Gossip at the Council of Piacenza

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Ruth

We remember the Council of Clermont, in 1095, as the launchpad of the First Crusade. But in order to understand why the Crusade was called, we need to look at the Council of Piacenza, held earlier in the same year.

Pope Gregory VII had died shortly after Norman mercenaries drove the King of Germany and his counter-Pope out of Rome. There was a short-lived Pope who doesn’t really enter into our story, and then in 1088, one of Gregory VII’s closest allies became Pope by popular acclaim, just as Gregory had done. The people of Rome were in favor of Papal power and against the Papacy being controlled by the Franks. So when they chose a Pope in this period, it was sure to be an opponent of the French and German kings. The new Pope took the name Urban II.

Urban II took up Gregory VII’s battles, including the counter-Pope who was still around. He held a series of church-wide councils to establish broad support for his own Papacy and Gregory’s reforms. It’s worth noting how important these assemblies were, even in times when monarchy was the normal form of secular government. Many early principles of self-government were worked out in the Church during the medieval centuries.

By 1093, Urban II had gained such power that he supported the King’s son of Germany in a rebellion against his father, crowning Prince Conrad as “King of the Romans.” He also excommunicated King Philip I of France for divorcing his first wife, Bertha, and remarrying another man’s wife, Bertrade. (Philip, you will recall, was the son of Anne of Kiev.) Additionally, he supported England’s Archbishop Anselm of Canterbury in rebelling against the new Norman dynasty to keep church power separate from the state.

In late 1094, Pope Urban began a formal tour of France and Italy so as to re-establish his personal authority in each locality. At the end, he called many of the people he’d met to come to a Council at Piacenza, Italy. The agenda was to discuss and ratify papal decisions from the past year, but the meeting also served as a royal court of the Church-King. Foreign ambassadors came to address the assembly.

Philip I sent a petition to have his excommunication revoked, but he was denied (unless he repented very soon). The Pope was determined to show himself master over the King of France. There was even worse in store for the King of Germany.

Henry IV had married Anne of Kiev’s niece Eupraxia of Kiev as his second wife. She was the widow of one of his nobles in Saxony, and she probably preferred to enter a convent, which is where Henry met her. However, she consented to a second marriage and was crowned Queen Adelaide. It was a terrible match; by the time Henry was taking his army into Italy, she had to be held prisoner. About a year before the Council of Piacenza, she escaped from his household and fled to Henry’s greatest enemy, the widowed Countess Matilda who claimed much of the same territory. She gave birth to a baby boy who did not live long.

Now, at the Council, Queen Adelaide/Eudoxia stepped forward to make a public accusation. She claimed that far from being the righteous Catholic that the Holy Roman Emperor claimed to be, he had joined a weird cult and forced her to participate in sex orgies and black magic. Further, both Adelaide and Prince Conrad, Henry’s son of his first marriage, claimed that he had even offered his second wife sexually to Conrad. Conrad professed that he had been terribly shocked and not at all tempted, and that it was the reason he rebelled against his father. It’s not clear what the Council did about any of this.

But soon after, the Pope could appear at the height of his power over the kings. Not to them, but to him, to Pope Urban II, came the Byzantine ambassadors. They brought a request from Emperor Alexios I Komnenos for mercenaries to help fight the Turks.

Alexios Komnenos had recently won a huge battle against a nomadic tribe, the Pechenegs, who had been in the region for centuries and had fought on any side they were paid to fight on. When they heard that Constantinople was weak, the whole tribe came with their carts, tents, and flocks. Along the way, they pillaged Byzantine farms for supplies. They had heard correctly that the Emperor was in a weak state; the Byzantine army was not strong enough to fight off even this rabble. But Alexios Komnenos took some of his stored gold and hired another nomadic tribe to join him. They devastated the Pechenegs and all nearby Seljuk Turks.

So Alexios Komnenos was a rising star. He wanted to take back Anatolia from the Turks; it did not yet seem inevitable that that land mass would become “Turkey.” With the Pechenegs dead and few other tribes nearby, his thoughts turned to the despicable Normans who had invaded not long ago in support of another Byzantine would-be Emperor. They were devils, but they fought like madmen. They’d do.

Revised entries, 2017:

One of Pope Urban II’s headaches came from the King of France. He should have been known to history as Philip the First Greek Name King, but instead he’s come down as Philip the Player, or more accurately, the Amorous. At the age of 19, he made a military intervention in a family usurpation dispute in Flanders. His side lost. The peace treaty included his agreement to marry Bertha of Holland, who was also the only plausible aristocratic lady not too closely related to Philip already.

Philip and Bertha were married for six years before she conceived any babies, but then she produced Prince Louis and Princess Constance. By now the couple was middle-aged, and they were both getting fat. History doesn’t tell us how fat she was, but he was having trouble riding a horse. That was the natural weight limit imposed on men in military leadership. We also know that her son later went into history as Louis the Fat.

Bertha was probably just fine; we don’t know. Philip left his complaints about her weight in written history because he had FALLEN IN LOVE. He chose to use the old Frankish custom of repudiating a wife. Bertha withdrew to her dowry lands in Holland and lived only a little longer, dying in 1094.

Bertrade, the glamorous new love, was already married to Count Fulk of Anjou. She had already given birth to the next Fulk, who will be a major character in the Crusades. King Philip simply took her from Anjou in 1092 and married her.

Count Fulk seems not to have cared that much. He had been married at least four times before, and in most of those cases, he had repudiated the bride, sometimes with a fig leaf excuse of “oh my we were too closely related.” He needed real brides to produce legitimate heirs, but now he had two sons, “an heir and a spare,” and he didn’t need a wife for sex, he had plenty of other options. He was a scandalous man, known for a bad temper.

But what Fulk could get away with, Philip could not. His “Queen Bertrade” had a living husband, while he had (for a few more years) a living wife. The Archbishop of Lyon excommunicated him: he could not participate in Mass.

