by Philip M. Taylor

It is with the Crusades that the study of war propaganda is provided with the most fertile evidence to date. The knights of the first (People’s) crusade, advocated by Pope Urban II in a sermon at Clermont in 1095, had little idea of their Muslim opponents, other than they were heathens. The crusade was a holy war authorized by the Pope in the name of Christ and, as such, was justified or legitimate violence. It was around this rather simplistic point that atrocity propaganda was constructed, although events such as the burning of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre some ninety years earlier were seized upon to inflame passions. But no more recent atrocity could be found to justify the expedition or Pope Urban’s call for a ‘great stirring of heart’ against the infidel. The Turks were, it is true, threatening Byzantium by advancing further into Asia Minor. Urban preached that ‘the barbarians in their frenzy have invaded and ravaged the churches of God in the eastern regions. Worse still, they have seized the Holy City of Christ, embellished by his passion and resurrection, and – it is blasphemy to say it – they have sold her and her churches into abominable slavery.’ Robert the Monk, writing some years later, provides us with one version of Urban’s call to arms which contains blatant atrocity propaganda. The Saracens, Urban maintained,

‘have circumcized the Christians, either spreading the blood from the circumcisions on the altars or pouring it into the baptismal fonts. And they cut open the navels of those whom they choose to torment with a loathsome death, tear out most of their vital organs and tie them to a stake, drag them around and flog them before killing them as they lie prone on the ground with all their entrails out. They tie some to posts and shoot at them with arrows; they order others to bare their necks and they attack them with drawn swords, trying to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single stroke. What shall I say of the appalling violation of women, of which it is more evil to speak than to keep silent?’

No other surviving version of Urban’s sermon contains such vivid propaganda but they do emphasise the psychological significance of Jerusalem in the Christian universe. Even so, none of this explains the timing of the call. Guibert of Nogent claimed that ‘there was no need for any churchman to exhort people from the pulpit to go and fight when … each man advertized to his neighbour, no less by his advice than by his example, the vow to go on the journey. All were on fire with eagerness.’ This contemporary source’s explanation of the wave of popular enthusiasm for the People’s or Peasant’s Crusade was that God had directly mobilized the universal Christian heart.

In reality, greed and self-interest probably played a more significant role. Stirred by popular orators, many of those that went were peasants and landless knights and this motley crew of adventurers, led by Walter the Penniless and Peter the Hermit, lacked both organization and discipline. Disaster and cruelty were inevitable. It was these factors which help to explain why the first Crusaders acted as brutally as they did: enemies were beheaded and their heads thrown into besieged cities or impaled on their lances to frighten the enemy. Sheer cruelty or an acute awareness of the role of psychological warfare? Perhaps a combination of both.

The First Crusade, which began the year after the People’s Crusade had ended in slaughter at the hands of the Turks at Civetot in Asia Minor, has to be explained in terms other than revenge or the chivalric code. Modern historians have put forward over-population in the west, the Church’s efforts to discourage domestic warfare between Christian peoples, and economic factors as the reasons for the First Crusade. Certainly the Church was anxious to persuade the knightly class to turn its aggressive energies against non-Christians; as one version of Urban’s speech has him proclaiming: ‘Let those who have once been robbers now become soldiers of Christ, let those who have been mercenaries for a few pennies now achieve eternal reward.’ Now fuelled by real atrocity stories committed by the Turks at Civetot, perhaps the real motivation of the knights who travelled to the Holy Land in 1096 was their increased social status as an aristocratic profession, a process sanctioned by the Church. They had acquired status through war and they needed to maintain their status through war. Crusading was a lucrative business and land was the source of power. All these factors came together at the same time to provide a fertile field in which Urban’s words could flourish and, through a system of remission of sins, the soldiers could conduct their profession against the infidel as brutally as they liked, in the safe knowledge that they were committing no mortal sin.

Indeed, thanks to the Gregorian Reform, war against the infidel was a more acceptable way for knights to gain salvation than the previous options of joining a monastery or a pilgrimage. As such, the crusades can be seen partly as armed pilgrimages. Later, monks and knights joined together in the Templars and the new warfare was praised by St Bernard with the words: ‘Advance in confidence, you knights, and boldly drive out the enemies of the Cross of Christ, be sure that neither death nor life can separate you from the love of God.’ The role of religious propaganda in launching the armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem is thus beyond dispute.

At the siege of Antioch (1097-9), the critical battle of the First Crusade, the Crusaders were heartened by reports of visions – a not infrequent event throughout the Crusades – by the alleged discovery of the Holy Lance that had pierced Christ’s side, and by the intervention of God himself. The lure of the Holy City of Jerusalem often pulled soldiers onwards against the advice of their leaders. With Antioch in their hands, in 1099 the Crusaders organized a religious procession around the besieged city of Jerusalem, described by one source in the following terms:

‘When the Saracens saw this, they proceeded in the same way along the city walls carrying on a spear the image of Muhammad covered with a cloth. When the Christians had reached the church of St Stephen and had made a station there as is the custom in our processions, the Saracens stood on the walls and shouted aloud at it. They made a great din with trumpets and subjected the Christians to every kind of mockery which they could devise. But worst of all, in the sight of all the Christians they struck the most holy cross, on which merciful Christ redeemed the human race by shedding his blood, with a piece of wood and then, to distress the Christians even more, they dashed it to pieces against the wall …’

Such provocation was not uncommon in sieges and may perhaps help to explain the brutality of the Crusaders towards their captives contrasted with the Christian doctrine of mercy and forgiveness. Jerusalem fell to the invaders in 1099. The defenders were massacred.

