God's Wolf E-Book

Jeffrey Lee

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

In 2010, a parcel bomb was sent from Yemen by an al-Qaeda operative with the intention of blowing up a plane over America. The device was intercepted before the plan could be put into action, but what puzzled investigators was the name of the person to whom the parcel was addressed: Reynald de Chatillon - a man who died 800 years ago. But who was he and why was he chosen above all others? Born in twelfth-century France and bred for violence, Reynald de Chatillon was a young knight who joined the Second Crusade and rose through the ranks to become the pre-eminent figure in the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem - and one of the most reviled characters in Islamic history. In the West, Reynald has long been considered a minor player in the Crusades and is often dismissed as having been a bloodthirsty maniac. Tales of his elaborate torture of prisoners and his pursuit of reckless wars against friends and foe alike have coloured Reynald's reputation. However, by using contemporary documents and original research, Jeffrey Lee overturns this popular perception and reveals him to be an influential and powerful leader, whose actions in the Middle East had a far-reaching impact that endures to this day. In telling his epic story, God's Wolf not only restores Reynald to his rightful position in history but also highlights how the legacy of the Crusades is still very much alive.

Leseprobe

For the brothers – Tam Tam, Bee Boy and Li’l Tigs

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations and Maps

Prologue

Introduction: A Monstrous Unbeliever

1 Dead Man Walking

2 The Wild East

3 Knight-errant

4 Arriviste

5 Diabolic Daring

6 A Violent Sinner

7 Guardian of the Land

8 Imperial Vassal

9 In the Power of Nur al-Din

10 Years of Darkness

11 Phoenix

12 Hero

13 Lord of La Grande Berrie

14 Desert Raider

15 Sea Wolf

16 The Lion and the Wolf

17 The ‘Manchurian’ Regent

18 King-maker

19 Truce-breaker

20 Apocalypse

21 The Ultimate Crusader

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS & MAPS

Colour Section

Contents of the FedEx package sent by Al-Qaida in 2010 (© PA)

Chapel of St Radegund fresco (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Cressac Chapel fresco (Corbis)

Illustration from the manuscript of William of Tyre’s History of Deeds done beyond the Sea, 12th century (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Illustration from the manuscript of William of Tyre’s History and its Continuation, 13th century (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

Illustration of Reynald de Chatillon’s seal as Prince of Antioch (From The Crusades: The Story of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, by T. A. Archer and Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, London & New York, 1894)

View from across the Orontes river by J. Redway (1841) (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Reynald’s stronghold at Kerak in Oultrejordan (Marco Tomasini/Shutterstock)

The Muslim stronghold of Shayzar (© Maxime Goepp,www.orient-latin.com)

The citadel of Aleppo (Valery Shanin/Shutterstock)

The castle on the Ile de Graye (Mildax/Shutterstock)

Contemporary portrait of Saladin, c. 1180 (Ann Ronan Pictures/Print Collector/Getty Images)

Illustration of Reynald’s seal as Lord of Oultrejordan (From La Palestine by Baron Ludovic de Vaux, Paris, 1883)

Portrait of Manuel I Comnemos and Maria of Antioch (DeAgostini/Getty Images)

Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Nickolay Vinokurov/Shutterstock)

The Horns of Hattin in Galilee, Israel (Zeromancer44/Wikimedia Commons)

Illustration from the Chronica Maiora by Matthew Paris, 13th century (Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

Maps

Crusader States and Castles

The Second Crusade, 1147–49

Principality of Antioch

Kingdom of Jerusalem

Reynald’s Arabian Campaign

Prologue

Sana’a, Yemen, 29 October 2010

The Sana’a office of the global courier company FedEx is on Hadda Street, a busy, dusty drag of upscale shops and restaurants in the Yemeni capital. Among the customers dropping off packages that Friday was a veiled woman who said she was Hanan al-Samawi, an engineering student. She left a box for shipping to the city of Chicago, Illinois.