So Agenda #1 at the Council of Piacenza was King Philip’s appeal to the Pope to reverse the Archbishop’s ruling. No repentance had taken place; in fact, gossip had it that the King was so infatuated with Bertrade that he paid little attention to other matters.

—

Henry IV, King of Germany and Holy Roman Emperor, was the Pope’s greatest challenge and even enemy. The last thing King Henry wanted was for some irregularity in his personal life to come before the Pope, like his distant cousin King Philip. He did not attend the Council, since he was still refusing to acknowledge this Pope as the true one.

But sadly for Henry, his second wife was there, bigger than life. Let’s back up.

Henry had been betrothed in childhood to the daughter of the Count of Savoy. The girl, Bertha, grew up in the same household with him in Germany and was married to him at 15. It should have all worked out great, but Henry didn’t like her personally. Worse, he was a womanizer to a scandalous degree, sometimes forcing any pretty girl he saw to be delivered to his bed, while keeping multiple regular mistresses.

Just a few years after their marriage, Henry tried to have it annulled. He called a council of German bishops and presented his case, swearing that he’d never slept with Bertha. The problem was that Bertha’s mother the Countess of Savoy was a powerful, determined lady (the following year, she burned a rebellious city). The bishops and counts told Henry to take his wife back.

Queen Bertha comes out of this story well: she was a faithful wife, bore him a string of children, and asked her mother to be peaceful. She was with Henry when he pulled the penance stunt of standing in the snow. She was still with him when his anti-Pope crowned him Holy Roman Emperor. She exits this sordid tale at age 36, year 1087.

Then Henry saw a pretty widow in a convent; she was a Byzantine princess, a good connection for someone at war with the Roman Pope. Her parentage is interesting; father was Prince of Kiev, but her mother was a Kipchak Turk, one of the invading nomad groups. Eupraxia’s appearance was probably exotic: she was a blend of Viking Rus, Greek royalty, and Asiatic Turk. Had she been anyone less than a Princess, he’d probably have just ordered her brought to his room, but he betrothed and married her in 1089. Their relationship was a disaster. Henry ended up actually holding her prisoner when he came to Italy with an army in 1093. She was pregnant. He couldn’t trust her with anyone at home, so he locked her up in a loyal North Italy monastery while he fought.

Eupraxia had escaped to one of Henry’s devoted enemies, the same Countess of Tuscany who owned the snowy castle Henry had stood outside with Bertha. Eupraxia’s baby died. Eupraxia now wanted to be free, the marriage ended, so she could go home to Kiev. She sent Pope Urban II a letter in 1094, and was invited to come to Piacenza.

Eupraxia’s story was explosive: Henry, she said, had joined a sex cult. They were “Nicolaitans,” heretics who used sex orgies in worship, and Henry hosted their wicked ceremonies in his palace. He had forced her into these orgies, so that perhaps some other man had fathered her baby. Not only that, she said he had offered her body to his son Conrad, who virtuously refused the offer.

Bertha’s son Conrad was at the Council too, and he backed up Eupraxia’s claims. He was in full rebellion against his father now. He vowed allegiance to Pope Urban II and ceremonially led the Pope’s horse like a servant. Pope Urban II crowned him King of Italy, deposing his father Henry from at least the lands where the Pope had influence.

So was it true? We really don’t know. Historians of the time who were against Henry IV believed in the orgies, and some added details such as Eupraxia’s naked body being used as a Black Mass altar. The “Nicolaitan” name was taken from the New Testament, so it was not really a well-attested 11th century group. The wisdom of our time suggests that these stories are improbable and implausible. What’s implausible often turns out to be simply not true. Was Eupraxia just a Real Housewives Drama Queen? Or did her claims have a deeper purpose?

The Pope closed his Council at Piacenza with dignity, and with his hand strengthened everywhere. He took six months to think about what to do next.

—

So at the Pope’s early 1095 Council in Piacenza, both of the Frankish kings were accused of serious moral crimes. For 300 years, the Franks had been the Pope’s defense against Lombards and Saracens. The Papacy still needed real (not spiritual) armies to shore up spiritual authority (and literally keep the Pope alive). Urban II was suddenly handed a new opportunity.

Seljuk Turks were now ruling in Baghdad and all around it, including Syria and the Holy Land. Other Turkic nomad tribes had been in the area for several centuries, and still other new ones were drifting in. One of the long-term nomadic groups, the Pechenegs, had seen weakness in Constantinople and responded by flooding into Byzantine territory in great numbers. They were coming to settle, with flocks and wagons.

Emperor Alexios I Komnenos had been a general fighting against the Norman invasion. Robert Guiscard, now Duke of southern Italy, had invaded Albania in 1081, coming right into the Greek heartland. After winning several key battles and seizing most of Macedonia and Thrace, Robert was called back to Rome to save the Pope. His son Bohemond (later a Crusader) stayed on but eventually lost Albania and Macedonia to the energetic young Byzantine general. Then some typically “Byzantine” plots placed general Alexios Komnenos on the throne.

As Emperor, he turned to face the Turkic Pecheneg threat. Hiring another tribe, the Cumans, as additional manpower, he defeated the Pechenegs and some nearby Seljuks. But in addition to other troubles, he still had an increasingly permanent infestation of Seljuk Turks all along his eastern frontier. Alexios Komnenos was determined to reverse the ebbing tide of the Empire and start winning back land. He just didn’t have enough boots on the ground, and the Cumans could only serve as mercenaries that one time. He decided to seek a Western alliance to put an end to the Turkish threat.

He was the Eastern Roman Emperor. Officially, there was a Western Roman Emperor: the King of Germany, Henry IV. But Henry’s title had been bestowed by his own anti-Pope. The Eastern Emperor had to choose which Pope to side with. His church recognized neither Roman Pope since 1051.

Alexios Komnenos chose to send a formal request for help to Pope Urban II, not to Henry IV. It seems that the deciding point may have been his personal experience pushing back Robert and Bohemond Guiscard from Albania. The Normans were a fighting machine; they had integrated the old Viking shield wall technique with Arab-copied horseback fighting. (That’s part of how they conquered England; the English had not yet copied the Arabs’ horseback methods.) Anyone would want Normans on his side.