Inspired by religious fervour, the Crusaders also recognized the financial rewards of battle in the wealthy Middle East. In the Song of Antioch are the words: ‘Out there on the grass, we shall either lose our heads or else become so rich in fine silver and gold that we shall no longer have to beg from our comrades.’ But the chivalric code also demanded that certain rules be observed, especially when Christian fought Christian. The advantages of fighting the infidel on his rich home soil soon became apparent. The Second Crusade, proclaimed by Pope Eugenius III in 1146, attempted to capitalize upon the success of the first. The reoccupation of conquered lands, and Edessa in particular, by the infidel provided the excuse, but the real reasons are similar to those which motivated the earlier campaign. This time, however, the sons of the First Crusaders were called upon to regain the honour – and salvation – of their fathers, ‘so that the dignity of the name of Christ may be enhanced in our time and your reputation for strength, which is praised throughout the world, may be kept unimpaired and unsullied’. St Bernard, the official preacher of the Second Crusade, extended the call to fight the Moslems not just in the Holy Land but also in Spain, and to take on the pagan Slavs of eastern and south-eastern Europe. In France, Bernard and King Louis VII designed an elaborate ceremony in 1147, described as follows:

‘Since there was no place in the fortress which could hold such a multitude [who had gathered], a wooden platform was built for the Abbot in a field outside of Vezelay, so that he could speak from a high place to the audience standing around him. Bernard mounted the platform together with the king, who wore the cross. When the heavenly instrument had, according to his custom, poured out the Dew of the Divine Word, the people on all sides began to clamour and to demand crosses. When he had sowed, rather than passed out the crosses which had been prepared, he was forced to tear his clothing into crosses and to sow them too.’

Bernard recruited throughout Europe using such propaganda devices, but his efforts were not to be rewarded with victory. Lisbon was recaptured but the war against the Slavs proved less successful. In the Holy Land, the Crusaders were driven back at Damascus and the entire venture became a débâcle. Their failure was explained by apologists with the argument that the troops had been unworthy executors of God’s will.

After Saladin defeated the Crusaders at the battle of Hattin in 1187 and captured Jerusalem, the Third Crusade (1189-92) was launched to recover the Holy Land. Pope Gregory VIII called upon Christendom to avenge the victims of the ‘savage barbarians’. The religious arguments now had to be even more forceful. Other than eternal salvation, the Church offered protection to property, land, and goods. Violence was justified by drawing upon the Old Testament and upon the writings of St Augustine. Hence the justification: ‘we do not seek peace so that we may wage war, but we wage war so that we may attain peace.’ But chivalric notions continued to motivate the knights in battle. During the Third Crusade, the Grand Master of the Templars refused to flee at the battle of Acre and was killed, but at least he died with honour. To have fled before the standards had fallen would have brought disgrace, not only upon him personally but also upon his Order, not to mention his family. Orders such as the Knights Templars were thus in many respects a development of the old Gallic tribes in which individuals fought alongside people as though they were members of the same family: ‘One for all and all for one’.

Exposure to the fighting ability of the Saracens inevitably led the Crusaders to respect and admiration for their enemies. This happens in most wars when soldiers realize that the image of the enemy they have had painted for them by propagandists rarely conforms to the reality. Fighting men admire fighting men if they display qualities in battle that they can respect and relate to by virtue of their own training and experience. Of the battle of Dorylaeum in 1097, one source has testified that if the Turks had been inspired by the Holy Spirit ‘it would have been impossible to find a people more powerful, more courageous, or more skilled in the art of war’. In other words, the Christian God provided the difference in morale between the two sides. Their motivation to fight an enemy they respected – and this usually meant an enemy they feared – was derived from the Crusaders’ religious zeal and from the belief that they were securing divine redemption by attempting to destroy the anti-Christ. By the late twelfth century, the crusading ethos was being used to justify wars elsewhere than in the Holy Land – in the Baltic, for example, or within Christendom itself in campaigns against heresy. Anyone who threatened the Church found themselves the object of a crusading call.

An important psychological factor in late medieval warfare, and of the Crusades in particular, when the knights were usually outnumbered by the Saracens, was the tightly-packed formations of heavily armoured knights. During the Third Crusade in 1190 one chronicler described how the Crusaders, having seen Saladin’s camp, were ‘terrified because they looked so powerful’, but then ‘began to draw closer together, as they had been trained to do’. The enemy found it impossible to break the formation and were fought off, whereupon the knights relieved the fortress of Darum. Such tactics enabled men to overcome their fear, relatively safe in the knowledge that their comrades and their armour would protect their lives. Should the formation be broken, the men would attempt to reform in a compact unit around the banner or standard. The banner was thus not just a means of signalling the troops to advance in battle. It was also a symbol of resistance in adversity. As the Rules of the Templars stated: ‘If the troops lose their banner, they are shocked, and this can lead to a terrible defeat.’

