CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE

Author(s): JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

Source: History , 1980, Vol. 65, No. 214 (1980), pp. 177-192
Published by: Wiley

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 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE*

JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH

Royal Holloway College, London

In his encyclical Quantum praedecessores of Decemb

Eugenius III wrote of those who had answered the call to t
that they had been 'fired by the ardour of charity'.1 In an
the late 1180s Peter of Blois argued that Christians would
fired by the zeal of charity, they fight fiercely those who b
Christ, pollute the sanctuary of the Lord and in their pride and
the glory of our Redeemer.2

In the 1260s the French poet Rutebeuf, lamenting the fai

trymen to move themselves to recapture Jerusalem, exclaime
of charity is cold in every Christian heart' .3 These writers u
ical word Caritas, charitei for Christian love, heightened it
Christian way with the words 'fired,' 'fire', and linked it
Since love has always been held to be fundamental to all C
including the ethics of violence, it is worth asking how repre
were of the apologists for the crusading movement. I hope to
idea of the crusader expressing love through his particip
armed force was an element in the thinking of senior chu
central Middle Ages. An understanding of this can he
crusades in the context of the spiritual reawakening of wester
accompanied the eleventh-century reform movement. Chr
ever, was presented to the faithful in a way that they wo
rather than in the form that would have reflected the com
relationship between violence and charity as understood
and canon lawyers. My discussion is limited to the justifica
to the East, although crusaders were not by any means onl
expeditions launched to recover or aid the Holy Land
paigned in Spain, along the shores of the Baltic and even in
western Europe.4
Christian charity encompasses love of God and love of o
and both these expressions of love were touched on by ap
crusades: in September 1096 Pope Urban II promised the
those Bolognese who joined the First Crusade, 'seeing
committed their property and their persons out of love o
neighbour' ;5 and St Bernard, writing in the 1140s of new

•This is the text of an inaugural lecture delivered at The Royal Hollow

sity of London, 10 May 1979.
1 Eugenius III, 'Epistolae et privilegia', Patrologia Latina clxxx, col. 10
2 Peter of Blois, 'Epistolae', PL ccvii, col. 533.
3 Rutebeuf, Onze poimes concemant la croisade, eds. J. Bastin and E.
p. 63.
4 See J. S. C. Riley-Smith, What were the crusades? (London, 1977), pp. 13-15.
5 Epistolae et chartae ad historiam primi belli sacri spectantes, ed. H. Hagenmeyer
(Innsbruck, 1901), p. 137. See also Papsturkunden in Spanien. I. Katalonien, ed. P. Kehr
(Berlin, 1926), p. 287; Epistolae et chartae, ed. Hagenmeyer, pp. 178-9 (a letter from Pope
Paschal II).

177

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 178 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
tones in the East, asked
If we harden our hearts and pay little attention .. .where is our love for
where is our love for our neighbour?6

It was believed that crusaders particularly expressed their love of Go

the way they became literally followers of Christ. From the first, they w
treated as 'soldiers of Christ', who had joined an expedition out of lov
him. And the taking of the cross, the sewing of a cross on a man's garme
as a symbol of his vow to crusade, was seen as a response to Ch
statement: 'Whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after me can
be my disciple' (Luke xiv, 27). It is notoriously difficult to establish ex
what occurred at the Council of Clermont in November 1095, but it
possible that Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade on the basis of
text: the author of one of the accounts of the council mentioned that he ha
done so when he ordered the crusaders to sew crosses on their clothes;7 an
another witness also referred to it, in a narrative in which Urban was ma
to remind his audience of Christ's words,
He that loveth father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. A
everyone that hath left house or father or mother or wife or children or land
my name's sake shall receive an hundredfold and shall possess life everlast
(Matt, x, 37, xix, 29)."

There is evidence that, whatever Urban actually said, a chord was stru
the hearts of those who responded to him. The anonymous author of
Gesta Francorum, who took part in the First Crusade, opened his narr
with a moving reference to the subject.
When already that time drew nigh, to which the Lord Jesus draws the attent
of his people every day, especially in the Gospel in which he says, 'If any m
will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow
(Matt, xvi, 24), there was a great stirring throughout the whole region of Gau
that if anyone, with a pure heart and mind, seriously wanted to follow God a
faithfully wished to bear the cross after him, he could make no delay in spee
taking the road to the Holy Sepulchre.'
The German Ekkehard of Aura, who was himself in the East in 1101
compared the crusaders to Simon of Cyrene,10 and the French King's
lain Odo of Deuil began his account of the Second Crusade with the wo

6 Bernard of Clairvaux, 'Epistolae', PL clxxxii, no. 364.

7 Baldric of Dol, 'Historia Jerusalem', Receuil des Historiens Occidentaux des croisad
p. 16. See also Epistolae et chartae, ed. Hagenmayer, p. 164; Ekkehard of Aura, 'Hiero
ita', RHC Oc., v, p. 15. Quotations from scripture are given in the 'Douai' translation.
8 Robert of Rheims, 'Historia Iherosolimitana', RHC Oc., iii, p. 728; and see also p. 8
Fulcher of Chartres, Historia Hierosolymitana, ed. H. Hagenmeyer (Heidelberg, 1913)
115-16, 163; Gaufridus, 'Dictamen', RHC Oc., v, p. 349; Henry of Huntingdon, 'D
tione Antiochiae a christianis', RHC Oc., v. p. 374. For the case put another way ab
century later, see Cardinal Henry of Albano, 'Tractatus de peregrinante civitate dei', PL c
col. 361.
9 Gesta Francorum, ed. R. Hill (London, 1962), p. 1. See P. Rousset, Les origines et les
caractires de la premiere croisade (Neuchätel, 1945), p. 99.
10 Ekkehard of Aura, p. 39, and see also p. 34, 'Historia de translatione', RHC Oc., v, p.
257.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 179
In the year of the Incarnation of the Word 1146, at East
glorious Louis,.. . King of the Franks and Duke of the Aq
took to follow Christ by bearing his cross in order to be wor

An anonymous twelfth-century poet wrote:

'You who love with true love
Awake ! Do not sleep !
The lark brings us day
And tells us in this hideaway
That the day of peace has come
That God, by his very great kindness,
Will give to those who for love of him
Take the cross and on account of what they do
Suffer pain night and day
So that he will see who truly loves him.'"

