The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land Read Free Page A

religious art and sculpture of the punishments to be suffered by those deemed impure: wretched sinners strangled by demons; the damned herded into the fires of the underworld by hideous devils.
    Under these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that most medieval Latin Christians were obsessed with sinfulness, contamination and the impending afterlife. One extreme expression of the pressing desire to pursue an unsullied and perfected Christian life was monasticism–in which monks or nuns made vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and lived in ordered communities, dedicating themselves to God. By the eleventh century, one of the most popular forms of monastic life was that advocated by the Burgundian monastery of Cluny, in eastern France. The Cluniac movement grew to have some 2,000 dependent houses from England to Italy and enjoyed far-reaching influence, not least in helping to develop and advance the ideals of the Reform movement. Its power was reaching an apex in the 1090s, when Urban II, himself a former Cluniac monk, held the papal office.
    Of course, the demands of monasticism were beyond the means of most medieval Christians. And for ordinary laymen and women, the path to God was strewn with the dangers of transgression, because many seemingly unavoidable aspects of human existence–like pride, hunger, lust and violence–were deemed sinful. But a number of interconnected salvific ‘remedies’ were available (even though their theoretical and theological foundations had yet fully to be refined). Latins were encouraged to confess their offences to a priest, who would then allot them a suitable penance, the performance of which supposedly cancelled out the taint of sin. The most common of all penitential acts was prayer, but the giving of alms to the poor or donations to religious houses and the performance of a purgative devotional journey (or pilgrimage) were also popular. These meritorious deeds might also be undertaken outside the formal framework of penance, either as a sort of spiritual down payment, or in order to entreat God, or one of his saints, for aid.
    Fulk Nerra was operating within this established belief structure when he sought salvation in the early eleventh century. One remedy he pursued was the foundation of a new monastery within his county of Anjou, at Beaulieu. According to Fulk’s own testimony, he did this ‘so that monks would be joined together there and pray day and night for the redemption of [my] soul’. This idea of tapping into the spiritual energy produced in monasteries through lay patronage was still at work in 1091, when the southern French noble Gaston IV of Béarn decided to donate some property to the Cluniac house of St Foi, Morlaàs, in Gascony. Gaston was an avowed supporter of the Reform papacy, had campaigned against the Moors of Iberia in 1087 and would go on to become a crusader. The legal document recording his gift to St Foi stated that he acted for the benefit of his own soul, that of his wife and children, and in the hope that ‘God may help us in this world in all our needs, and in the future grant us eternal life’. In fact, by Gaston’s day most of western Christendom’s lay nobility enjoyed similar well-established connections with monasteries, and this had a marked effect upon the speed at which crusade enthusiasm spread across Europe after 1095. Partly, this was because the vow undertaken by knights committing to the holy war mirrored that taken by monks–a similarity that seemed to confirm the efficacy of fighting for God. More important still was the fact that the papacy, with its links to religious houses like Cluny, relied upon the monasteries of the Latin West to help spread and support the call to crusade.
    The second path to salvation embraced by Fulk Nerra was pilgrimage, and, given his multiple journeys to Jerusalem, he evidently found this particular form of penitential devotion especially compelling–later writing that the cleansing force