Not to Santiago - Fragment second voyage

In the history fragments in Not to Santiago and back again several sources are referenced Ik name two important ones:

[1] - Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, (Oak Harbor, WA: Logos Research Systems, Inc.) 1997. Internet editie.

[2] - Dominique Iogna-Prat, Ordonner et Exclure. Cluny et la société chrétienne face à l'hérésie, au judaïsme et a l'islam (1000-1150), Champs/Flammarion, 2000.

See also the linkpage.

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Second fragment: From the second voyage: Until 1453 - The institute

Thirty years after the crusades started, the last Cluniac Pope has left. The momentum is gone but the crusades continue. The original policy is not abandoned, the stakes are too high. The eight crusades called by the Pope are relatively short operations with a specific purpose. Maintaining power in the conquered regions, however, requires that Western Europeans constantly leaving for the Middle-East. Many take the crusaders' oath. Many leave just like that. No doubt it was attractive to adventurers as well. Kingdoms are created and castles built. In Western Europe it works, up to a point. There is peace. The Pope can sell the policy reasonably well and if two rulers quarrel, he can force a treaty.

Then Edessa falls in 1144. The conquest is actually the outcome of all kinds of internal Arab tensions but, as is usually the case, the victory is claimed for Islam. Now, after the conquests of Antioch and Jerusalem, both sides can claim that God is supporting their fight. For the Pope, the fall of Edessa provides the justification to preach another crusade. To his astonishment, there is not much reaction. What's to be done? The first Cistercian Pope, Eugenius III, starts talking with his friend, Bernard of Clairvaux[3]. And not with Cluny.

I'm not clear - and nor does it become clear to me - how a monastic order whose goal is to turn its back to the world can start preaching crusades. Let alone how Christianity can assume a military aspect.

There is an internal contradiction in Cîteaux.

Bernard of Clairvaux is a powerful man. He is a friend of the French king and has a huge influence on the masses both by his appearance and by his way of speaking. There is no need to explain this. There are people in history who have that kind of charisma. These people are the definition of power. Bernard gives in and preaches the second crusade before a large audience in Vézelay with the French king present as well. The outcome is overwhelming. The crowd cheers, the French king takes the crusaders' oath and Bernard has to tear his clothes in pieces to distribute to the audience. The next few weeks, Bernard repeats this little trick all over France. The vision of the crusades that Bernard offers will have differed widely from the harsh reality of battle. It doesn't matter. That is propaganda.

The context of discovery differs from the context of justification.

What Bernard thought in the lonely confines of his cloister bore no relation whatsoever to the reality of the Middle-East. It was a mystical piety. In a way, the call for a crusade was a sign of alienated otherworldliness. There is no text or eyewitness report of his sermon. There are, however, letters from Bernard to crusaders. The mysticism is there in the possibility of purification and the forgiveness of sins if you go to the Middle-East. The stupidity is there in the use of propagandist language, such as 'the lustful use of the holy places by Muslims'. This is something we can recognise in the speech of Urban II. We can continue in the same way. It is the standard language of incitement. Again, as with Urban II, issuing from a monastic order. A short century later, another Cistercian abbot sets about the Albigensians as army commander.

But there is a big difference from fifty years earlier. The influence of Cluny has disappeared and made room for the mystic piety of the Cistercians. Belief has become stronger and the worldly, almost rational approach of Odilon and Hugues - from the world of timber to the world of marble - has disappeared. Now it really is a holy war. The first men who knew what they were fighting for and knew what they wanted to reform have been replaced by deeply religious monks and priests who invent religious justifications for a battle. Religion and violence intertwined. Church and state intertwined. The reasons to fight have changed.

Finally, Bernard presents the argument of the Christian warrior-martyr. Whether he dies in bed or on the battlefield, the death of one of his saints is undoubtedly precious in the eyes of God, but if he dies in battle his death is absolutely more precious.

And also [...] pagans must not be slain if they may by other means be prevented from oppressing the faithful. However, it is better they should be put to death than that the rod of the wicked should rest on the lot of the righteous. The righteous fear no sin in killing the enemy of Christ. Christ's soldier can securely kill and more safely die. When he dies, it profits him; when he slays, it profits Christ. The Christian exults in the death of the pagan because Christ is glorified thereby. But when he himself is killed, he has reached his goal.

