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The Middle Ground: the Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea, 1096-1204

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The Middle Ground: the Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea, 1096-1204 This is a repository copy of The Middle Ground: The Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea, 1096-1204. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/119209/ Version: Accepted Version Proceedings Paper: Murray, AV (2018) The Middle Ground: The Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea, 1096-1204. In: Theotokis, G and Yildiz, A, (eds.) A Military History of the Mediterranean Sea: Aspects of War, Diplomacy and Military Elites. First International Conference on the Military History of the Mediterranean Sea, 25-28 Jun 2015, Istanbul, Turkey. Brill . ISBN 978-90-04-36204-8 This is an author produced version of a chapter published in A Military History of the Mediterranean Sea. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ The Middle Ground: The Passage of Crusade Armies to the Holy Land by Land and Sea (1096-1204) Alan V. Murray The crusades were wars unlike any others in the history of Christianity. Two especially significant differences marked this form of holy war from other forms of warfare in the Middle Ages. The first was the character of participation in the crusade movement. Crusades had the status of penitential pilgrimages which offered the opportunity to gain spiritual rewards, and thus often attracted large numbers of participants from beyond the traditional military classes of nobles and knights. The second difference was the sheer magnitude of the undertaking in practical terms. Crusade expeditions had to travel vast distances from their starting points in Western Europe in order to reach their geographical objective, the Holy Land, and later, Egypt, meaning that they were in transit for many months, or in some cases, years, before they could engage with their Muslim enemies. Edward Peters has drawn attention to the fact that much of the modern historiography of the crusades has concentrated on two main areas. On the one hand there is the organisation of crusades in Europe, together with everything associated with it: ideology, motivation, finance, preaching, recruitment and so on; on the other hand, there are the primarily military activities of crusaders in the Holy Land and other theatres of war. What happened in between these two complexes, he claims, has tended not to attract the attention of historians.1 The aim of this essay is to examine the factors which influenced the choice of land or sea routes in the passage of crusade armies to the East, looking at the relative aims and practicalities of land and seaborne crusades, as well as other issues contingent upon this choice, in the hope that it might serve as a useful starting point for further research. Soon after Pope Urban made his famous appeal for the liberation of the Holy Land from Turkish rule at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, several seaborne expeditions were evidently being planned, but the majority of the forces that took part in the First Crusade (1096-99) and the expeditions which followed it in 1101 travelled by land routes. The smaller naval expeditions in the First Crusade and those that followed in the course of the next forty years tended to come from two regions with strong maritime traditions and capabilities: the northern Italian city- states of Genoa, Venice and Pisa, and the North Sea region of Norway, Denmark, Saxony, Frisia, Flanders and England.2 The clear preference for larger forces from the European mainland was to travel by land routes, as in the Second Crusade (1147-49), when the main German and French expeditions led by Conrad III and Louis VII travelled overland, while a single combined Anglo- Norman, German and Flemish fleet sailed via the Iberian Peninsula to the Holy Land. However, a major change occurred at the time of the Third Crusade (1189-92). The departure of Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa from Regensburg in May 1189 was the last occasion that a land route was taken by a major crusade expedition for another two centuries. The following year both Richard I of England and Philip II Augustus of France chose to sail to the Holy Land, with the necessary shipping being either constructed or hired specially for the occasion, while Barbarossa’s son Henry VI appears to have considered only a sea passage for the crusade that he launched in 1197, but did not take part in himself.3 1 Peters, “There and Back Again: Crusaders in Motion, 1096-1291”, pp. 157-58. 2 For seaborne expeditions between 1101 and the Second Crusade, see especially: Doxey, “Norwegian Crusaders and the Balearic Islands” (on the crusade of King Sigurd Jorsalfar of Norway); Riley-Smith, “The Venetian Crusade of 1122-1124”; Queller and Katele, “Venice and the Conquest of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem”. 3 Naumann, Der Kreuzzug Kaiser Heinrichs VI. 2 1. Land Passages The diverse armies which made up the First Crusade took three distinct overland routes to Constantinople. The forces from northern and central France and Flanders, under Hugh, count of Vermandois, Stephen, count of Blois, Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, and Robert II, count of Flanders, all followed a route through France and the Italian peninsula to Apulia. From the ports of Brindisi or Bari they sailed across the Adriatic Sea to the Byzantine port of Dyrrachion (mod. Durrës, Albania), and then marched through the Balkans to the Byzantine capital along the ancient road known as the Via Egnatia.4 Since Roman times there had been a relatively good network of roads in France and Italy, and the city of Rome with its huge number of shrine churches was an attractive staging point on the journeys of crusaders, who regarded themselves as pilgrims. However, this route involved a crossing of the Alps, which restricted the use of wheeled vehicles, and thus the amount of equipment and supplies that armies could carry. The Normans of southern Italy had experience of campaigns against Byzantine territory, and so the Adriatic crossing was the obvious route for the followers of Bohemund, especially since he could presumably organise shipping locally on favourable terms.5 Hiring ships may well have been more expensive for the northern French, whose longer journey meant that they already had a considerable outlay for victuals and other expenses before they reached Apulia. The Adriatic crossing was also potentially dangerous. In 1097 a ship from the army of Robert Curthose and Stephen of Blois capsized, resulting in the loss of some 400 men and many animals and treasure chests.6 Hugh of Vermandois was shipwrecked and cast ashore on Byzantine territory, having lost most of his baggage; one wonders whether his relatively passive role on the crusade may have been caused by a loss of equipment and funds that restricted his ability to reward his followers adequately.7 The route through Italy and across the Adriatic would also have been an obvious one for the army of Raymond of Saint-Gilles, count of Toulouse and marquis of Provence, which left in December 1096. However, instead of travelling south down the peninsula, Raymond and his followers marched due east through Lombardy and then turned south-east to traverse the rocky, inhospitable coast of Dalmatia until they eventually joined a reasonably well-maintained road system after reaching the Byzantine frontier. As is detailed in the account of the priest Raymond of Aguilers, they suffered considerable privation and delay, not least due to the hostility of the local population.8 No satisfactory explanation has yet been advanced why the count of Saint-Gilles chose such an unfamiliar and difficult route on which his forces suffered so much, rather than taking the better known and undoubtedly easier passage down the peninsula to the Apulian ports. John France makes the suggestion that Raymond did not travel to Bari because December was an unfavourable time for sea crossings, adding that a “sea passage for such a large army would have been costly and ships might not have been available”.9 One wonders, however, why Raymond departed so late; most of the other armies had left before this time, and it is possible that his departure had been delayed by difficulties in organising his diverse followers. Raymond’s forces were recruited from the widest area of any of the armies of the princes: Provence, Languedoc, Auvergne, Septimania and Catalonia; alongside the households and military retinues of lords and bishops it also contained numerous poorer pilgrims drawn from the non-military classes of the Occitan-speaking south, which was, after 4 Murray, “Roads, Bridges and Shipping in the Passage of Crusade Armies by Overland Routes to the Bosporus; Pryor, “Modelling Bohemond’s March to Thessalonike”, pp. 1-24. On the Via Egnatia, see Belke, “Roads and Travel in Macedonia and Thrace in the Middle and Late Byzantine Period”, pp. 74-79. 5 Theotokis, The Norman Campaigns in the Balkans. 6 Fulcheri Carnotensis Historia Hierosolymitana, pp.
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