ABSTRACT
The First Crusade seemed to contemporaries a wondrous event by which God bestowed the Holy Land on His faithful. The novelty of the event and the staggering scale of its achievement astonished contemporaries. The monastic chroniclers of the first quarter of the twelfth century sought to find a place for this phenomenon in the Christian revelation. They elaborated the notion, found in its simplest form in the eyewitness accounts, that the crusade was the army of God chosen by Him to do His work. In this view the crusaders enjoyed victory not merely because they fought well, but because by their spiritual exercises, and above all by their penance, they pleased God who favoured them with triumph. The crusade was a religious exercise, not merely a war. This feeling was reinforced by the failures of the expeditions of 1101-02 which underlined the success of 1095-99 and were attributed to God’s vengeance on the pride and luxury of the leaders. It is important to understand this view of events because the First Crusade became the model for all others. When Eugenius III (1145-53) issued his Bull for the Second Crusade he was consciously modelling it on the appeal of 1095. All subsequent appeals embodied this view of the events of 1095-99. But this ‘Idea of the Crusade’, important as it was, needs to be separated from the realities which the course of the campaign itself revealed.