Pope Urban II, now primarily supported by Normans, was handed the opportunity of actually acting like a Holy Roman Emperor. It was the ultimate power move against the disgraced French and German kings. Stalin later asked ironically, “how many divisions does the Pope have?” Here, in 1095, Pope Urban II had a chance to prove that he had many.

He called for a second council in six months, this time in Clermont, France. That’s when the final decisions would be made. The Pope had the power to grant a divorce to a Byzantine Princess and call for an army to rescue the Byzantine Emperor. Surely now the Church could be united again under Rome…

Posted in Crusades, Women | Leave a comment

1085: Toledo and the proto-Crusade

Posted on March 13, 2014 by Ruth

Before the First Crusade to the Holy Land, the idea of religious war was tried out in Spain.

The Christian kingdoms in the north were, from west to east (left to right): Galicia with two Atlantic borders; Castile and Leon, lined up along the northern Atlantic coast; Navarre and Aragon, along the foothills of the Pyrenees (Aragon was landlocked). Their ruling families were so frequently engaged in fraternal wars that they really needed no outside enemies. Marriages and deaths were constantly uniting and dividing portions of the kingdoms; it’s hard to find a year when no Christian kings were at war with each other.

In 1064, only Aragon was ruled independently; its king, Sancho, accepted the Pope’s offer to send an international contingent of knights to help take back a city on Aragon’s border. The Duke of Aquitaine and some of the Normans who had been invading Italy joined him to besiege and conquer Barbastro. It appears that city was truly sacked in a way that local Muslim and Christian armies did not normally do. Instead of backing off and organizing tribute, the Norman and French knights set about executing, raping, enslaving and burning. Only a year later, the Muslims had recaptured the town; but the siege of Barbastro seems to have been a psychological turning point.

Historians now dispute just how directly the Pope offered his assisance in this first proto-Crusade, but there’s no doubt that the next Pope proclaimed automatic forgiveness of sin to any knights who went to Spain. Pope Gregory VII (who was often at war with the King of Germany) clearly saw the danger of relying too much on the Franks, whether French or German. He was trying to strengthen new ties to support Rome. The Kings of Aragon and Leon vied for who could promise the Pope better support and more loyalty to his reforms. If either of them emerged as a strong Rome supporter, the Pope would be safer.

King Alfonso of Leon-Castile led the next major invasion (apparently without international guests) against the Muslims. The taifa of Toledo was already paying him tribute, and it was not actually hostile to him personally, since he had lived there for a short time to be safe from a losing battle against his brother, the King of Navarre. But after he had consolidated power, he occupied Toledo in 1085 and made it his new capital city, as it had once been the capital of the Visigoths. He quickly appointed one of the Pope’s close associates (a Frenchman, not a Castilian) as Archbishop of Toledo and decreed that churches there must follow the current rites of Rome, not their traditional ones.

The loss of Toledo was a huge blow to the allied Muslim taifas. The emirs of Seville, Toledo, Valencia and Granada faced a problem: would Spain have another international invasion? The emirs could be friendly with Spanish kings; the Emir of Zaragoza apparently stalled one crusade attempt in 1073 by allying with the King of Navarre against the King of Aragon. Nor were these emirs recent immigrants; by 1050 they shared more culture with any other Spanish city than with far-off Muslim places like Egypt. But the nature of territorial war in Spain seemed to be changing. The emirs couldn’t afford to allow Spain to become a bloody international battleground while they used only local forces. They would have to call on international Muslims.

It was a bitter decision because the closest Muslims were Berbers, and importing Berbers had always been a huge mistake. The emirs were aware that mercenaries might take over; but the Emir of Seville is supposed to have said, “it’s better to drive camels in Africa than to herd pigs in Seville.” If he was going to lose power, he would rather be overthrown by Muslims than by savage Normans.

They sent a request to Marrakech, the capital of the Almoravid dynasty. The Almoravids arrived quickly, wearing Tuareg blue veils as a uniform. In 1086, the emirs of several cities and the Almoravids met Alfonso’s army at Badajoz, on the border of modern Portugal. The Arabs later nicknamed the field of battle “al-Zalaka” which means “slippery,” because the ground became so bloody. Alfonso survived but with immense losses; he withdrew to Toledo and did not invade Muslim territory again.

Meanwhile, the Almoravids began overthrowing the same emirs who had invited them. The emirs had become too complacent about religion, too willing to ally with Christians, and too much like city-dwellers who loved luxury, safety, and high taxes. The Emir of Seville was taken captive by Berbers in 1091, the same year that Turks came very close to the gates of Constantinople. He died imprisoned in Morocco in 1095, the same year that the Pope called for the First Crusade to help Constantinople.

In one of the curious twists of history, the Muslim daughter-in-law of the Emir of Seville ended up taking refuge with King Alfonso in Toledo, and she probably became his 3rd wife. Alfonso maintained Toledo’s scholarly library and began a program of translating its works into Castilian (his spoken language) and Latin. He continued to strike Arabic-letter coins. At this point, the Mozarab culture could hardly distinguish between native ideas/images and Arabic ones.

 

 

Posted in Crusades | Leave a comment

pre-Crusades: Church vs. State

Posted on March 10, 2014 by Ruth

We traced earlier how the rise of the Pope’s power was always tied into the military support of Charlemagne’s family. After the land of the Franks broke up for the last time in an inheritance distribution, separate branches of the family ruled in Paris and Aachen. The King of the Germans was by far stronger during the 10th and 11th centuries. Most of the German kings were also separately crowned as King of Italy in Pavia.

The north of Italy was still called Lombardy; Pavia was its capital and they still had their historical “Iron Crown” that was used in each coronation ritual. Any King of Germany and Italy also controlled Rome. Being crowned Holy Roman Emperor was a separate deal; it doesn’t seem to have come automatically but had to be negotiated with the Pope in each generation.

