Critical Analysis of the First Crusade as a Response to the 11th Century Reform - Research Paper Example

? Critical Analysis of the First Crusade as a Response to the 11th Century Reform Critical Analysis of the First Crusade as a Response to the 11th Century Reform Introduction Though the common view asserts that the first Crusade was primarily the response of thousands of common people to Pope Urban’s (II) preaching, modern sociological studies show that it was essentially the product of the early reformist zeal of the 11th century as well as a response to the contemporary historical phenomena. An in-depth analysis of the historical background of the First Crusade will reveal that it was connected to the socio-political and religious strata of the Reformation in a number of ways. Therefore it was more of a sociopolitical phenomenon than a pure religious eruption among the common people. Indeed Pope Urban’s religious apparel often tends to shroud the true aspects of the First Crusade and the fact that Pope Urban himself was up to his own cause is often ignored. Indeed historians have interpreted the event of the First Crusade differently. The lack of any unique primary document on Pope Urban’s (II) motive for the crusade has laid the event open to interpretation. These interpretations revolve mainly around three points: a. the 11th century reform movement, b. the Seldjuk or Muslim threat to the Eastern Roman Orthodoxy, c. affirmation of Papacy on entire European Christendom. But an astute analysis of the event will reveal that all of these three causes had their, more or less, equal shares of influence on the First Crusade. Seldjuk’s Threat in the East as a Primary Cause of First Crusade Though there is a common tendency among the historians to underrate the Seljuk threat to the Eastern Christendom considering it as a secondary cause of the First Crusade and to view it as a mere excuse to move eastward, the Seljuk attack on the Byzantine Empire was no less important as a psychological motivation than other causes. In a concrete sense, it might be a mere excuse in Pope Urban’s political and religious scheme, but it was a demonic cause to usurp the commoners’ sacrificial emotion for the war in its essence. In fact, First Crusade was the product of the reincarnated commoners’ passion for a holy war against the infidel and the unfaithful that were commonly considered to be the Seldjuk during the late 11th century. The extremity of medieval religiosity to achieve ablution for sins, restored faith of the commoners in church, superiority of the Popes and the church’s victory of the Emperor- all together functioned to boost up the common people’s zeal to fight for the Holy Land and eastern Christendom against the invading Seldjuk. Even if Islam and Christianity coexist on the east bank of the Mediterranean Sea for more than three hundred years before the 1000s, as Thomas Asbridge’s claims, the increasing Seldjuk attacks on the Byzantine Empire, the defeat in Manzikert in 1077, the conquest of religiously important cities like Antioch and Nicaea, Turkish invasion and conquest of Anatolia, etc were severe blows on the 11th century Christendom that made the Western church reformers feel the pressure on the East and eventually provoked the superior papacy to successfully characterize the invaders as the infidel and unfaithful who must be challenged. In an article, Paul Crawford describes the crisis as following: “In 1071 the Turks met and crushed the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert, near Armenia. As a result the entire heartland of the Empire, in Asia Minor, lay open and defenseless” (Crawford 2). The atrocities of the Seldjuk are reflected in a “Letter of Alexius to Count Robert of Flanders”: The holy places they desecrate and destroy in numberless ways, and they threaten them with worse treatment…For almost the entire land from Jerusalem to Greece, and the whole of Greece with its upper regions…and now almost nothing remains except Constantinople. (Alexius) East-West Schism as one of the Causes of First Crusade Indeed for Pope Urban II there was no other option left except manipulating the commoners’ religious sentiment to urge them to move eastward in order to strengthen the relationship of the Western Union of Churches with the Eastern churches, as Cowdrey says, “Ever since he had become Pope in 1088, he had been anxious to improve relations with the Byzantine Emperor, Alexius Comnenus, and to promote the union of the Eastern and Western Churches” (279). Being crowned to Papacy shortly after the most significant conflict between Emperor Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII Pope Urban’s primary concern was to strengthen the hold on a unified Christendom in the papal grip. Since during the papal authority of Pope Gregory VII, the end of the Investiture Controversy endowed Papacy with the superiority to the Emperor, Pope Urban was susceptible more to the threat of East-West division than to the threat of Emperorship. Therefore the imperatives that Pope Urban had to face upon his appointment were to mitigate the threat of Eastern Orthodoxy and to further annihilate the threat from the Emperorship by contributing to the rise of a pro-papacy arm forces, as Crawford says in this regard, Urban probably had something a little more elaborate than that in mind--among other things, he probably hoped that an expedition to the East, carried out under papal leadership and comprised of noblemen from across Western Europe, would boost his position in the ongoing Investiture Controversy with the Holy Roman Empire. (Crawford 2) In this regard, he followed his predecessor, Pope Gregory who “called upon the military classes to take part in a ‘militia Christi’, or ‘militia sancti Petri’, in which they placed themselves at the service of the vicar of St Peter” (Cowdrey 179). But he did not repeat Gregory’s mistake. Indeed Gregory failed to perceive the true nature of papacy and the dynamics of commoners’ reverence for the religious order. The commoners like military classes were not ready to take the responsibility that apostolic hierarchy, as Gregory VII claimed, placed upon their shoulders. Consequently he failed “to mobilize them to help the Eastern Churches in face of Seldjuk attacks; and he expressed the hope that those who took part might, perhaps, also go on and reach the Holy Sepulcher” (Cowdrey 180). In contradiction, Pope