This seam of devotion was richly worked by authority. In c.1144, in a

bull that was often to be reissued, Pope Celestine II wrote that the Temp
lars,
new Maccabees in this time of Grace, renouncing earthly desires and posses
sions, bearing his cross, are followers of Christ.13

And the image of the crusader denying himself and actually taking up
Christ's cross was particularly strongly expressed at the turn of the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries by Pope Innocent III,14 to whom God was a
benefactor owed by all profound and unrepayable debts of gratitude.
Who would refuse to die for him, who was made for us obedient unto death, a
death indeed on the cross?15

If God underwent death for man, ought man to question dying for God?16

Innocent expatiated on the relationship between the crusader and the cross
in his great encyclical Quia maior, which launched the Fifth Crusade.
We summon on behalf of him who when dying cried in a great voice on the cross,
made obedient to God his father unto death on the cross, crying so that he
should save us from the eternal crucifixion of death; who, indeed, for his own
sake summoned us and said, 'If any man will come after me, let him deny himself
and take up his cross and follow me' (Matt, xvi, 24). And in this clearly he said,
'Whoever wishes to follow me to the crown should also follow me to the battle,
which is now proposed to all as a test'.17

11 Odo of Deuil, De profectione Ludovici VII in orientem, ed. V. G. Berry (New York,
1948), p. 6.
12 Les chansons de croisade, eds. J. Bedier and P. Aubry (Paris, 1909), p. 20. F. -W.
Wentzlaff-Eggebert Kreuzzugsdichtung des Mittelalters (Berlin, 1960), p. 325 has suggested
that vernacular poetry reflected the themes of crusade preaching. I am inclined to think that
the traffic of ideas was two-way.
13 Papsturkunden fir Templer und Johanniter, ed. R. Hiestand (Göttingen, 1972), no. 8.
14 Innocent III, Register, eds. O. Hageneder and A. Haidacher, i (Graz, 1964), nos. 13,302,
407; Innocent III, 'Opera omnia', PL ccxv, cols. 1339-40; Innocent III, 'Quia major", ed. G.
Tangl, Studien zum Register Innocenz' III (Weimar, 1929), pp. 88-9; Roger of Howden,
Chronica, ed. W. Stubbs (London, 1868-71), iv, pp. 165-6.
15 Innocent III, Register, no. 302; see also Innocent III, 'Opera', ccxv, col. 1339.
16 Roger of Howden, iv, p. 72. This echoes Urban II at Clermont as reported by Baldric of
Dol, p. 15.
17 Innocent III, 'Quia maior\ ed. Tangl, p. 88.

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 180 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
In a letter of 1208 to Leopold of Austria, Innocent had also stressed
insignificance of the crusader's action when compared to that of Chris
You receive a soft and gentle cross; he bore one that was sharp and hard. Y
wear it superficially on your clothing; he endured it really in his flesh. You s
on yours with linen and silk threads; he was nailed to his with iron and h
nails.18

His pontificate marks a climax in the use of this imagery, but the lov
God expressed by crusaders may still have been a popular theme
thirteenth-century sermons. The Ordinacio de predicacione S. cruris
Anglia of c. 1216, obviously following Innocent, referred to those ente
the service of the cross as observing the commandment to love God with a
one's heart," and Cardinal Odo of Chäteauroux, who in 1245 was give
the task of preaching and organizing a new crusade from France, devot
homily to the subject. Preaching on the text, 'Amen I say to you tha
you who have followed me ... shall also sit (alongside)... when the Son
Man shall sit on the seat of his majesty' (Matt, xix, 28), Odo enjoined
audience to forsake everything for the love of God: true conversion co
only come about through love of God rather than of earthly things a
man could love his neighbour only as an expression of his love of God
went on to tell his listeners that

It is a clear sign that a man burns with love of God and zeal for God when he
leaves country, possessions, house, children and wife, going overseas in the
service of Jesus Christ... Whoever wishes to take and have Christ ought to
follow him; to follow him to death.20

There can be little doubt that the audiences addressed by popes and
preachers saw the expression of love for God in terms that were real to
them, above all in the light of their relationship with and the loyalty they
owed to secular rulers. And these rulers were also feudal lords. At the time
the ties between vassals and their lords were regarded as being so close and
were held in so emotional a way that feudal terminology was used by the
poets of courtly love to describe the devotion of the perfect lover to his
lady.21 To the crusaders, Christ was a king and lord who had lost his
inheritance, his haereditas or Patrimonium, to the pagans: indeed the image
of the Holy Land as Christ's inheritance, which was an old one, was used in
one of the accounts of Pope Urban IPs speech at Clermont22 and often
thereafter; even as late as 1274, Pope Gregory X wrote in his Con
stitutiones pro zelo fidei of the feelings of charity that should be aroused in
Christian hearts at its loss.23 It was the duty of Christ's subjects to fight for
the recovery or in the defence of Christ's heritage as they would for the

