Popes, emperors and the Crusades

Pope and emperor: Canossa, 1077

In the eleventh-century West, kings and lords chose bishops and abbots and invested them with ring and staff, and church offices were often bought and sold. Those who carried on the reform begun at the monastery of Cluny believed the church must be free of worldly power. At the centre of that struggle stood Hildebrand, who became Pope Gregory VII in 1073. The twenty-seven propositions of the Dictatus papae, entered in his register in 1075, say that the pope may depose emperors (12) and that the Roman church has never erred and never will (22).

King Henry IV of Germany clashed with the pope over the appointing of bishops, and in January 1076 at Worms he and the German bishops declared Gregory deposed. In February Gregory excommunicated Henry and released his subjects from their oaths to him. When the princes threatened to choose a new king unless he was absolved within a year, Henry crossed the Alps in midwinter. In January 1077 he came to Canossa, the castle of Matilda of Tuscany where the pope was staying, and by the accounts of the time stood for three days barefoot in a penitent's garment outside the gate, until Gregory lifted the excommunication.

Excommunicated again in 1080, Henry took Rome in 1084, set up another pope and was crowned emperor by him; Gregory, rescued by Norman troops who then plundered Rome, died in exile at Salerno in 1085. The question of appointing bishops was settled at Worms in 1122 by a compromise: the church conferred the spiritual office, the emperor the worldly rights. The Catholic Church honours Gregory VII as a saint who fought for the church's freedom; Protestants long saw in him papal pride reaching over kings; and the Eastern Orthodox do not accept the claim that the Roman church cannot err (see Monks, missions and the parting of East and West). Many historians today see in him both a real reform against the sale of church offices and an overreaching claim to rule worldly power too.

From Clermont to Jerusalem

In 1071 the Seljuk Turks defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert and took most of Asia Minor, and the Emperor Alexios I Komnenos asked the West for soldiers. In November 1095 at Clermont in France, Pope Urban II, once a monk of Cluny, appealed to the knights to go east. According to Fulcher of Chartres, who wrote his history of the expedition between about 1101 and 1127, Urban called them to help their Eastern brothers and to free Jerusalem, and promised remission of sins to those who died on the way. Other chroniclers report the speech differently, so what we have is not the pope's own words but the memory of those who heard him Fulcher of Chartres, History of the Expedition to Jerusalem 1.3.

Great numbers sewed cloth crosses on their clothes and set out. For them the expedition was a pilgrimage to Christ's tomb, a penance for their sins and a defence of Eastern Christians. Some hoped for land and plunder, but many knights sold or mortgaged their lands to pay their way, and many historians judge their faith to have been sincere. That makes what they did weigh the more.

In the spring of 1096, before the main armies left, bands led by Count Emicho and others fell on the Jewish communities of the Rhineland: Speyer, Worms, Mainz and Cologne. They demanded baptism or death; many Jews were killed, and some took their own lives and their families' rather than be forcibly baptized. The bishop of Speyer hid and protected the Jews, and the archbishop of Mainz took them into his palace, but in Mainz the mob broke in. The pope had ordered nothing of the kind and church law forbade forced baptism, yet preaching war on Christ's enemies far away became a sword against neighbours close at hand. The Hebrew chronicles of 1096, written in the next century, honour the dead as martyrs who sanctified God's name, and Jews still remember them in the synagogue's lamentations.

The crusaders took Nicaea in 1097 and Antioch in 1098, and on 15 July 1099 they stormed Jerusalem. They killed the city's Muslims, even those who had fled to the mosque on the Temple Mount, and Jews too were killed or carried off as captives. The crusaders' own chronicles recorded the slaughter as a triumph, and Muslim historians long remembered the blood shed in the holy city. The number of the dead differs from record to record and historians' estimates vary, but none doubt that it was a massacre. For eighty-eight years after, Jerusalem was a Latin kingdom.

Later crusades, and three memories

When Edessa fell to the Muslims in 1144, Bernard of Clairvaux preached the Second Crusade, and he went in person to stop a monk who was preaching the killing of Jews in the Rhineland. When Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187 he let the inhabitants ransom themselves and leave; many who could not pay were enslaved, but there was no massacre like that of 1099. The Third Crusade failed to recover the city, and in 1204 the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, a Christian city (see 1054: East and West divided). From 1209 a crusade was waged against those called heretics in southern France (see The Inquisition and heresy). In 1219, early accounts say, Francis of Assisi crossed from the crusader camp in Egypt to preach the gospel to the Sultan al-Kamil; and with the fall of Acre in 1291 the crusader states in the East came to an end.

To Muslims the Crusades were an invasion by the Franks from the West, and they remember Saladin as the generous ruler who won Jerusalem back. For many Muslims today the word ‘crusade’ still calls up Western invasion and domination. Jews remember 1096 as the beginning of a long history of persecution in Christian Europe. Eastern Christians asked for help and received sometimes protectors, sometimes masters: the crusaders set Latin patriarchs over Antioch and Jerusalem, and when the crusaders had gone, the Eastern Christians left in Muslim lands were at times suspected as the invaders' kin.

For centuries Catholics honoured the Crusades as holy expeditions, and the remission of sins promised to crusaders became one root of the indulgences Luther later challenged (see Wittenberg, 1517). On the Day of Pardon in March 2000, Pope John Paul II confessed before God the violence that sons and daughters of the church had used in the name of defending the truth, and the sins committed against the Jews, and asked forgiveness Memory and Reconciliation.

For the church today

When Peter drew his sword and struck the high priest's servant, Matthew records:

“Put your sword back in its place,” Jesus said to him. “For all who draw the sword will die by the sword.

Matthew 26:52

Before Pilate he said, "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36); if it were, his servants would fight. Paul writes that "The weapons of our warfare are not the weapons of the flesh" (2 Corinthians 10:3-4), and Matthew Henry comments, "Outward force is not the method of the gospel, but strong persuasions, by the power of truth and the meekness of wisdom" Matthew Henry.

Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Carefully consider what is right in the eyes of everybody. If it is possible on your part, live at peace with everyone. … Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.

Romans 12:17-21

The story of the Crusades shows that sincere faith can still take God's name to hate an enemy. Rather than despise the crusaders, we should recognise the same temptation in ourselves, and first listen to how Muslims, Jews and Eastern Christians remember these things. Christ's kingdom does not spread by the sword but through people who love their enemies and overcome evil with good. The next lesson, The friars, follows Francis and Dominic, who in the same age sought to live the gospel not by the sword but by poverty and preaching.

Practice