In the years leading up to the First Crusade, the balance of power between King and Pope became a crisis. The key problem was that the church drew its financial support from land ownership; a bishop was not only a “Prince of the Church” but also the secular ruler of fairly extensive lands. Remember that government was managed by means of the pyramid of feudalism; each manor was part of a larger unit, and each of these part of a larger region, all under the king. The Church didn’t rule any particular region, but they owned patches of land all through every county and dukedom. Bishops were technically independent, but in fact they were woven all into the governance of a kingdom.

If the King could appoint bishops in his territory, he could make sure that they were agreeable to his rule. It was easiest to appoint younger sons of the local ruling family as bishops. They were already part of society and its structure of loyalty. It was easiest of all if the King/Emperor could appointed the Pope, too, and several of them did, including the Empress who was regent for her son, the future Henry IV.

The Popes began to see the danger of leaning too much on the Franks. If the Pope was entirely dependent on the kings of France and Germany, the Church would cease to have any real meaning. A new Benedictine monastic movement in Cluny, France insisted that the Church must be separate and higher, to honor God.

In the middle of the 11th century, the Pope’s legal adviser and ambassador, Hildebrand, steered Rome through several smaller crises in which the city had elected a different pope from the one appointed by the German Empress. In 1073, during the previous pope’s funeral rites, the people of Rome formed a mob and demanded that Hildebrand himself should become Pope to fight for Roman independence. Hildebrand wasn’t even a priest, but at popular request he was quickly ordained priest, bishop and Pope. Right around this same time, Henry IV became an adult and took power in his own name as King of the Germans.

The new Pope Gregory VII opposed the German King in every way possible. As his most lasting reform, he set up a separate governance structure, the Roman Curia, to elect popes and appoint bishops. It’s hard for us to understand, from our viewpoint, just how important this was in Europe’s history. We associate the Curia with everything old-fashioned, hidden and authoritarian. But in its creation, it was an institution to maintain distance between church and state. It was part of the long European conflict that finally gave us our modern theory of private religion. The young Henry IV knew exactly what was at stake and opposed everything Gregory VII did.

During Henry IV’s 50 year reign, he deposed the Pope *twice* (appointing his own counter Pope) and was excommunicated (twice). The first time, he was still in his early 20s and found a way to turn his excommunication to strategic advantage. He begged the Pope for forgiveness by standing barefoot for 3 days in the snow, outside the castle where the Pope was staying. It was great religious theater, but it also gave him a reason to keep his army stationed nearby. (His later capture of Rome could only be reversed by the Pope’s allies fighting pitched battles.)

The Pope worked on strategies to weaken Henry IV. German aristocrats were generally willing to rebel against their king, who was usually some kind of relative. Also, there was genuine debate over the Emperor’s control of the church. Pope Gregory’s supporters, many of them powerful Cluniac monks, pointed out how morally wrong it was for the church to become a puppet of any state. Various Counts and Dukes began to ally with the Pope. A noble widow, Matilda of Tuscany, could claim the lands of Tuscany, Lorraine and Swabia against the German king’s wishes, so the Pope supported her in this act of rebellion. The Pope also encouraged and allied with the Norman brothers who were storming southern Italy and Sicily.

Gregory VII believed that the Church should be not just independent, but also higher in authority than even the Holy Roman Emperor. He wrote to some of the newly-converted places, seeking to set up feudal vows to Rome in places like Denmark and Hungary. He also wrote to the Byzantine Emperor, trying to solve the schism of the 1050s. He left a mandate for his successors to try to bring the branches of the Church back together, so that it could stand stronger against kings. Henry IV had actually taken money from Constantinople to undermine Rome, which showed just how dangerous it was for the church to be a house divided.

Last, out of Gregory VII’s troubles came an idea of holy war. This Pope had a vision of how all Christendom could come together under the Rome’s authority and push out the invaders. The church could lead by promising forgiveness of sin in exchange for military service, something the German king could never do. Taifa-riddled Spain was a perfect first proving ground.

 

Posted in Crusades | Leave a comment

Pilgrims to the Holy Land

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Ruth

In the century before the First Crusade, a number of regions had adopted Christianity: Norway, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Bulgaria. During this same time, an abbey of Benedictine monks at Cluny, in Aquitaine, encouraged many people to go on pilgrimages. The newly-converted should go; the guilty should go. Some judges even sentenced aristocrats to go on pilgrimage to atone for murder. The first Christian king of Norway, Olaf Tryggvason, went to Jerusalem as a pilgrim.

In the 11th century, pilgrim travel was at first easier, because they could travel safely in Hungary and Byzantine Anatolia. The first Christian king of Hungary established a hostel for pilgrims in Jerusalem and moved his administrative capital to be near one of the chief pilgrim roads. This gave him a great deal of contact with other Europeans, important since the Huns had been invading barbarians, themselves, and Stephen wanted to rebrand.

Anatolia had established pilgrim hostels, guides and shrines. It had been solidly Roman and Christian for a long time; some of its cities are cited in the Bible. When the Seljuk Turks took over Baghdad in 1055, next they invaded the Armenian mountain kingdom. By 1080, there was an Armenian refugee kingdom in Anatolia, along the coast.But Armenians had been among the earliest converts to Christianity, so they were friendly to pilgrims. It wasn’t so bad at the border with Syria, either. Although the crazy Caliph al-Hakim had torn down Constantine’s basilica in Jerusalem, the Fatimids generally favored pilgrim travel.

The other route to the Holy Land was by sea. In Roman times, it was easy to get a ship from Rome to Alexandria or Jaffa. For a long time, Constantinople’s warships kept piracy at bay, but after the Muslim invasion it was harder. By the 11th century, the eastern Mediterranean was also served by Venice, which was nominally under Constantinople. For pilgrims, Venetian ships were the only option. Venice provided some armed protection and charged high fees.

During the late 11th century, both eastern Anatolia and all of Syria/Palestine fell into anarchy and civil war. Pilgrims who made it back to Hungary left warnings for others. With the overland route becoming impossible, only the sea route was left, so its expenses skyrocketed.