18 Innocent III, 'Opera', ccxv, col. 1340.

" Quinti Belli Sacri Scriptores minores, ed. R. Röhricht (Geneva, 1879), p. 4.
20 Odo of Chäteauroux, 'Sermones de tempore et Sanctis', ed. J. B. Pitra, Analecta novis
sima (Paris, 1888), ii, pp. 310-15. For an even later example, see Rutebeuf, pp. 121, 128.
21 M. Bloch, Feudal Society (London, 1961), p. 233.
22 Guibert of Nogent, 'Historia quae dicitur Gesta Dei per Francos', RHC Oc., iv, p. 137.
See also Baldric of Dol, p. 14.
23 'Constitutiones pro zelo fidei', ed. H. Finke, Konzilienstudien zur Geschichte des 13.
Jahrhunderts (Münster, 1891), p. 113.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 181
domains of their own lords, and the anonymous twelfth-c
whose crusade song I have already quoted, expressed a
when he wrote that 'he who abandons his lord in need deserves to be
condemned'24.
Faced by a world that saw things in such concrete terms the popes tended
to express themselves on this matter in a cloudy way, probably because
theologians could not bring themselves to use too explicitly the feudal
relationship, with its notions of contract and reciprocal obligations, as a
means of describing man's relationship to God. Carl Erdmann has drawn
attention to the ambiguous way in which, as he turned for help to the
feudal knighthood in the 1070s and 1080s, Pope Gregory VII used the
feudal terms miles, fidelis and servitium,25 and the same was true of Greg
ory's successors. But popes could also on occasion specifically use the
images of the everyday world to bring home to people what was meant by
loving God. Innocent III, for instance, was fond of referring in this way to
Christ as a king.
Consider most dear sons, consider carefully that if any temporal king was
thrown out of his domain and perhaps captured, would he not, when he was
restored to his pristine liberty and the time had come for dispensing justice, look
on his vassals as unfaithful and traitors against the crown and guilty of Use
majesti unless they had committed not only their property but also their persons
to the task of freeing him? ... And similarly will not Jesus Christ, the king of
kings and lord of lords, whose servant you cannot deny being, who joined your
soul to your body, who redeemed you with his precious blood, who conceded to
you the kingdom, who enables you to live and move and gave you all the good
things you have... condemn you for the vice of ingratitude and, as it were, the
crime of infidelity if you neglect to help him?26

At about the same time the great preacher James of Vitry developed what
Innocent was saying in one of his sermons, although he was careful to point
out that man's relationship with Christ was not a feudal one.
When a lord is afflicted by the loss of his patrimony he wishes to prove his
friends and find out if his vassals are faithful. Whoever holds a fief of a liege lord
is worthily deprived of it if he deserts him when he is engaged in battle and loses
his inheritance. You hold your body and soul and whatever you have from the
Supreme Emperor and today he has had you called upon to help him in battle;
and though you are not bound by feudal law, he offers you so many and such
good things, the remission of all sins, whatever the penalty or guilt, and above all
eternal life, that you ought at once to hurry to him.27

Later in the century, Odo of Chäteauroux, in the sermon to which I have

already referred, asked his audience a question coloured by the aspirations
and feelings of the world in which they lived. 'What is loving God if it is not
desiring his honour and glory? '29 Churchmen, therefore, could portray the

24 Les chansons de croisade, ed. Bedier and Aubry, p. 20.

25 C. Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade (Princeton, 1977), pp. 201-10. See also I.
S. Robinson, 'Gregory VII and the soldiers of Christ,' History lviii (1973), pp. 177-84.
26 Innocent III, 'Opera', ccxiv, cols. 809-10; and see ccxv, col. 1500; Innocent III, 'Quia
maior\ ed. Tangl, pp. 89-90.
27 James of Vitry, 'Sermones vulgares', ed. J. Β. Pitra, Analecta novissima (Paris, 1888), ii,
p. 422.
28 Odo of Chäteauroux, 'Sermones', pp. 310-11.

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 182 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
crusader's love of God in terms that laymen could recogniz
analogous to their regard for their earthly superiors. But the p
of theology in everyday terms is revealed even more strikingly in
ssion of the idea of love for fellow-men.
The belief that crusading expressed love of one's neighbour as well as
love of God also dated from the First Crusade. It has long been accepted
that an important element in Pope Urban's thinking when he preached the
cross was the opportunity he saw of bringing fraternal aid to Christians in
the East, oppressed by or in danger from the Muslims.29 Baldric of Dol, in
his account of the sermon at Clermont, laid emphasis on the supposed
suffering of the Eastern Christians and made Urban make a typical distinc
tion between the barbarisms of internal strife in France and the virtues of
helping the East.
It is dreadful, brothers, dreadful, for you to raise thieving hands against Christ
ians. It is much less evil to brandish the sword against the Muslims; in a particu
lar case it is good, because it is charity to lay down lives for friends.30

The development of the idea of violence expressing fraternal love can be

illustrated from the sources for the history of the Military Orders, which
were linked closely to the crusades, even if the brothers in them were not
technically crusaders.31 The founding of the Order of Knights Templar is a
remarkable event in the history of the religious life. One of the chief
attractions of the First Crusade, which followed closely on a change in the
Church's thinking on the röle of laymen,32 was that now at last the laity had
a task to perform, pleasing to God, for which they were especially equip
ped and which professed religious were not permitted to undertake. In a
well-known passage in his history of the crusade, Guibert of Nogent wel
comed the fact that now laymen could attain salvation through works
without entering a monastery;33 and the sudden realization that the leading
crusader Tancred, torn between 'the Gospel and the world', had of the new
röle for Christian warriors, and his enthusiastic response to it,34 is evidence
for the force of this idea, as is the emphasis on the 'new knight' still to be
found in the writings of St. Bernard half a century later.35 But so dominant
was the appeal of the religious life and so superior was its status that, within
20 years of the capture of Jerusalem, professed religious were themselves
taking on the röle of warriors, usurping the special function of the laity. All
contemporaries were struck by the fact that a new kind of religious life had
come into being, in which the brothers could hardly have acted in a more
secular way. The compilers of the Templar rule wrote that