Inside the box was a Hewlett-Packard LaserJet printer, some traditional Yemeni clothing, a souvenir model of Yemen’s famous mud skyscrapers and a few English books, including a torn copy of The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot.

Inside the printer were 300 grams of the industrial explosive PETN, more than enough to bring down a jetliner in flight. It was primed to detonate over Chicago.

The plot was the work of the Islamist terror group, Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The device’s living targets were the people of Chicago, but the bomb was not addressed to them. It was addressed to an old enemy, the most hated and feared of the crusaders who battled the forces of Islam in the Middle Ages.

The bomb was addressed to a man who had been dead for more than 800 years. It was addressed to Reynald de Chatillon.

Introduction

A MONSTROUS UNBELIEVER

Reynald was the most perfidious and wicked of the Franks. He was the greediest, the most determined to destroy and do evil, to violate agreements and solemn oaths, to break his promise and to lie

Imad al-Din1

Twenty-first-century terrorists address their printer-bomb to a long-dead Frankish knight.

The crusades live.

This might surprise most Westerners, for whom the crusades are little more than a dim and dusty story of knights fighting Saracens in the deserts of the Middle East. In fact the legacy of the crusades is very much alive, for they were the crucible in which the forging of the modern world began.

The series of religio-military expeditions, which marched from Western Europe to seize Jerusalem from the Muslims, were the first counter-attacks by Western Christendom against the expanding civilization of Islam – a civilization then superior in medicine, science, mathematics, commerce and much else. The states created in the Levant, settled by the crusaders and then fought over for two centuries were the Christian West’s first colonial experiment. The movement began with the staggeringly successful First Crusade, which captured the Holy City of Jerusalem in 1099. Half a century later came the Second Crusade (1145-9), when Reynald de Chatillon went to the East. The Third Crusade of 1189-92 is perhaps the one best lodged in the Western psyche, given its leading men: King Richard the Lionheart, for Christendom, and his chivalrous adversary, the sultan Saladin, for Islam.

Crusades were not directed just against Saracens in the Orient. Religious fervour and the spirit of conquest drove the frontiers of Christendom in all directions. Crusades were launched against Muslims in Iberia, Eastern European Slavs, heretical Christians and even the Greek Christian Byzantine Empire.

Usually, in the twenty-first century, Western awareness of the crusades remains vague, carrying with it (if anything) some inchoate guilt for ‘Christian aggression’. In the year 2000, Pope John Paul II’s apology for the Church’s errors was widely taken to include the crusades. But long before crusading fervour dwindled, Islam’s knowledge had been transferred to the West, opening the way to the modern scientific method and the long path to the Enlightenment during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Islamic civilization, set into a defensive posture, stagnated and its power waned. This impotence lies behind much of today’s desperate Islamist extremism. In 1492, the Catholic Reconquista finally triumphed, with the defeat of the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. In the same year, and sponsored by the same Catholic monarchs, Columbus discovered the New World, assuring the supremacy of the Christian West. The dangerous idea that set these tectonic shifts in motion was spearheaded by men such as Reynald de Chatillon.

Among Muslims there is no guilt for the violence of the crusading wars, nor are they seen as distant historical events. Rather, there is a widespread belief that the Islamic world is still engaged in a virtuous battle against the crusader onslaught. Any loss of Islamic land – whether it was to medieval Frankish crusaders like Reynald, the Catholic Reconquista in Spain, the Zionist armies in Palestine in 1948 or the American-led occupation of Iraq in 2003 – forms part of this historical perspective. The crusades are seen by some as an ongoing scourge, one that has inflicted an open, festering wound on Islam. The militant Islamists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) describe all their Western enemies as ‘crusaders’, whether they are tourists on a Tunisian beach, the President of the United States or concert-goers in Paris. Bitterness over the crusades was certainly a motivating factor for the terrorists of Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) when they addressed their cargo bomb to Reynald. After the attempt, which luckily failed,2 AQAP wrote in their English-language propaganda journal, Inspire:

Today, we are fighting a war against American tyranny. This is a new crusade waged by the West against Islam. Therefore we wanted to put things into proper perspective This current battle fought by the West is not an isolated battle but is a continuation of a long history of aggression by the West against the Muslimworld3

Addressing the package to a crusader, AQAP pronounced, would ‘revive and bring back this history’. But why choose Reynald de Chatillon in particular as the embodiment of this crusader enemy? Why not Godfrey de Bouillon or Raymond of Toulouse, leaders of the First Crusade? When they seized Jerusalem from the Muslims in 1099, their troops perpetrated a massacre so vile that on the Temple Mount their horses waded in blood up to their knees. Or why not the much more famous Richard the Lionheart, whose mere presence terrorized armies, and who festooned his bridle with the heads of Saracens that he had killed?

Reynald is reviled even more than those crusaders of malign memory. He epitomizes the crusades’ enduring legacy of enmity between Christian and Muslim. The Muslims called him ‘Arnat’, or simply ‘al-Brins’ (the Prince), and he was a figure of hatred and terror from the first. For twelfth-century Muslims chronicling the war against the crusaders, Arnat was ‘The most treacherous and wicked of the Franks’.* Likened to Abu Lahab, the loathsome enemy of the Prophet Muhammad, Arnat was blamed for spreading ‘disorder, devastation and ruin’. He was ‘one of the most devilish and recalcitrant Franks’, ‘the most hostile to the Muslims and the most dangerous to them’, ‘a monstrous infidel and a terrible oppressor’.

In the present day this reputation as a Muslim bogeyman remains as potent as ever. The typical modern Muslim view of Reynald is of someone ‘fanatical, greedy and bloodthirsty’.4 He ‘aroused more hatred between Arabs and the Franks than had been caused by decades of wars and massacres’.5 As Inspire explains, AQAP’s FedEx bomb was addressed to Reynald in particular because he was ‘one of the worst and most treacherous of the crusade’s leaders’.

When you get to know what Reynald did – the blasphemy and trauma he inflicted on Islam – it is not surprising that many Muslims still detest the man and his legacy. He was the most effective and ruthless military opponent of the Muslims, particularly of Saladin, who has been elevated in posterity to almost saintly status. And Reynald’s shocking exploits (or mad escapades, depending on your point of view) sent tremors through the religious sensibilities of the Islamic world. He struck at the very heart of the faith itself. Reynald’s strategy could even be said to be the spark that lit that never-ending jihad, the Holy War, which Islamist groups, including AQAP and ISIS, still prosecute today.

While Reynald’s name lives in infamy in the bestiary of Islamism, in the West he has been relegated to almost complete obscurity. Modern historians have usually dismissed him as a peripheral maverick, a ‘knight-brigand’ or a ‘parvenu’. This is a surprising mistake, given his substantial influence in the crusader states. Equally surprising, when his impact is admitted, traditional Western historical narrative usually echoes the negative Islamic view of Reynald. In contrast to his Muslim foes and crusader rivals, who are seen as tolerant and compromising, Reynald is portrayed by Western historians as a greedy, selfish bigot and as an inveterate warmonger. He is ‘crude, thick-headed and stubborn’, ‘aggressive, unadapted and incomprehending’.6 In the traditional historical narrative, Reynald is cast as the arch-villain of the crusading epic. He is even made responsible for the crusaders’ greatest military disaster. Some recent scholars have sought to redress the balance, pointing out Reynald’s contribution and his embodiment of ‘traditional crusading values’, but their influence has been largely limited to academic circles.7

For instance, I mentioned Reynald to a Swedish friend who lives in the Middle East and has an interest in the region’s history. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, ‘he was that horrible man who threw prisoners off the walls of his castle.’ Now while Reynald was responsible for many acts of violence and cruelty, and the walls of his mighty fortress at Kerak are easily high enough to throw a man to his death, there is no evidence of this actually occurring. A quick trawl of the Internet, though, finds this story to be common currency, sometimes with gruesome embellishments. As a Kerak travel guide claims:

One of his [Reynald’s] more notorious pleasures involved encasing the heads of his prisoners in wooden boxes so that, when he flung them off the castle walls, he could be sure that they hadn’t lost consciousness by the time they hit the rocks below8

Across all sorts of websites – whether entertainment, travel or ‘historical’ – the same picture of Reynald is drawn: he is ‘notorious’, ‘barbarous’ and ‘despicable’, and his ‘reputation for treachery, betrayal and brutality is unsurpassed’.9 This goes for other media, too. In a BBC documentary series on the crusades, Reynald was called a ‘manic aggressive’.10 And the Reynald character in historical novels is usually wicked, while in films he has been portrayed almost as a caricature of the bad guy. In Ridley Scott’s crusading Hollywood blockbuster, Kingdom of Heaven,11 the excellent Brendan Gleeson plays Reynald as a sort of violent buffoon and a member of the Order of the Knights Templar – shorthand, in this view of the crusades, for the embodiment of unreconstructed Christian militancy. The real Reynald was certainly violent – consistently and extremely – but in a violent time. He was never a Templar. Nor was he a buffoon.

Reynald’s bad press began in his own lifetime. The Muslim chroniclers wax vitriolic about him, and key crusader sources are also hostile; the greatest historian of the Latin East, Archbishop William of Tyre, who knew Reynald personally, was a political opponent and had other reasons to dislike him, as we shall see. The second main Frankish record is the chronicle of Ernoul, squire of the prominent crusader noble Balian of Ibelin, another bitter rival of Reynald. Still, there are sources that provide different glimpses of the man and, despite the bias against him, we can piece together a picture of Reynald that is surprisingly positive.

The truth reveals the epic life of Reynald de Chatillon as one of the most important of the crusading period. Famous all over Christendom, Reynald was an embodiment of the chivalric ideal. His knightly virtues were notable enough to promote him from obscurity to woo princesses and win royal power in one of the great romantic stories of the age. Via humiliation and harsh imprisonment, he rose to confront emperors and sultans. A ruthless, brutal grudge-holder, he inflicted revenges so savage and spectacular that they still echo down the ages. A renowned warrior, he led crusader armies to one of their most comprehensive military victories and inflicted on Saladin his most decisive reverse, adding years to the survival of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. A daring tactician, he waged an unprecedented, unrepeated campaign against his Islamic enemies in their own back yard. Reynald became the pre-eminent figure in the crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem, a colossus in the struggle for Palestine that obsessed the Christian world through the twelfth century. Reynald’s personality, his external enmities and internal rivalries dominated the last crucial years of the kingdom. And amidst cataclysmic defeat, his death would be decisive in its fall.

Uncovering the true story of Reynald de Chatillon means revising some other accepted truths about the crusades. This book emphasizes how appeasement and treachery – rather than Reynald’s aggressive policies – undermined the Kingdom of Jerusalem. It will put Reynald’s undoubted aggression and other attributes into context, while telling the extraordinary story of what was, for good or ill, one of the more remarkable medieval lives. It is a life that has been ignored, obscured and misrepresented for too long.

* The crusaders were usually known as ‘Franks’ or ‘Latins’: ‘Franks’ because the largest contingents came from what is now France, and Old French was the lingua franca of the crusader states; ‘Latins’ to distinguish them from Greek Christians.

Vézelay, Burgundy, 31 March 1146

Dressed in his rough white monk’s habit, the frail figure of Abbot Bernard looked out from a makeshift wooden platform across a crowd of many thousands of souls.

Jutting up from a rolling plain, the steep hill of Vézelay loomed behind him, crowned by a massive Romanesque basilica, the abbey-church of St Mary Magdalene. So many had come to hear Bernard speak that the multitude had overflowed the great church and the town itself. They had moved down to this new site in the spring meadows, where this sea of humanity – townspeople, peasants, priests, the flower of the nobility, King Louis VII himself – waited for the speaker to begin. They had gathered to witness Bernard, abbot of the pioneering monastery of Clairvaux, spiritual spearhead of the Cistercian order and the greatest orator of the age, preach the crusade.