This entry ends up being rather frustrating to write, because every source assures me that there were wild rumors and horror stories about dangers to pilgrims, but none cite any actual stories. When the Seljuks took over Jerusalem and realized that rich foreigners had this odd idea that it was their right to cross Turkish lands and visit a Turkish-ruled city, they saw it first as an unwelcome spy op or invasion. Some pilgrims were turned away; others were harassed by robbers and could not get any help from soldier outposts. At other times, the Seljuk governors of Jerusalem permitted pilgrims but made them pay outrageous fees to enter. The Seljuk governors of Jerusalem were often at war with the chiefs of other nearby cities like Aleppo and Damascus.

Some of the horror stories came from Anatolia’s new status as a war frontier.  As the Seljuks and their allies, the Pechenegs, pressed against the Muslim-Byzantine border, Anatolia was no longer peaceful. With armies and battles come plunder, fires, robberies and outlaw bands. Monasteries and churches in Anatolia were burnt and  plundered. Travelers were robbed.

That’s the most detail I’ve been able to muster. If you know any specific claims of pilgrim persecution, please post as comments.

Posted in Crusades, Muslim Empire (old series) | Leave a comment

Turkish Syria

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Ruth

Countdown to the First Crusade:

In 1055, Seljuk Turks took over governance of Baghdad. The Abbasid Caliphate was utterly gone. Seljuk rulers spoke Persian and sometimes Arabic, and often they used Arabic names like Mohammed. However, the old Arabic titles of office shifted to Persian and Turkish. (The common people never stopped speaking Seljuk-dialect Turkish, which is the direct ancestor of modern Turkish.) From this point, we hear of Sultans, Shahs, Beys, and Atabegs, in addition to the old Emirs and Caliphs.

The first Seljuk Sultan was named Toghril Bey, a colorful guy. His foster brother seized power until Toghril not only defeated his army, but also strangled him personally with a bowstring. Then Toghril settled the legality of rule by marrying the last Abbasid princess. After his death, his sons and nephews began to murder each other until “Alp Arslan” (Heroic Lion) became Sultan in 1063.

Alp Arslan went to war against the Byzantine Emperor; both men led their own armies into Armenia, to the Battle of Manzikert (1071). In this battle, the Turks used the tactic of constantly falling back to draw the Byzantine Army into a long ragged line in a valley, then encircling it and attacking.

The Greek Emperor became a personal captive of Sultan Arslan. The story goes that the Sultan asked, “What would you do to me if I were your captive,” and the Emperor replied truthfully, “I’d kill you, or parade you through the streets.” Sultan Arslan humiliated the Emperor by promptly freeing him without harm. From this time, Seljuk Turks owned more and more of Anatolia: it *began* to become “Turkey.” It wasn’t their homeland yet, though; Alp Arslan was buried in Turkmenistan, and Anatolian farmers still spoke Greek.

Alp’s son became Sultan Malik Shah I; at this time, the Turkish Muslims consolidated power over all of the eastern and northern Muslim lands, pushing out some Egyptian rulers from the Holy Land. Malik’s brother Tutush ruled in Damascus; a warlord named Artuk became governor of Jerusalem. The Turkish Beys appointed to govern Aleppo, Jerusalem, Antioch and Damascus fought against each other. Chiefs with names like Radwan, Daquq, Ilghazi and Sokmen staged internecine battles in farm fields around these cities.

When a little boy, Malik’s baby son, became Sultan in Baghdad in 1092, there was a free-for-all power grab. A second Arslan declared independence for Turkish Anatolia, while Tutush (the baby’s uncle) did the same in Damascus.

The Muslim Empire, the Ummah, had fallen into near anarchy. Islam had been based on central rule by Mohammed; now it had broken into at least 3 pieces that might not ever get back together. The Fatimids in Egypt were still sending out secret preachers/spies into the Persian and Turkish region. Sunni fundamentalists were ruling much of Africa and Spain.

During this whole period, pilgrims from Europe continued to attempt to visit and kiss holy relics in Jerusalem. At times, the city was besieged or sacked by some Turkish warlord; in 1096, a Fatimid Sultan swung north to conquer it. It was extremely dangerous to live in, or travel to, Jerusalem.

Now the stage is set for the First Crusade; that’s the land they’ll be invading: Syria devoured by Turkish invaders. Next, the characters and the plot motive. I have to swing the camera back to Europe for a bit, to catch up with the Popes and kings.

 

 

Posted in Crusades, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Rome vs. Eastern Rome: 1054

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Ruth

Countdown to the First Crusade: Church schism

By the beginning of the Middle Ages (6th cent.), Christians had a general understanding that all theological disputes should be solved by representatives of the five major Christian regions: Jerusalem, Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople and Rome. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Constantinople considered itself the Roman government in exile. When Popes began crowning Carolingians as Holy Roman Emperors in the west, it was a direct assault on Constantinople’s claims. Around the same time three of the five Patriarchates fell under Islam’s rule: Alexandria, Jerusalem and Antioch no longer had secular power, though they could still send theologians to a council. The power struggle between Rome and Constantinople had no mediating parties: it really came down to Eastern Rome vs. Actual, Resurgent Rome.

When the Franks and other Europeans converted to Latin Christianity, they learned a form of the official creed that included a word not used in Byzantine churches. Rome didn’t officially adopt this version until 1014, when it was sung at the coronation of Henry “the Fowler” as Holy Roman Emperor. During the 800s and 900s, it was a football to kick around, a negotiating point while Rome and Constantinople bickered over other forms of power. At first it seemed collegiate enough: the Byzantines politely informed the Latins that they had deposed their Patriarch, only to find that Rome sent an inquiry team as if it was their business. Approvals, disapprovals, legates and ambassadors went back and forth as if Rome and Constantinople were siblings. As disgruntled as they got, there was no open breach for a long time.