29 Erdmann, op. cit., pp. 349-50, 355 ff.

30 Baldric of Dol, pp. 13-15. See also Hugh of S. Maria, 'Itineris Hierosolymitani Compen
dium', RHC Oc., v, p. 363; Narratio Floriacensis', RHC Oc., v, p. 357.
31 See Riley-Smith, What were the [Link]. 70-1.
32 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 169-92.
33 Guibert of Nogent, p. 124. See also Pope Urban ΙΓβ letter to Vallombrosa, 'Papsiurkun
den in Florenz', ed. W. Wiederhold, Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu
Göttingen, Phil. -Hist. Kl. (1901), p. 313.
34 Radulph of Caen, 'Gesta Tancredi', RHC Oc., iii, p. 606. See Erdmann, op. cit., pp.
336-7.
35 Rousset, op. cit., pp. 154-5, 159-63.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 183
We believe that by divine providence this new kind of re
founded by you in the holy places, so that you combine s
religious life and in this way the order can fight with arms an
smite the enemy.'6

The association in the Templar life of both religious and

was a point also made in St. Bernard's treatise, the
militiae,37 and in the early thirteenth century, by which t
lers had also taken on military responsibilities and the S
Military Orders had been founded, James of Vitry wrote o
concerning whom the Lord says, Ί will encompass my ho
serve me in war, going and returning'(Zac. ix, 8). Going in t
ing in time of peace; going by means of action, returning by
tion; going in war to fight, returning in peace to repose and
so that they are like soldiers in battle and like monks in conv

The appearance of religious dedicated to war was boun

troversy. In the 1160s and 1170s Pope Alexander III wa
transformation of the Hospital of St. John into a Milita
early as the 1120s someone, perhaps Hugh of St. Victor
the Templars' behalf critics who maintained that a mon
defend with arms the faith and Christendom was 'illicit an
that it would lead the Templars into sin because war w
hatred and greed.
I say to you that you do not hate, which is unjust, because y
but iniquity. Again I say, you are not greedy, which is un
acquire that which should justly be taken on account of sin
justly yours because of the work that you do.40

But the real reply was given in 1139 by Pope Innocent

optimum, the papal charter for the Templars, and it wa
attention to the love shown by the brothers.
As true Israelites and most instructed fighters in divine bat
flames of divine charity, you carry out in deeds the words
ter love than this no man hath, that a man lay down his life f

In 1155 this was re-emphasized by Pope Adrian IV in Sic

in phrases that were often to be repeated in later papal
The knights of the Temple ... are especially called to the ser

34 Die ursprüngliche Templerregel, ed. G. Schnürer (Freiburg, 1903

31 Bernard of Clairvaux, 'De laude novae militiae', Opera, ed. J. Le
1963), pp. 219-22.
31 James of Vitry, 'Sermones', p. 406.
39 J. S. C. Riley-Smith, The Knights of St. John in Jerusalem and Cy
76.

40*Un document sur les ddbuts des Templiers', ed. J. Leclercq, Revu
que, Iii (1957), p. 87. For the authorship see Μ. L. Bulst-Thiele, S
Tempil Hierosolymitani Magistri (Göttingen, 1974), p. 23.
41 Papsturkunden fur Templer und Johanniter, ed. Hiestand, no.
Cartulaire giniral de Vordre de Temple 11197-1150, ed. Marquis d'Alb
4. 'Such eminence of charity and grace of praiseworthy honesty are see
devoted knights of the Temple of Jerusalem'.

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184 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
tent God and are numbered with the heavenly host. This is indicate
reverend habit and is shown by the sign of the cross of Our Lord w
wear on their bodies. Indeed they have been founded for this purpose,
do not fear to lay down their lives for their brothers.42

The same attitude was to be found with regard to the Hospitall

took on military duties. The first reference to a military win
statutes treated it as an extension of their charitable work.

These eleemosynary grants have properly been established in the holy Order of
the Hospital, except for the brethren-at-arms, whom the holy Order keeps
honourably, and many other bounties.43

And in 1191 Pope Celestine III referred to the Hospitallers, fighting the
infidel and looking after the poor, as 'the children of peace and love...
servants in Christ of the holy poor of Jerusalem and of all lands every
where.'44 In this respect the Military Orders sprang from the same stem as
did the other new orders of the time, demonstrating in their own fashion
the concern for charitable work and the care of one's neighbour that so
many of them showed.
The idea that crusading expressed fraternal love was, of course, also put
forward in encyclicals directed chiefly at the laity. In 1169, Pope Alexan
der III, responding to a request for aid from the Kingdom of Jerusalem,
published a major appeal with the widest possible circulation. He began it
by-stressing the röle of love.
Among all the means that Divine Wisdom has provided for the exercise of
charity in the midst of temporal affairs, it would be difficult to find a field of
action in which this charity could be expressed with more glory with regard to
virtue, and with better results with regard to rewards, than in aid to relieve the
needs of the Church in the East and the faithful of Christ, by defending them
against the onslaught of the pagans, so that both the cult of the Divine Name
does not fail and the virtue of brotherhood shines forth praiseworthily.45

In 1215 Innocent III returned to the theme of love in Quia maior, this time
love for Christians in territories occupied by the Muslims.
How does a man love according to divine precept his neighbour as himself when,
knowing that his Christian brothers in faith and in name are held by the
perfidious Muslims in strict confinement and weighed down by the yoke of
heaviest servitude, he cannot devote himself to the efficacious work of liberating
them? In this he transgresses the command of that natural law which the Lord
declared in the Gospel. 'All things... whatsoever you would that men should do
to you, do you also to them.' (Matt, vii, 12). Is it by chance that you do not know
that among them (the Muslims) many thousands of Christians are held in ser
vitude and in jail, tortured with innumerable torments?46