The actual words of Bernard’s speech are lost, but we can be sure of much of the content. Expressed through Bernard’s inimitable, potent, mellifluous rhetoric, it would have echoed the proclamation recently issued by Pope Eugenius III, the papal bull Quantum Praedecessores. So Bernard would have described the recent catastrophic loss of the city of Edessa, one of the key crusader cities in the East, to the fierce Turkish warlord, Zengi. He would have described the suffering of the Christians of Edessa and the danger its fall posed to the Holy City of Jerusalem. He would have urged the men present, and especially the nobility – the warriors – to enlist alongside the king in his armed pilgrimage to the East, to fight for Christ and the Holy Land. He probably dangled the carrot of glory, honour and other earthly rewards for the successful crusader. Without doubt he promised heavenly rewards to anyone who ‘took the cross’. These rewards included a complete remission of their sins.

Bernard’s pale body looked ‘almost lifeless’, but his words carried immense power. Whatever he said, it had an almost miraculous effect. That day, wrote an onlooker, Bernard was ‘heaven’s instrument’, bestowing on the multitude ‘the dew of the divine word’.12 The crowd was gripped and inspired. Then and there, thousands committed to the crusade. When Bernard finally called all those who wished to make the ‘noble journey’ to step forward and take the cross, the response was overwhelming. ‘Crosses!’ the crowd roared. ‘Give us crosses!’

At sunset they were still sewing crossed strips of material to the shoulders of the new crusaders. A supply of cloth had been brought, in anticipation, but this soon ran out and, in their frenzy, people tore off their own clothes to be used. Bernard himself joined them, ripping up his habit for the cause. In the fading light the beautiful Queen Eleanor and her entourage of young damsels dressed up as Amazons and galloped around the fields, further whipping up the ecstatic crowds.

‘I opened my mouth,’ Bernard later wrote to the Pope. ‘I spoke; and at once the crusaders have multiplied to infinity. Villages and towns are now deserted. You will scarcely find one man for every seven women. Everywhere you see widows whose husbands are still alive.’13

One of those dead men walking – and almost certainly among the passionate crowd at Vézelay that day – was a youthful knight full of zeal and ambition, but with meagre prospects, a certain Reynald de Chatillon.

Chapter 1

DEAD MAN WALKING

Edessa is taken as you know, and the Christians are sorely afflicted because of it; the churches are burnt and abandoned,God is no longer sacrificed there. Knights, make your decisions, you who are esteemed for your skill in arms; make a gift of your bodies to Him who was placed on the cross for you.

Troubadour song of the Second Crusade

Renown is easiest won among perils.

Tacitus

Reynald de Chatillon was born sometime around 1125. He was a younger son of Hervé II de Donzy, Count of Gien and Lord of Donzy, a Burgundian town less than thirty miles from Vézelay. Lying about a day’s ride from Donzy was another of the family dominions, the town for which Reynald was named, Chatillon-sur-Loing.1 The River Loing, memorably painted by the Impressionist Alfred Sisley, is a tributary of the Seine. It rises in Burgundy and winds down past attractive medieval villages such as Villiers, Moret and Grez-sur-Loing with its graceful twelfth-century bridge. Chatillon (the present-day Chatillon-Coligny) is not one of the most picturesque of the towns along the Loing and reveals few traces from Reynald’s time. The only vestige of the little castle is the ruined tower of the donjon, and this was built in 1180, long after Reynald had left for the Holy Land.

We don’t know exactly what Reynald’s connection with Chatillon was. He may have been born there or lived there for a while in his youth. He may have been assigned the town as a fief. Peter of Blois calls him ‘Lord of Chatillon’. Whatever his connection, it was not strong enough to keep Reynald in France. As for so many other young men in the Middle Ages, especially around the twelfth century, the call of the Holy Land – that almost legendary Outremer (‘beyond the sea’) – proved too strong.