At missions frontiers, Greek and Latin missionaries clashed. Russia went Greek; Poland went Latin. Hungary went Latin. Bulgaria was a battleground with both kinds of missionaries, but by 1020, Byzantium was in military and theological control of Bulgaria and Serbia.

When Normans began to take over southern Italy, they appointed Latin bishops who used the Western creed form. Italy shared the peninsula with Rome, but southern Italy (mostly Mediterranean coast with shipping ties to the east) had always answered to Constantinople. Southern Italians were confused. Who was in control? Was it a collegiate matter for a church council, or had there been conquest? Was Rome now higher than a sibling? Yes: the “Bishop of Rome” now claimed to have theological hierarchy over all other regions, based on Jesus’ comment to Peter (who died in Rome).

The Patriarch of Constantinople retaliated against Rome’s abuse of power by closing Latin churches still operating in his city in 1052. In 1054, a legate from the Pope walked into Hagia Sophia Basilica and laid on the altar an order of Excommunication against the Patriarch. For a few decades, Patriarchs had often “forgotten” to list Popes in their official church hierarchy list; on their side, the Popes often “forgot” to notify Constantinople of their ordination. Now they were openly declaring each other powerless and illegitimate. The excommunicated Patriarch ignored the Papal Bull and issued his own edict denouncing the heretical Latin creed formula.

So what happened next? Not much. In a way, the Great Schism mattered less in its own time than it does now. At the time, Greek-speaking Anne of Kiev was queen of France and then regent over her son Philip. The Holy Roman Emperor didn’t come around arresting Byzantine relatives at the Parisian court just because Rome had issued an edict. And one generation later, in 1081, the western (German) Holy Roman Emperor was himself besieging Rome in a dispute with the Pope. It wasn’t even clear if the Pope was his own man.

What we can learn from it, coming up to the Crusades, was the fluidity and uncertainty of relationship between Rome and Constantinople. We all know as a point of general information that the First Crusade happened because the Pope sent help at request of the Byzantine Emperor. We’ll get there shortly, as the 11th century closes. But think about the geopolitical significance of what amounted to a Latin military invasion of Byzantine territory. At the same time that Normans were oppressing Greek monks in Italy, the Greek Emperor was forced to invite more Normans right into Jerusalem to do the same. Imagine the delight of the Pope, after two centuries of power plays against Byzantium: now, he had the ability to summon a chain-mailed horde to the rescue.

We tend to look back in history and assume that Rome was always dictating to Europe; but instead, we see here that a process of elimination (Islam taking over competitors) and long rivalry led to that point. Until that point, it wasn’t clear that Rome was really going to become All That. The Bishop of Rome was just a church official in a city among others. But the First Crusade was a master stroke of sibling domination. It was the first reply to Stalin’s much later question: How many divisions does the Pope have? 11th century answer: more than the Patriarch, anyway.

 

Posted in Crusades, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Anti-Semitism begins in Europe

Posted on February 27, 2014 by Ruth

Part of the countdown to the First Crusade…

Before the year 1000, there’s no clear evidence of anti-Jewish actions. A small community of Jews had settled along the Rhine River in Roman days; there were some other small historic communities in parts of Roman France. Most of Europe’s Jews before the turn of the millenium were merchants, though some were farmers and wine-makers.

A particular group of merchants are known to history as Radhanites. Their home base in Europe was in the Rhone Valley; they traveled back and forth to China, at times by way of the Jewish-convert Khazar kingdom on the Black Sea. (It’s possible that contact with Jewish traders encouraged the Khazar king to learn more and then convert.) Some of their routes used the sea, but going to China invariably entailed a long overland journey. The Radhanites were remarkable for being able to speak most of the languages along the way, including Slavic and Persian. They carried European furs and slaves eastward, returning with spices. Before 1000, they were the main spice suppliers to the Carolingian kings.

As we’ve seen, the region of Europe and Asia was destabilized in the late 900s. The Abbasid Caliphate was nearly gone: North Africa became Sunni fundamentalist; Egypt became Shi’ite evangelical; Persia was filled with Turkic nomads. China was not stable after the Tang dynasty fell. And just before the Kievans converted to Orthodox Christianity, they sacked the Jewish kingdom of Khazaria. For a while, even skilled Jewish merchants could not work the Silk Road. During the 11th century, the price of spices shot up. French and German kings had no good reason to protect Jews now that they weren’t spice sellers.

When (1009) the crazy Fatimid Sultan al-Hakim of Egypt tore down the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, the Christian world was shocked. Al-Hakim ordered all non-Muslim places, both monastery and synagogue, torn down. But somehow, as word spread, Jews became connected with the destruction. Rumors spread saying that the Jews had incited Fatimid demolitions. “Anti-semitism” is a modern word, and it’s clumsy at times because Arabs are “Semites” but are not included in it. Back at that time, they were: Jews and Arabs were viewed as very similar. They were all “Levantine” and Saracens.

King Robert II in Paris and Duke Richard II of Normandy began formal oppressions of their Jewish populations. They began by insisting on conversion, but of course when conversion was refused, they started killing (many despairing Jews killed themselves, often by drowning). A Jewish scholar in Normandy was able, with difficulty, to journey to Rome and appeal directly to the Pope for relief, which the Pope provided as possible. But it was never safe to be Jewish in France again. In Spain, as the kingdom of Andalusia splintered into taifas, the Christian kings who sacked frontier towns did not distinguish between Jew and Muslim. Jews were seen as collaborators, spies, and foreign. Popes never supported Jewish persecution, but it continued.

During this same century, one of the greatest Talmud scholars ever lived in Troyes, France. Troyes was the site of large international trading fairs several times a year. Perhaps it was a safer place since Jews had an economic role in the fairs, or perhaps Rashi just managed to squeeze his lifetime in between persecutions. It helped that Troyes was well outside Normandy.