43 Papsturkunden fir Templer und Johanniter, ed. Hiestand, no. 27; and see nos. 38, 54, 75,
93.
43 Cartulaire giniral de Vordre des Hospitaliers de St. Jean de Jirusalem (1100-1310), ed. J.
Delaville Le Roulx (Paris, 1894-1906), no. 627.
"Ibid., no. 911.
43 Alexander III, 'Opera omnia', PL cc, col. 599. See also cols. 601-2. For the background,
see R. C. Smail, 'Latin Syria and the West, 1149-1187', Transactions of the Royal Historical
Society, 5th ser., xix (1969), pp. 13-4.
46 Innocent III, 'Quia maior', ed. Tangl, p. 90.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 185
Now, the striking thing about these references to love is
one-dimensional and therefore not truly Christian. Love of
always treated in crusade propaganda in terms of frat
fellow-Christians, never in terms of love shown for enem
friends. And this one-sided view of love did not properly re
teaching in the past or at the time. One has only to read th
Peter Lombard to find a contemporary theologian putting
ers a more fully rounded view. By neighbour, Peter stress
mean all mankind. Certainly, he argued, fellow-Christians o
to be loved and, in that we cannot show equal love to all, the
first, since they are members of the same body and recog
Father. It is, moreover, sufficient to love enemies straightforw
to hate them; in this respect love of enemies comes las
expressions of love. But he emphasized that enemies must
our love for all men and he quoted St. Augustine to the ef
more virtuous to love enemies than friends.47
The Christian tradition on violence, moreover, the foundations of which
had been laid by the Fathers, naturally stressed the röle of love, for
enemies as well as friends, in the use of force. St. Augustine had treated the
matter comprehensively. To him, just violence required right intention on
the part of the imposers of force as an essential pre-requisite. In his treatise
on the Sermon on the Mount, containing one of his earliest essays on the
subject, he stressed that the intention behind punishment designed for the
purpose of correction had to be to make the offender happy; it had to be
imposed out of love by those who had in this matter overcome hatred.
Christ had denounced hatred seeking vengeance, not love desiring to cor
rect the object of love. Further, many noble and saintly men had in the past
inflicted death as a punishment for sins. Those put to death had suffered no
injury from it; rather, they were already being injured by their sins and
their state might have become far worse had they been allowed to live.
Augustine referred here to the prophet Elijah killing on authority from
God and he drew attention to St. Paul delivering a sinner over to Satan for
the destruction of his flesh, so that his spirit might be saved (I Cor. v, 5). He
admitted that he did not really understand the meaning of the words St.
Paul had used, but he maintained that it was clear that, whatever St. Paul
did mean, he intended to save a soul; in other words that this was a
punishment imposed through love.48 To Augustine, the intentions of those
who authorized violence and of those who participated in it had to be in
favour of justice, a virtue which for him assigned to everyone his due,
working through love of God and love of one's neighbour.49 It being often
more loving to use force than indulgence, it followed that just violence had
love for those on whom it was meted out as the mainspring of action; and
this kind of motivation would mean that one would be careful to employ
only such violence as was necessary.50 Augustine often wrote of the way
47 Peter Lombard, 'Sententiarum libri quatuor" (PL cxcii), iii, D. xxvii, c. 4, DD. xxix-xxx.
48'De sermone Domini in monte' (Corpus Chrisüanorum. Series Latina, xxxv), I, xx §§
63-5.
49 For instance, see 'De civitate Dei' (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, xlvii-xlviii),
XIX, vii, xxi.
5°'Epistolae' (PL xxxiii), no. xciii § 8. But cf. R. S. Hartigan, 'St Augustine on war and
killing: the problem of the innocent', Journal of the History of Ideas, xxvii (1966), pp. 201-4.

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 186 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
parents could express their love for their children by correcting them,5
he also referred to the violence sometimes needed in healing the sick
rescuing men from physical danger against their wills.52 The scriptures
combed by him for references to acts or expressions of violence, mo
by love, perpetrated by Moses and Elijah,53 by St. Paul,54 by a lovin
and even by a loving Christ, as when he scourged the stall-keepers
the Temple and blinded St. Paul on the road to Damascus.55 All of
provided a basis for his justification of the repression of heresy.
right, and a sign of love and mercy in imitation of Christ, for a
Church, in collaboration with a loving state, to force heretics from the
of error for their own benefit, compelling them to goodness in the
way as the host at the wedding feast in Christ's parable had sent o
servant to force those in the high-ways to come to the banquet.56
Augustine's thought was very influential in the central Middle Ag
most of the criteria for Christian violence crusading ideas followed his.
they did not on love. One explanation might be that since Aug
devoted most of his writing on violence to justifying the suppressi
heresy—and made little distinction between force associated with
against external foes and force used internally to repress heretics
approach was one that could lead more naturally to an emphasis on
a disciplinary force, for which parallels could be drawn with family
But, in fact, writers at the time of the crusades also treated violence aga
external and internal injurers under the same general heading. And
they did not distinguish the forms of violence, at least as far
justification of force went, one would not expect crusade propagand
have done so either.
It might also be pointed out that certain premisses in Augustine's
thought were alien to the theology of the central Middle Ages and that this
might explain why the justifiers of crusading violence did not follow him on
the issue of love of enemies as well as friends. In particular, he had a very
negative attitude towards free will, and this led him to have a pessimistic
view of the ability of most of mankind truly to act through love. The fact
was that those whom love restrained were less numerous in this world than
those who had to be restrained by terror. Fear, instilled by the penal laws
of the Roman emperors against heresy, forced men to truth, and many
were brought to the true faith and to salvation who otherwise would not
have known it. Moreover, fear gave the faint-hearted the excuse to break
with heresy.57 Augustine could, therefore, compare just and unjust perse