The Crusades also demonstrate the psychological significance of an able military commander. During the disaster at Damascus in the Second Crusade, one source relates how the Holy Roman Emperor severed in one blow virtually the entire side of an armour- protected Saracen. ‘At this deed the citizens, both those who witnessed it and those who learned it from others, were thrown into such a fright that they despaired of resisting and even of life itself.’ Richard I of England (the ‘Lionheart’) is another excellent example. A strict disciplinarian, he was a man who took care not to march his men too hard or too far, ensured that they were well supplied, and personally supervised the execution of his orders. Richard’s personal guard formed one of the main strike forces in the battle of Arsuf, men who were supplied and armed by the king himself and whose loyalty to him he could depend upon. But he was not averse to brutality, ordering the decapitation of 2700 Turks at Acre when Saladin delayed in returning the Holy Cross. Tancred, one of the leaders of the First Crusade, according to his biographer, always took his turn at guard duty and even replaced the wounded or the exhausted. When a crusade was not led by one of the European kings, the military leader was elected by his fellow military leaders or by the Pope.

The climax of Crusade propaganda came in 1213 when Pope Innocent III proclaimed the Fifth Crusade. Distributed throughout Christendom, the Pope’s letter was widely copied and provided a set of guidelines for preaching this latest campaign to all members of Christendom, regardless of class or status:

‘For how can a man be said to love his neighbour as himself, in obedience to God’s command, when, knowing that his brothers, who are Christians in faith and in name, are held in the hands of the perfidious Saracens in dire imprisonment and are weighed down by the yoke of most heavy slavery, he does not do something effective to liberate them, thereby transgressing the command of that natural law which the Lord gave in the gospel, ‘Whatsoever you would that men should do to you, do you also to them’? Or perhaps you do not know that many thousands of Christians are being held in slavery and imprisonment in their hands, tortured by countless torments?’

The Pope pointed out, perhaps anticipating criticism from a war-weary populace, that the Holy Land had been in Christian hands before Islam’s seizure, before Muhammad (the ‘false prophet who has seduced many men from the truth by world enticements and the pleasures of the flesh’):

‘So rouse yourselves, most beloved sons, transforming your quarrels and rivalries, brother against brother, into associations of peace and affection; gird yourselves for the service of the Crucified One, not hesitating to risk your possessions and your persons for Him who laid down his life and shed his blood for you, equally certain and sure that if you are truly penitent you will achieve eternal rest as a profit for this temporal labour.’

Even those who did not physically join the Crusade but contributed towards it were to be granted remission of their sins. Anyone who hindered the war (Jews and pirates were cited as examples) was to be excommunicated and cast into slavery. ‘We order sentence of this kind to be read out publicly each Sunday and feast day in all maritime cities.’ Monthly prayer processions were to be held ‘with this wise proviso that during the procession the preaching of the cross which brings salvation should always be offered to the people in a way that is assiduous and encouraging’. During daily mass, ‘everyone, men and women alike, must humbly prostrate themselves on the ground and the psalm ‘Oh God, the heathens are come into thy inheritance’ should be sung loudly by the clergy.’ Churches were to have contribution chests for everyone to donate alms for the Crusade. Priests ‘should devote themselves conscientiously to prayer and exhortation, teaching the crusaders both by word and example’ and the clergy were to donate one-twentieth of their income for three years. The Pope also ordered an end to civil strife within Christendom for four years.

Such was the thoroughness of the propaganda campaign orchestrated on behalf of the Fifth Crusade that the Pope also appointed special officials to preach ‘with great care and attention to detail’ the messages in the guidelines:

‘You must promote the cause of Christ with such zeal and vigilance that you will share in the many and great benefits we believe will result from it.’

Yet the Fifth Crusade took place amidst great changes in medieval warfare. Improvements in State administration and increased centralization enabled kings to raise armies on a more regular basis, permanent professional armies whose pay and recruitment were organized through indentures. A distinction was now being made between ‘private war’, waged between individuals with as little damage as possible to the general community, and ‘public war’ in which prisoners could be taken and held for ransom, enemy property seized as booty, and reparations exacted from the local population. The emerging nation-states of western Europe began to utilize more effectively a peasantry that could be brought to the battlefield at a reasonably low cost, thanks to the crossbow and longbow, although the aristocratic knights initially resented this development which placed more emphasis upon collective rather than individual combat. But the Normans and the Saracens had demonstrated the value of archers and the value of defence over attack. Stone castles and fortified towns built by the Normans throughout Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries demanded the development of siege warfare and tactics and the introduction of gunpowder in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries helped to inaugurate a new era for both warfare and propaganda, symbolized by the concept of guerre mortelle in which both the property and the lives of the conquered lay at the mercy of the conqueror.