In Western Europe at the time daily existence was harsh and living conditions rudimentary, even for the noble classes. Life expectancy was short, but then a long life might not have been much to gloat over. The climate was unforgiving and the winters chilled both peasant hovel and noble castle alike. Food was bland, monotonous and unhygienic, and water was often contaminated. Medicine was no more than base superstition, with treatment usually exacerbating any malady, often fatally. The economy was based on the hard labour of subsistence agriculture – a precarious existence on the edge of permanent poverty, catastrophic in years of famine and blight. The population eked out its days almost exclusively in villages that were isolated, even over short distances, by difficult, dangerous roads, local warfare and linguistic differences. Most towns were small, cramped and filthy behind their old walls, with embryonic levels of trade. The feudal system of serfdom left many peasants in complete thrall to their lords and masters.

In this rigidly hierarchical world, social mobility was virtually non-existent, and improvement by education was possible only via the Church. Literacy – indeed learning in general – was monopolized by the clergy, which ruled the souls of all Western Christendom, with power centred on the Papacy in Rome. In this time of profound, ubiquitous religious faith, the Church wielded wide temporal powers and the Pope claimed supreme spiritual authority, even over the greatest rulers, such as the German emperor and the kings of England and France. Bishops were mighty lords in their own right and even lowly priests held their parishioners’ uneducated minds in thrall. They dangled the carrot of everlasting bliss to those who followed their bidding, while terrifying their flock with graphic images of the tortures of hell.

By the twelfth century, however, the world was beginning to change. A spirit of adventure was abroad, and it was clearly strong in young men like Reynald de Chatillon. He lived in a time of questioning and searching, of pushing boundaries and breaking new ground. Sometimes this period is called the ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, though the term goes in and out of fashion. Populations were on the move as new towns, outside the feudal system, were being founded and granted trading privileges. Cities like Paris and London were expanding fast and, encouraged by the crusades, international trade routes were opening apace, enriching maritime cities like Venice and Amalfi, bringing in new foodstuffs, materials, technologies, luxuries and ideas from the Orient. There was an explosion of artistic creativity; freed by new inspirations and technologies, architecture abandoned classical strictures and flowered into the spectacular, soaring ‘Gothic’ style. Music and literature threw up seminal works such as The Romance of the Rose, the songs of the wandering goliards and the poetry of the troubadours, leading to the remarkable discovery (or invention) of ‘romantic love’. It was also a time of enquiry; in the famous phrase of the twelfth-century churchman Peter of Blois, a new generation of scholars – like the radical Peter Abelard – was ‘clambering onto the shoulders of giants’. The ‘giants’ were the classical thinkers such as Aristotle and Galen, whose works were becoming known in the West. They fuelled the growth of the first universities in Paris and Oxford, the legal school in Bologna and the great medical schools of Salerno and Montpellier. This expansion in learning was facilitated by the crusades, which brought Christian intellectuals into contact with classical authors preserved by Islamic scholarship, and opened Western eyes to the relatively advanced Islamic sciences, philosophy and mathematics. These learnings were as fundamental as Arabic numerals (including the vital zero), which displaced the cumbersome Roman system. The enquiring minds of the day devoured the new knowledge with exhilaration.