5"De sermone Domini in monte', I, xix § 63; 'In epistolam Joannis ad Parthos tractatus'
(PL xxxv), VII § 8; 'De civitate Dei', XIX, xvi; 'Epistolae', nos. lxxxix § 2, cxxxviii § 14, cliii §
17, clxxxv §§ 7, 21.
52 'Epistolae', nos. xciii §§ 2-4, clxxxv §§ 7, 33-4.
53 'De sermone Domini in monte', I, xx § 64; 'Contra Faustum Manichaeum' (PL xlii), xxii
§ 79; 'Contra litteras Petiliani' (PL xliii), II, lxxxvi § 191.
54 'De sermone Domini in monte', I, xix § 65; 'Contra Faustum Manichaeum', xxii § 79;
'Contra epistolam Parmeniani' (PL xliii), iii § 3; 'Contra litteras Petiliani', II, xx § 44.
55 'Contra litteras Petiliani', II, xix § 43, lxxx § 177; 'Epistolae', nos. xciii § 7, clxxxv § 22.
56 'Epistolae', nos. lxxxix § 6, xciii §§ 1, 6, c §§ 13, 16, cxxxviii §§ 14-15, clxxiii §§ 3-10,
clxxxv §§ 23-4,46; 'Contra Gaudentium' (PL xliii), i § 28; 'Sermones' (PL xxxviii), no. cxii §
8.
37 'Epistolae', nos. xciii §§ 1-3,17-19, cliii § 16, clxxiii § 2, clxxxv §§ 7,13-15,21,29,32.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 187
cution: the Roman state, in alliance with the Church, impose
cution, while the pagan emperors and the wicked persecuted
argued that Christ had promised blessedness for those pers
tice's sake, but had said nothing about those persecuted fo
injustice. Nobody became a martyr merely by suffering for
not the penalty that makes a martyr, but the cause' .59 So the e
was the justice of the cause for which one suffered, and an
tine used was that of Christ, unjustly crucified, hanging on
ween the two thieves, who had been justly condemned.60 Playin
will it was, of course, fairly easy to justify violence in terms o
to those incapable of motivation to good except by fear. But
easy to do so if one shared the highly developed notions of
were common in the central Middle Ages, since coercio
limited the operation of free will in the coerced. In a dictum
tant Causa XXIII on violence, the canonist Gratian, writ
showed anxiety about this matter.61
Augustine's approach to free will, moreover, resulted in an
to the salvific value of works.62 In fact he did not really be
special merit attached to the participants in his violence. H
Abraham had shown 'praiseworthy' compliance with Go
sacrifice Isaac,63 but he seems to have regarded even acts
God's specific command—a category of force to which h
attention—as being merely blameless.64 One would be q
refuse such an order, but only doing one's duty if one obeyed i
man who owed obedience to the giver of a command, whethe
or God's minister, did not himself kill: he was an instrument in
the authorizer.65 To the apologists for the crusades, on th
merit, which of course stemmed from the dominant positi
concept of free will, played so large a part that a recent hi
crusades has defined holy war in terms of its meritoriousness.6
But, apart from Gratian's dictum to which I have already
theologians of the time of the crusades do not seem to
difficult to graft ideas of free will and merit onto Augusti

58 'Epistolae', nos. xciii § 5, clxxxv §§ 8-11. See also 'Contra epistolam Pa

13-15; 'Contra litteras Petiliani', II, xix-xx §| 43-4, lxxxvi § 191, lxxxviii
nos. xciii § 50, c §§ 7, 11, cviii § 14.
" 'Epistolae', nos. lxxxix § 2, cciv § 4. See 'De sermone Domini in monte',
epistolam Parmeniani', i §§ 13-15; 'Contra litteras Petiliani', II, lxxxiv § 18
xciii §§ 8,16, clxxxv § 9.
60 'Epistolae', no. clxxx § 9.
61 Gratian, 'Decretum', ed. E. Friedberg, Corpus iuris canonici, i (Leipzig
6, c. 4 d.p.c.
" E. Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine (London, 1961), pp. 154-5.
63 'Contra Faustum Manichaeum', xxii § 73.
64 Ibid., xxii § 75.1 hope to consider Augustine's views on violence at the command of God
and their influence on crusading thought in a later paper.
65'De civitate Dei', I, xxi, xxvi; and see also 'Contra Faustum Manichaeum xxii § 75;
'Quaestiones in Heptateuchum' (Corpus Christianorum. Series Latina, xxxiii), VI, x.
68 J. A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law and the Crusader (Madison, 1969), pp. 21, 29 and
'Holy War and the Medieval Lawyers', The Holy War, ed. T. P. Murphy (Columbus, 1976), p.
116.

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 188 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
Indeed, if there is one feature of their treatment of love and violence
how Augustinian it is; and quotations from Augustine, including th
which emphasized love of enemies, predominate in their writings. It was S
Anselm of Lucca, a supporter of Pope Gregory VII, who in books XII
XIII of his Collectio canonum, written in c. 1083, collected the basic A
tinian texts on violence, including those on force and love, and passed the
on to his successors as authorities for the arguments that the Church
not persecute but expressed love when she punished sin; that Moses, u
force on orders from God, did nothing cruel; that punishment coul
imposed not out of hatred but out of love; and that wars could be ben
ent in intention.67 Anselm was followed by Ivo of Chartres who, in
Decretum and Panormia, written in France in c. 1094 on the eve of the Fir
Crusade,68 used his authorities to demonstrate that love of neighbo
demanded that in normal circumstances one should not kill.69 One should
not embark on punishment unless one had personally overcome hatred;
indeed penalties could be imposed on those who killed out of hate and not
out of zeal for justice.70 But Ivo stressed, in an Augustinian passage that
was later to be used by Gratian, that the exercise of Christian forebearance
(patientia) did not entirely rule out necessary fighting.71 Love, in fact, could
involve physical correction, in the same way as a father punished a son or a
master a servant.72 To coerce one's neighbour could be to love him and the
man who punished evil did not persecute but loved.73 Indeed in the
Panormia, which was a popular work,74 three chapters were devoted to the
arguments, taken entirely from St. Augustine, that neighbourly love
demanded that men prevent their neighbours from doing evil and that
Christians could, in fact, sin if they did not persecute those engaged in evil
works.75 Ivo maintained that wars fought by true Christians were in fact
acts of pacification, since their aim was peace.76
The works of Anselm of Lucca and Ivo of Chartres foreshadowed that of
Gratian, but in no way approached the subtlety and honesty of Gratian's
treatment of force in Causa XXIII of his Decretum, written in c. 1140. He
began by facing up squarely to the passages in the New Testament that
appeared to forbid Christians to use violence of any kind, but he then took
his readers through a mass of material that gradually revealed the Christian
justification of violence. On the issue of love, including love of enemies, he
was, like Anselm and Ivo, fundamentally Augustinian. The use of force
was not entirely forbidden in the precepts of forebearance (patientia),77 for