Urban’s success in motivating the commoners to be armed against Muslims lies in the fact that he had been able to associate the religious emotions with the fight for Holy Land. Breaking with the “age-long reluctance of Christians fully to recognize the licitness of the procession of arms”, Pope Urban was able to hide the military enterprise under the cloak of armed pilgrimage. Church Reform and the Birth of First Crusade Monastic revival and church reform have some huge impacts on the regeneration of the First Crusade. Though the Seldjuk’s attack on Byzantine Empire provides the Popes of the 11th century with a cause to redirect the commoners’ attention to the East, the concept of a Christian War or a Holy War against the unfaithful or the pagans was an unprecedented doctrine of the reformed Papacy. It was unprecedented in the sense that Christendom has not seen such a warring religiosity or it does not have any direct evidence of the manipulation of Christianity in arming its followers. Prior to the Monastic Revival in the 1000s, the Church was suffering from some grave doctrinal problems: a. in contradiction with the religious doctrine, the priests were often found to marry and to have families, b. the practice of Simony that allowed church personnel to sell their position, and c. the lay investiture controversy. The settlement of these issues eventually restored the common people’s faith in the existing religious system while bestowing enormous power on them to contend with the monarchs, as Pascovici says comments, In a very religious world as the medieval society, in which - at least in theory - the only purpose of life was seeking absolution for sins, and this way securing a place in heaven, the influence - essentially spiritual - of the successor of St. Peter went beyond the restrictive limits of faith and religion….in the XI-th century Papacy was, probably, stronger than ever. (Pascovici) Pope Leo IX, a staunch supporter of the Benedictine Monastery at Cluny largely prepared this plot for the following Pope, Gregory VII, to go into conflict with Emperor Henry IV in term of supremacy. Consequently the end of Gregory’s conflict with the Emperor put the Church at a position superior to monarchy. Church in Need of Armed Devotees and the Introduction of Crusade Indeed the devotee with arms was a call of the time. Papal conflict with monarchy as well as the concurrent reorganization of the church in the pattern of a state direly felt the need of a force that could mitigate the threat of the state’s military power. Since it was difficult to build such a pro-church armed force on any Christian doctrine, Pope Gregory IV failed to include the military classes in his ‘militia Christi’, or ‘militia sancti Petri’. Yet Pope Urban II successfully usurped the commoners’ passion for a Holy War against the infidel or the unfaithful. The abstraction of the infidel or the unfaithful had often been used to refer to any party, either the noncompliant Monarch or any non-Christian force, that was against the interest of the Church and the religious doctrine, since the doctrinal infidel or unfaithful do not have any particular objective-point to be in focus (Siberry 59-62). Indeed the concept of “Holy War” against any internal threatening power like Monarchy preceded the concept of ‘holy war’, against the external forces like the Seldjuk in the east, which culminated in the term “Crusade”. Moreover, with the declination of the royal power, the task of defending the Christendom from any internal and external threat increasingly rested upon the knights who were motivated with Pope Urban’s idea of ‘armed pilgrimage’, as Cowdrey says in this regard, “After the waning of royal power….it was upon the knights that the task of defending Christian peoples by force of arms against their internal and external foes increasingly rested; in recognition of this, the Church began to bless their weapons of warfare…..the notion of the holy war against the infidel gained currency” (Cowdrey 180). Instead of building up a church-controlled military force in the face of doctrinal difficulties, Pope Urban’s easiest option was to motivate the armed people like knights with religiosity of armed pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Yet some critics argue that regaining Jerusalem the Holy Land was not Pope Urban’s primary objective. Rather the Holy Land was the face value of a religious goal to which the armed people could be redirected. At the same time, it was the face value of the Church’s goal, reaching which could help Pope Urban to achieve other ends as well. Conclusion Though Pope Urban responds to the call of emperor Alexius, their motives were completely different from each other. Whereas on Alexius’s side, the call for reinforcement was the diplomatic part of his emperorship, for Pope Urban II, Alexius’s call for reinforcement against the Seljuk was not a mere appeal for help to serve the cause of Christendom; rather it was an emperor’s request which was, in some way, an opportunity to reinforce the bond between the West and the East Schisms, and to which responding might prove the church’s fatherhood over the state as well as the Roman Catholic Church. Therefore in spite of the growing antagonism between the church and the state, Pope Urban was greatly inspired by the church’s cause, not by a pure religious zeal to retrieve the Holy Sepulture, as Paul Crawford refers to Pope Urban’s (II) multifold motives for preaching the First Crusade in the following: “It is hard to know exactly what Urban had in mind when he called for expeditions to the East….Alexius had called for large contingents of mercenaries….to take service in the Byzantine Army. Urban probably had something a little more elaborate than that in mind.” (Crawford 2) Works Cited Cowdrey, H. E. J. “Pope Urban II’s Preaching of the First Crusade”, History. London: Historical Association, 55(1970), 177-188. Crawford, Paul. “Crusades: Political and Military Background”, 3 April, 2011. Available at Comnesius, Alexius. “Letter of Alexius to Count Robert of Flanders”, 3 April, 2011. Available at Pascovici, Epurescu. “Theological Arguments in the Competition Between Empire and Papcy for Supremacy in the Christian Commonwealth.” The Erasmus Journal. 02 March, 2009. http://erasmus.ong.ro/art2.htm Siberry. Elizabeth. Criticism of Crusading. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985, 200 Read More