I can’t imagine that it was any fun to be a Jew in Sicily or southern Italy when the Normans invaded there. The Norman worldview was deeply anti-Jewish. The Jews had cultivated scholarship, diplomacy, languages and merchant skills to survive in the post-Roman world. Norman lords despised all of these skills.  In the last essay I described their partial conversion; their Viking attitudes and Odin-cult bloodlust took many centuries to wear down. They didn’t value literacy; they were the first European aristocracy to scorn earning money through work and especially through trade (as opposed to blackmail, which they favored). They were culturally allergic to Jews. Even without rumors about Jews inciting demolition of churches, the international ascendancy of Normans was bound to be bad news for Jewry.

Posted in Crusades, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Normans on the world stage

Posted on February 23, 2014 by Ruth

 

You’ll remember that one of the early steps to pacifying the North was the deal the Franks made with Rollo the Dane to have land in exchange for peace. The Northmen who settled in Normandy were probably warriors who took local wives, because their descendants were speaking French within one generation. Their names, especially for boys, remained North Germanic; their version of French had a Danish accent. But their identity as Normans was more French than Danish.

The Normans were still distinctly different; they were the most aggressive ethnic group in Europe. They seem to have had the worst case of military-themed Christianity, although the Anglo-Saxons shared this theology and may have helped spread it among the Normans. In their minds, Jesus was the leader of a war band. He came to earth as an act of aggression against Satan, the rival (and rebel) king. They didn’t find it strange that he died on a cross as an act of war, since Northern mythology was full of mysticism about death. In the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Dream of the Rood,” the cross reminisces about how frightening it was when the young, strong warrior leaped onto it to give his life. Being a Christian meant loyalty to Jesus as warrior-king, which easily included acts of aggression against Christ’s enemies.

Norse culture did not value literacy, scholarship, or peaceful negotiation. The Norman aristocrats could be extremely pious and ignorant at the same time. They cared deeply about their faith, but simply did not (could not) read the parts of the Gospels that might disabuse them of their militant notions. Faith was about rituals, vows, and loyalty to God’s heavenly Hall. Wanton killing might be murder, therefore a sin; but much killing was lawful, and it was generally justified if the warrior was as careless of his own life as he was of others’.

You’ll remember, too, that the Normans followed primogeniture inheritance customs. Oldest sons inherited the estate and all its income; younger sons inherited a solid education (in the arts of war) and a network of family relationships. It’s not surprising that Normandy became the backbone of the Frankish feudal system, and at the same time a great exporter of arrogant, pious, callous knights. Younger sons had to seek their fortune through conquest.

Normans on pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem discovered that southern Italy was often attacked by Saracens. Nobody was firmly in control of southern Italy; it was nominally Byzantine, but often at civil war with Lombards. Sometimes there were joint Byzantine-Roman attempts to defend the coast or take back Sicily, but the overall effect was a power vacuum that the Normans happily filled. First as pilgrims, then as mercenaries, then invaders, they began to control the region. Ironically, the most violent Normans were most likely to be on pilgrimage doing penance for the sin of murder. And as devout Catholics, they had the Pope’s blessing to begin dominating Arab and Byzantine parts of Italy and Sicily.

Norman lords became Counts in southern Italy beginning in 1038. In 1061, the Pope appointed Robert Guiscard to be “Duke of Sicily.” It was an empty title, but Robert and his brother Roger set out to make it real. The brothers spent the rest of their lives conquering Arab Sicily town by town. By 1091, Roger was Count of all Sicily for real; in the same year he reconquered the island of Malta. The language of Malta remained Arabic at the core, with borrowed Norman words. Eventually Sicily became a Norman kingdom, often including parts of southern Italy. Normans set up new titles for themselves, including Robert’s son Bohemond as Prince of Taranto. (Bohemund became a Crusader.)

The Byzantine Emperor was not pleased to have Sicily and Italy under Norman control, even if they were nominally Christians. They had no historic fondness for Constantinople (as Charlemagne did) and they were loyal only to the Pope, the Emperor’s rival. Norman dominance in the Mediterranean did not contribute to regional peace; if anything, it was another early step toward the Crusades. The most aggressive strain of Christianity was now at home in the heart of the Mediterranean world, directly challenging Byzantine and Arab power.

 

Posted in Crusades, Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Ideology takes over the Caliphate

Posted on February 22, 2014 by Ruth

I’ve taken a week off writing about medieval Islam, so I want to review before going on. After about 950, the nature of the Muslim world began to change profoundly. Each region had its own type of change. In Persia, there were nomadic Turks moving in, converting, ruling various regions, and often moving on toward the Middle East. In Egypt, formerly pragmatic rulers were replaced with the very ideological Ismaili Fatimid dynasty. Instead of concerning themselves mainly with tax collection and frontier security, the Fatimids sponsored an aggressive conversion outreach, the ministry of Dawa.

In Muslim Spain (Andalusia), Islamic rule had been perhaps the most pragmatic and least ideological. Under the central rule of Cordoba, there had been a high degree of co-existence of non-Muslims and Muslim factions. But when the last real Caliph of Cordoba’s power went to a vizier who squandered it, Cordoba fell into civil war in 1009. Its scholars and cultural elite fled to other cities. These cities formed militias and became city-states, called taifas. The taifas went to war against each other, trying to regain central power. Some of them were dominated by Arabs, others by Berbers, others by native Iberians who had converted to Islam.

The Christian kingdoms of Northern Spain took the opportunity to pick them off one by one during the middle of the 11th century. The Reconquista might have taken just a generation or two, instead of several centuries, if nothing more had changed. But to the south, in Africa, fundamentalist Islam was stronger than ever, conquering more and more regions of black Africa. Its Berber capital was Marrakesh, in Morocco. Some of the more powerful taifa kings sent invitations to Marrakesh asking for military help against the Christians. The Almoravid fighters, wearing blue Tuareg face veils as a uniform, crossed over in 1086.