The popularity of pilgrimages was another expression of this restless zeitgeist. Whether wending their way to the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury, following the route to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, visiting St Peter’s in Rome or taking the long journey to the Holy Places in the Promised Land, twelfth-century roads were increasingly thronged with pilgrims on the move. And of course a crusade was, at its simplest, no more than an armed pilgrimage. The clearest manifestation of this outward-looking urge to spread Christendom was actual geographical expansion. The Second Crusade was far more than just another expedition aimed at Palestine; it was an early and emphatic expression of European colonialism. While King Louis VII of France and Emperor Conrad III of Germany led their armies eastwards, there were also crusading offensives in Iberia, one of which led to the capture of Lisbon from the Moors. Militant, expansionist Christianity pressed northwards as well, with the launch of the Wendish Crusade in the Baltic. In all directions, the frontiers of Christendom were being extended.2

Within Christendom, too, boundaries were being pushed back as the wilderness was tamed. Bernard’s own Cistercian order was at the vanguard of this muscular spirituality. The white monks reformed lax practices in the Church and represented a new purity in Western monasticism. They also embodied their ideals by building monasteries in remote locations, turning forests into tilled fields. Bernard’s personal quest for truth led him to find the Lord in nature; his monastery of Clairvaux was built in a ‘desert’, a wild, remote valley, which the labour and ardour of the monks transformed into fertile gardens and a prosperous abbey.

This was the energetic world of increasing opportunity into which Reynald was born. Nothing specific is known about his youth, but this is not unusual, even for the most famous medieval figures. The same goes for the man who would become his greatest adversary, Saladin. While we have little information, we also have no reason to assume that Reynald’s upbringing differed from the typical upbringing of a male born into the knightly class. As such, almost everything he knew would have predisposed him to respond positively to the call for a crusade. The Pope’s bull, the king’s desire to make the journey, Reynald’s background, situation and education – all these would have made his decision quite straightforward.

Traditionally young noblemen were sent by their family to be brought up in another lordly household. There they would serve as a squire and be prepared for knighthood. Whether Reynald was raised in his family seat at Donzy, or elsewhere, he would have been instilled with the same martial values and the ideals of chivalry. The ruling class was first and foremost a warrior class, and its most prized values were those of the soldier, capable of winning glory for himself and his lineage and of defending his lands, his womenfolk and his vassals with the sword. The draughty baronial halls of Reynald’s youth would have echoed to the sound of the chansons de gestes, songs of the great deeds of real-life heroes from the First Crusade, of semi-legendary heroes like Oliver and Roland, the soldiers of Charlemagne, and of Lancelot and the wholly legendary heroes from the Arthurian myths. Reynald would have known these stories for sure.

These were the early days of heraldry, before formal, inherited coats of arms, when nobles were choosing their own emblems for their shields, banners and personal seals. In a time of helmets, which obscured the face, these signs were vital for identification in battle. They were also powerful symbolic statements about the wearer. The symbol Reynald chose for himself was the swan, the chivalric bird par excellence, enshrined in the earliest known cycle of chansons, known as the Chevalier au Cygne (the Swan Knight). The first part of the cycle is the Chanson d’Antioche (the Song of Antioch), which sings of the First Crusade down to the capture of the great city of Antioch in 1098. It continues with the Chanson de Jherusalem, taking the story on to the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Both these songs were in wide circulation in northern France during Reynald’s youth. In choosing the swan as his emblem, Reynald was perhaps revealing a romantic streak and was consciously associating himself with this tradition, and with a real-life hero of these chansons, the greatest knight of the First Crusade, Godfrey de Bouillon. After the capture of Jerusalem, Godfrey was chosen as the leader of the Franks in the East. In a saintly rejection of worldly glory, he refused the title of king, agreeing only to be ‘Guardian of the Holy Sepulchre’. Legend had it that Godfrey was descended from a swan – the Swan Knight of the chansons.

The books of chivalry and the stories of the chansons reveal the pattern for the knightly ideal. Central to them were the fame and glory that a knight would win on the battlefield in the service of his lord. And if the battle was against heathens, on crusade, on behalf of Holy Mother Church, then even better. At the time the crusaders were seen as:

heroes who from the cold of uttermost Europe plunged into the intolerable heat of the East, careless of their own lives, if only they could bring help to Christendom its hour or trial… nothing to be compared to their glory has ever been begotten by any age.3