Reason was lost. The whole emotional religious irrationality of Bernard manifested itself in the persecution of Pierre Abélard and Bernard's influence led to the conviction of Abélard and the burning of his books. The Pope himself lit the pile. Abélard did not recover from the shock and died a year later. The dark Middle Ages should have been over by 1150. But the darkness of fanatical religious monasticism appeared stronger all the time. The worst of times still had to come.

It casts doubt on Bernard's sanctity.

It casts doubt on canonisation.

Or is this at the heart of the church?

Bernard introduces a religious fanaticism into the system which then never leaves it. It was this Bernard who was chosen by Louis VII of France as his counsellor. Louis leaves for the Middle-East on the 8th of June at the head of his French army. His wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, went with him. Eleanor was charming. She was worldly, sensitive and cultured. Many books have been written about her and her minstrels. She was not keen on Bernard. She was not religiously inclined. Louis was much more open to that sort of thing and probably was in reality very religious. Eleanor did take the crusaders' oath. Apart from the French army, there is also a German army that leaves under Conrad III. It goes wrong from the start. The German army is not well disciplined and falls into a big trap again. They start to pillage along the way and in a Greek cloister they kill all the monks to avenge the death of two crusaders. Eventually this costs the Germans dearly. Once across the Bosphorus, a large part of the force is slaughtered, like the army of Peter the Hermit fifty years before. The French army was more disciplined but suffered a lot on the journey. The land route was difficult. All the problems the first crusade had encountered reappeared.

Learning is difficult.

The Islamic Turks and the Christian Byzantines made a treaty to defend each other against the great armies from the West. Byzantium did not want the Turks to see it as a traitor to the crusaders. They were not happy with it all. The plague of the crusades would no doubt have contributed to the aversion in the Middle-East towards the Christians and the attitude of Byzantium would no doubt have contributed to the aversion of the West towards Byzantium. The church would not have been pleased. The problems were too great and it was decided to continue the journey by boat from Attila in southern Turkey to Antioch. Only part of the army could board. There was not enough room. Part of the infantry and the French and German pilgrims were left behind. The group died, starved or was enslaved.

The faithful were betrayed by their rulers, betrayed by their faith.

On arrival in Antioch they are welcomed by Raymond, Eleanor's uncle and not much older than her. There's an argument over an attack on Aleppo, eighty kilometres down the road, which forms a major threat to Raymond's Antioch. Louis doesn't want to attack. First he wants to pray in Jerusalem at the holy grave. Eleanor, together with Raymond, is in favour of attacking. From a military viewpoint, the attack makes sense. It is not going well. Husband and wife quarrel. Eleanor seems to have started an affair with Raymond. At least she spends a lot of her time with him and she threatens Louis with a divorce because of their blood relationship. Louis is certainly offended in one way or another.

Then the crusade finally arrives at Jerusalem. The Palestinian Franks - many of whom were born and raised there, had lived there for some fifty years - talk them into attacking Damascus. It fails horribly and within a week they are back in Jerusalem. Humiliated. Betrayed. Were the Palestinian Franks bought off? Or had they already become so like the Arabs that they saw the goal of the crusades as fratricide? By their actions the crusaders drove two Arab kings in each other's arms, one of them the King of Aleppo, and brought defeat to their own army. The army returns. The crusade is a fiasco. Many Christians are killed. Trust in God has suffered a lot. Trust in Bernard of Clairvaux is discredited. It is becoming clear.

A soft religious approach, a kind of Disney vision of the Holy Land, of a holy war, which is actually a war of conquest, is not good.

They sail back to France via Rome where the Pope tries to reconcile them. On two different ships. En route Eleanor hears that Raymond is dead. Killed when the attack on Aleppo finally takes place.

Louis seems not to have understood things too well. His faith has taken a battering and his wife is too worldly for him. He can't handle it and dumps his wife, possibly by mutual consent. Probably on Eleanor's initiative.

This isn't clever. But he is a believer and the church has always hated [intelligent] women so he gets permission. Aquitaine, which came so elegantly as a dowry to France, leaves as a dowry with the divorce. Eleanor is no fool. Louis perhaps is. Anyway, as a king he is not rational. His kingdom takes second place to his belief. That's what his wife believes.

She marries Henry II Plantagenet, future king of England. And Aquitaine goes with her.

It is an important moment.

This quarrel is the cause of the Hundred Years War that can no longer be avoided. It is an example of the French king's irrationality. He had poor political judgement coupled with an oversized loyalty to the church. The same capacities will eventually cost one of his descendants his head.

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Not to Santiago and back again

Fragment second voyage

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