67 PL cxlix, cols. 532-4; A. Stickler, '11 potere coattivo materiale della Chiesa nella riforma
Gregoriana, secondo Anselmo da Lucca', Studi gregoriani, ii (1947), pp. 235-85; Erdmann,
op. cit., pp. 244-5.
68 P. Fournier and G. Le Bras, Histoire des collections canoniques en Occident (Paris,
1931-2), ii, pp. 82-3, 96-7.
69 'Decretum' (PL clxi), χ cc. 4, 157.
70 'Decretum', χ c. 60; 'Panormia' (PL clxi), viii c. 9.
71 'Panormia', viii c. 42.
72 'Decretum', χ cc. 60, 76, 77; 'Panormia', viii c. 22.
73 'Decretum', χ cc. 62, 76, 95; 'Panormia', viii c. 36.
74 Fournier and Le Bras, op. cit., ii, p. 97.
75 'Panormia', viii cc. 15-17; and see also c. 58.
16 'Decretum', χ c. 105.
77 Gratian, 'Decretum', C. 23, q. 1 c. 2.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 189
while they should be interpreted as meaning that clemency and
should be shown, bad sins ought to be punished, as in the cases o
and Sapphira on the condemnation of St. Peter—this was a
example of the Fathers and of those writing on violence in the
Middle Ages—of Elymas who was blinded on the word of St. Pa
the sinner whom St. Paul handed over to Satan.78 Evil must not be
rendered for evil and one should love, not persecute, enemies,79 but
Augustine's analogies of the doctor prescribing for patients and the heads
of households correcting sons and servants were drawn on.80 Out of mater
nal love the Church could prescribe medicine for sinners, and anyway
better the wounds of a friend than the kisses of an enemy.81 Men were
bound to love their enemies, to pray for them and show mercy to them, but
the demands of love should mean that they could not allow others to sin
with impunity. Acts of mercy could themselves be unjust, and one such act
could lead to universal harm.82 And so the restless were usefully corrected
by the office of public power. It was better to love with severity: persecu
tion was not always culpable for it could serve love.83 And the wicked could
be forced to goodness: men had the example of Christ to follow here;
nobody loved more than he did, yet he forced St. Paul onto the path of
righteousness. Moses, too, punished the Israelites not out of cruelty but out
of love. Correction was an attribute of mercy, as could be found by reading
not only the Old Testament, but also the New, although the examples in it
were more rare.84 Gratian believed that he had established from his
authorities that punishment in itself was permitted and did not necessarily
involve hatred.85
As a final example of the treatment of love and violence at the time of
the crusades one might look at St. Thomas Aquinas's early polemical treat
ise Contra impugnantes, written in 1256.86 This again was Augustinian in
its approach and it repeated the argument that Christ only gave the apos
tles, who were simple and uneducated men, power to authorize punish
ment by means of force after he had taught them to love their neighbours
absolutely.87
Reading these works one glimpses what seems to be a different world to
that portrayed in crusading propaganda. Instead of the one-dimensional
notion of fraternal love for fellow-Christians, violence is treated in the
context of love for all mankind, enemies as well as friends. For all its
obvious faults, one is bound to admire the subtlety and learning of the
canonists' treatment of force and to recognize that it has an authentic place
in the Christian ethical tradition. But it must be stressed that theologians
and canonists and the popes and curial clerks who wrote the calls to

"'Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 c. 26 d.p.c.
"Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 c. 16 d.p.c.
80 Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 c. 24; q. 5 c. 36.
81 Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 cc. 25, 37.
82 Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 cc. 32 d.p.c., 33.
"Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 c. 37.
"Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 cc. 43-4,51.
85 Ibid., C. 23 q. 4 c. 54 d.p.c.
86 See J. A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d'Aquino (Oxford, 1974), pp. 383-4.
87 Thomas Aquinas, 'Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem', Opera omnia iussu
Leonis XIII P.M. edita, xli (Rome, 1970), cap. xvi, esp. § 4.

