher called Peter the Hermit. As they gathered in the cities of the Rhineland in 1096, they perpetrated Christianity's first large-scale massacres of Jews, since this was an identifiable group of non-Christians more accessible than Muslims to Western Europeans spoiling for a fight, and generally not able to put up much resistance. It would not be the last time that recruiting for Crusades led to such atrocities.
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Inhibitions in every section of the crusader army broke down at the climax of the expedition. In 1099 Western soldiers, exhausted but triumphant from winning the great city of Antioch after an epic siege, captured Jerusalem itself in a frenzied attack. Aware of a rapidly approaching Fatimid relief force, they indulged in hasty and vicious slaughter, and later more calculated executions of Jerusalem's Muslim and Jewish inhabitants and defenders. The scale of this massacre has been recently challenged,
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but whatever qualifications one makes, it was savage enough to arouse astonishment and fury in the Islamic world. The Temple site, for the first time in its chequered history, became given over to Christian worship; the Al-Aqsa Mosque became a church, the Dome of the Rock a cathedral.

Muslims were bewildered at the sudden incursion of Western Europeans into the Middle East. In fact the crusading armies of this first expedition had hit unawares on a moment of peculiar weakness and disarray in Islamic states.
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In that window of opportunity, Western Europeans were able to establish a Latin kingdom in Jerusalem and a territorial presence in the eastern Mediterranean which was only finally extinguished when the Ottoman Turks completed their capture of the island of Crete from the Venetians in 1669. By then the Holy Land itself was long lost. Jerusalem had fallen in 1187 to the armies of the Kurdish military hero Saladin (Salah al-Din); its inhabitants were treated with ostentatious magnanimity to contrast with the atrocities of 1099. It was only temporarily restored to Christian rule between 1229 and 1244, and in 1291 Islamic armies pushed Westerners out of their last strongholds in Palestine.

Despite prodigious expenditure of heroism and resources over two centuries, no crusade equalled the success of the first. The Latin kingdom, at its greatest extent approximately the size of the modern State of Israel, was chronically unstable in government. That character in itself was hardly much different from many of its prototypes in the Latin West, but the kingdom was never a very robust political entity, relying on a constant infusion of financial and military resources from Western enthusiasts. One symptom of its provinciality and marginality was its lack of any institution of Latin higher education such as were beginning to emerge back home; moreover, no single holy figure emerged from its society with sufficient charisma to join the growing list of saints of the Western Church. The crusaders' initial success in 1099 was actually a disastrous chimera; it held out the prospect that God would repeat his favour, and the piling up of evidence to the contrary did not prevent the triumph of hope over experience, prolonging the efforts to achieve new victories. Ironically, as we will see, one of the most permanent achievements of the crusaders was fatally to weaken the Christian empire of the East. In 1204 a crusade which had begun with the aim of attacking Muslim Egypt turned instead to Constantinople, had no hesitation in sacking it and then set up a 'Latin' empire there. This catastrophe led to deep bitterness among the Greeks against Westerners, which ruined the chances for any scheme of religious reunion before the final destruction of Byzantine power in 1453 (see pp. 475-7).