It’s easy to take this alliance for granted, since we live in a world with sharp ideological distinctions. But this is not how Spain had been during the 9th and 10th centuries. There had often been alliances between Muslim Emirs and Christian kings; Charlemagne’s one sally into Spain had been at the invitation of a rebellious Muslim. There had been a great deal of intermarriage, too; records suggest that Abd al-Rahman III had blue eyes from a Christian-born mother or grandmother. The last powerful vizier of Cordoba named his son Abd al-Rahman, but history knows him as Abd al-Rahman Sanchuelo: “little Sancho”, nicknamed for his Christian grandfather. It seems possible, in hindsight, that Spain’s 11th century civil war could have resolved some other way, with regional cross-religious alliances.

If that had been a possibility, it was no longer possible after the fundamentalist Almoravid fighters crossed into Spain. Religion began to matter much more. First, the alliance was made on specifically religious grounds. As Almoravid generals took over Spanish cities, they instituted a stricter interpretation of Sharia. They evicted many of the non-Muslims who had achieved positions of wealth and status.

Second, the Almoravids were Berber nomads, infamously hostile to city life. They didn’t care about the Houses of Wisdom, book-copying scribes, musical instruments, three-course meals, white tablecloths, deodorant, fashions or fountains of Cordoba and its satellites. When they didn’t outright destroy these things, they neglected them. Many of the new Taifa kings were illiterate; they didn’t value Hebrew or Latin scholarship, they only valued Quran memorization and their own school of Sharia interpretation.

One of the most famous Jews of the period was Samuel, known as haNagid (“the prince”). He was one of the Cordoban scholars who fled civil war; he started a shop in Malaga, a coastal town. Even before the main Almoravid invasion, Malaga’s taifa had a Berber king who was illiterate. When the king heard that one of his servants had found a man from Cordoba who could write letters, he directly hired Samuel as his chief scribe. Samuel’s education quickly elevated him above all other staff, and he became the Grand Vizier. He even led armies against other taifas.

When Samuel haNagid died in 1056, his son took his place. His son was only in his 20s, and although he too was educated, he was not canny enough to maneuver in Berber politics. In 1066, a fundamentalist mob rioted against Jews, particularly against the young Jewish vizier. After killing him, they went on to kill about 1500 others, most of Granada’s Jewish community. This was the first anti-Jewish violence in a land where Jews had welcomed and helped the Muslim conquerors.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series) | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Kievan interlude

Posted on February 18, 2014 by Ruth

To take note of today’s news of fiery uprising in Kiev, I’m going to duck to one side of the Islamic developments I’ve been tracking, and instead look at Anne of Kiev, a Queen of France.

Anne’s grandmother may have been the Byzantine princess who very reluctantly went off into the deep woods to marry Prince Vladimir of Kiev. It’s not clear if Anna, sister to the Byzantine emperor, had children or if she was just the Princess consort as Vladimir’s children were growing up. Kiev’s new alliance with Constantinople was centrally important, and whether she was the natural mother and grandmother to his descendants, she was the greatest influence.

Russia, or Rus as it was often called in medieval times, had been a Swedish colony of sorts. It wasn’t directly ruled by Sweden, but Swedish war parties and traders dominated the Slavic foresters and farmers along Russia’s rivers. They had been intermarrying for several centuries already, so it’s not surprising that Vladimir’s daughter was married to the King of Sweden. Not only that, he also contracted for the Princess of Sweden to come marry his oldest son, Yaroslav.

Yaroslav’s daughter Anne was raised as an Orthodox Christian, probably under the tutelage of priests from Constantinople. But her parents had barely been baptized for one generation. Both Sweden and Rus were barbaric places compared with Constantinople; they were even barbaric compared with Aachen and Paris. Neither of them actually minted money at that time; they used fragments of silver bars for barter. Swedish kings still preferred their silver to be formed into arm rings, not coins.

On the other hand, young Anne’s pedigree included the past Emperors of Eastern Rome, and her father was at that time in control of vast areas of frontier forest. Kiev had rapidly modeled itself after Constantinople’s buildings and customs. Five-course Byzantine dinners, using forks, were typical at Yaroslav’s palace. Greek and Latin scholarship was imported as quickly as possible, too. There was a high contrast between palace life and the Kievan countryside.

Charlemagne’s empire had been divided in 887; although boundaries continued to change with each generation, it remained basically “Germany” and “France” from then on. While his descendants named Otto were crowned Holy Roman Emperors, the western Franks were also seeking a foothold to rise in power.

Since their new close alliance with Rome had made Charlemagne’s descendants pay attention to the strictest marriage rules, it was getting harder to find royal wives. One well-researched reference book on early medieval marriage said that the French and Germans misunderstood Rome’s rules. Rome counted “degrees” of relationship differently; when they intended to ban a man from marrying his 2nd cousin, it looked to the northerners like the ban prevented him from marrying even his 4th cousin. Among the aristocracy, nearly everyone was related to someone.

Kiev’s ascendancy came just in time. When Henry I of France was left widowed, his ambassadors could not find any European bride who wasn’t too closely related. They finally went to Kiev and negotiated with Yaroslav. Henry I married Anne in Rheims Cathedral in 1051.

Anne spoke Greek as a native tongue, and she could read Greek, Latin, Slavic, and at least two other languages. She was far better educated than anyone she met in Paris. Her husband, Henry I, was illiterate in spite of his ancestor’s insistence on literacy. He was so impressed with her intelligence and education that he made her an active part of his governing council. Some of his decrees (signed only with a cross, for his name) had an added inscription “with Anne’s consent.”

Anne’s oldest son was given a Greek name, Philip. Subsequent children had European names: Hugh, Robert, and Emma. There’s no record of the name Philip in Europe before Anne’s son, who became Philip I.

When Henry I died, Anne of Kiev became the Queen Regent for her son Philip. There are still some medieval Latin documents containing her name written in Cyrillic characters. This, too, is odd; for it was not until several centuries later that names counted as legal signatures in Europe. If a scribe wrote her name, why not in Latin? It appears that Anne herself chose to authenticate documents with her signature, and that her name in Slavic letters remained her identity.

 

Posted in Muslim Empire (old series), Women | Tagged , , | Leave a comment