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190 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
crusade did not live in different worlds. Pope Alexander III, for inst
whose name was issued one of the encyclicals from which I ha
was himself a canonist and the author of a- commentary on G
[Link] It is not believable that the popes who proclaimed
and the more respectable preachers who whipped up enthusiasm
did not grasp the complexity of the Christian position. They
presented their one-sided version of love deliberately, with a v
audience they were addressing.
It could be that they dared not do otherwise. A feature of the att
twelfth-century lay society as revealed in its vernacular poetr
blind, uncomprehending hatred of the infidel, expressed, for i
Charlemagne's famous declaration in the Song of Roland that '
paynims may I show love or peace'. Through the epics runs the them
implacable war of conversion against non-Christians, a theme
ssed itself in the slaughters that accompanied the conquests of
Crusade and the forced conversions that were perpetrated in ih
in Spain.89 Only towards the end of the twelfth century did the
the 'noble heathen', the pagan who was capable of good actions
take hold among ordinary laymen.90 Given this feeling, it was h
ible for crusade propagandists to write in terms of love of enem
contrary, crusading literature and propaganda played on the x
by the use of emotive terms—enemies of God, servants of the
vants of the Anti-Christ—to describe the Muslims.91
But this negative explanation is not sufficient. The popes and their rep
resentatives must have brought up the subject of love because of the posi
tive feelings they knew would be aroused in those who listened to their
appeals. I believe that, as with love of God, we find here echoes of the
secular world. It will have been noticed that in the sources from which I
have quoted the words most commonly used to refer to fellow-Christians
are brothers (fratres) and friends (amici). And at this time the word amicus
as often as not meant kinsman, rather than simply friend, as in a French
eleventh-century document which referred to
his friends, that is to say his mother, his brothers, his sisters and his other
relatives by blood or by marriage.92

Men hearing these words would be encouraged to think of fellow

Christians as their relatives and the specific use of this kind of imagery is to
be found in one of the reports of Pope Urban's sermon at Clermont, in
which he was said to have referred to the Eastern Christians as

88 Alexander III, Summa, ed. F. Thaner (Innsbruck, 1874), esp. pp. 88-98.
89 P. Boissonade, Du nouveau sur la Chanson de Roland (Paris, 1923), pp. 291-2; Rousset,
op. cit., pp. 110-33.
90 For a recent survey of the literature, see R. C. Schwinges, Kreuzzugsideologie und Tole
ranz (Stuttgart, 1977), pp. 102-8.
91 For the terms used at the time of the First Crusade, see Rousset, op. cit., pp. 104-5.
92 Bloch, op. cit., pp. 123-4. Bloch (op. cit., p. 231) argued that the word amicus was also
often used of a vassal. For references to amici, perhaps in this sense, see Fulcher of Chartres,
p. 137; Henry of Albano, cols. 360-1. For the use of the terminology of mercenaries with
reference to crusaders, see Fulcher of Chartres, p. 136; Baldric of Dol, p. 15.

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 JONATHAN RILEY-SMITH 191
your full brothers, your comrades, your brothers born of t
you are sons of the same Christ and the same Church.'3
It is well-known that in the central Middle Ages kins
creating the same sort of binding obligations as vassala
source of strength to the individual, and ties of kins
along with vassalage, over all others. It looks as thoug
dists decided to present crusading love to laymen in th
of family. And if one accepts Georges Duby's belief that
knightly families 'the patrimony seemed indeed to ha
support for the recollection ... of family consciousnes
Palestine as the hereditary patrimony of Christ takes on
an age obsessed by family land-holdings, Christ's ch
aroused by threats to their father's inheritance.95
My suggestion that crusading charity was presente
example of family love leads to a further point. Marc Blo
'the Middle Ages, from beginning to end, and particularl
lived under the sign of private vengeance' .96 The hist
twelfth and thirteenth centuries is punctuated by vi
Church was naturally opposed to them, but it looks as
ing of crusades it was not averse to using the imagery of
attract knights. Vengeance on the infidel who had o
brothers and seized their father's patrimony was a th
aganda;97 and when in 1198 Pope Innocent III referred
summoned

as sons to take vengeance on injury to their father and as brothers to avenge the
destruction of their brothers'8

everyone must have known what he meant. The crusade was in this sense a
blood-feud waged against those who had harmed members of Christ's
family.
But I would also argue that love, even in the debased form in which it
was presented to potential crusaders, was theologically essential to the
crusading movement, because for Christians in all ages sacred violence
cannot be proposed on any grounds save that of love. And the idea of
charity contributed to the crusades' attraction in that, while all sorts of
motives and feelings conditioned the response of Latin Christians to the
popes' appeals to take the cross, contemporaries really did feel that they
were engaging in something morally satisfying. In an age dominated by the
theology of merit this explains why participation in crusades was believed
to be meritorious, why the expeditions were seen as penitential acts that

93 Baldric of Dol, pp. 12-13. See also Fulcher of Chartres, pp. 132-3, for a reference to the
Eastern Christians as 'confratribus vestris'.
94 G. Duby, The Chivalrous Society (London, 1977), p. 146.
95 Or their mother's inheritance: see, for instance, Peter of Blois, 'De Hierosolymitana
peregrinatione acceleranda', PL ccvii, col. 1063.
96 Bloch, op. cit., p. 125; and see pp. 123-33.
97 For the First Crusade, see Rousset, op. cit., pp. 105-6; and for ideas of vengeance in the
epics, see Rousset, op. cit., p. 126.
99 Innocent III, Register, no. 302. See also Roger of Howden, iv, p. 165; Innocent III, 'Quia
maior', ed. Tangl, p. 90.

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192 CRUSADING AS AN ACT OF LOVE
could gain indulgences, and why death in battle was regarded a
dom. In the 1930s Carl Erdmann, in his influential book on the
the movement, linked it to the eleventh-century reformers who
explained, 'the very men who stood for the idea of holy war and
put it into practice'.99 His association of the reform movement
development of the crusading idea was one of the most striking feat
a brilliant study, but it can be argued that he did not take things fa
that, although he gave evidence for a relationship between ref
sacred violence, he did not explain why such a relationship existe
as manifestations of Christian love, the crusades were as much the p
of the renewed spirituality of the central Middle Ages, with its con
living the vita apostolica and expressing Christian ideals in active
charity, as were the new hospitals, the pastoral work of the Au
and Premonstratensians and the service of the friars. The char
Francis may now appeal to us more than that of the crusaders
sprang from the same roots.

" Erdmann, op. cit., p. 143 and passim.

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