A knight would also win glory in the service of his lady, following the principles of ‘courtly love’, a twelfth-century fashion in romantic manners and verse that was closely intertwined with the Second Crusade, through Eleanor of Aquitaine. Wife of Louis VII, the queen controlled most of southern France in her own right. She was also a great patron of the arts, especially of the troubadours, the southern French singers of the chansons and lays of courtly love. The adventurous Eleanor accompanied her husband on crusade and, from the very start, her presence added a sheen of glamour, especially for a youthful knight. She made sure everyone noticed her, and while churchmen disapproved of her extravagant displays, no virile young bachelor, especially one – like Reynald – with a taste for the flamboyant and dramatic, could fail to have been enamoured by the Amazonian queen on that remarkable day at Vézelay, and further seduced by the attractions of the crusade.

And of course if a knight did not go on crusade, far from winning the regard of a beautiful lady, there was the risk of the reverse. Just as women in the First World War handed shaming white feathers to non-combatants, so it is said that Eleanor and her ladies distributed spindles and distaffs to those reluctant to take the cross. It was clearly a knight’s honourable duty to defend the faithful in the East. This obligation was accentuated because the recently captured city of Edessa had been the first city to turn Christian, a fact stressed by the crusade’s promoters, such as Bernard of Clairvaux. Further spurring a good knight into action were the lurid reports of the sufferings of Edessa that filtered back to the West. The Lament on Edessa, for instance, was a contemporary poem on the catastrophe that Zengi’s armies inflicted on Edessa’s people:

Like wolves among a flock of lambs [they] fell upon them in their midst

They slaughtered indiscriminately, the martyrs let out streams of blood,

They massacred without compassion the young and the children

They had no mercy on the grey hairs of the elderly or with the tender age of a child.4

Not to avenge the venerable city’s destruction would be dishonourable. As Pope Eugenius put it, in his crusading proclamation:

It will be seen as a great token of nobility and uprightness if those things acquired by the efforts of your fathers are vigorously defended by you, their good sons. But if, God forbid, it comes to pass differently, then the bravery of the fathers will have proved diminished in the sons.5

Certainly those who took the cross, but then returned without completing the pilgrimage, suffered shame. Count Stephen of Blois was one of the chief knights of the First Crusade, but he deserted during the excruciating siege of Antioch and fled in disgrace to France. His wife Adela, the steely daughter of William the Conqueror, was humiliated by her husband’s cowardice. She made her feelings clear to Stephen, even in the most intimate of moments:

Being frequently reproved by a variety of persons for this conduct, Stephen was compelled both by fear and shame to undertake a fresh crusade. Among others, his wife, Adela, often urged him to it, reminding him of it even amidst the endearments of conjugal caresses.6

Goaded by Adela’s cruelly timed taunts, Stephen returned to the Holy Land to make amends. This time he fought through appalling hardships on the journey and completed his vow of pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Hopefully both he and Adela were satisfied that he achieved final redemption when, hopelessly outnumbered, he died bravely in battle against the Egyptians at Ramleh in 1102.

In any case, the quest for glory and the avoidance of shame are two sides of the same coin. As one Muslim adversary of the crusaders put it, bravery results from ‘contemptuous disdain of being considered a coward and acquiring ill repute’.7 Reynald would have seen it no differently.

And if the promise of glory on its own was not enough, then the example of the astonishingly successful First Crusade would have provided further motivation, which both Bernard and the Pope actively exploited. The participants had won glory in their lifetime, and immortality in the chansons. They also won earthly wealth and power: new counties, principalities and kingdoms were being created in the East, and new men were being raised in rank, becoming counts, princes and kings. There was property to be had too, especially in cities like Jerusalem, where the Muslim population was killed or expelled. A poor crusader – even the lowliest commoner – could suddenly find himself the owner of a palatial mansion. And there was booty: sacks of it. Along with the knowledge of the ages, stories – together with hard golden and silver evidence – of the fabled wealth of the East spread quickly back to Western Europe and acted as sparkling lures for those eking out a subsistence living. Writers such as Fulcher of Chartres, working in the newly formed crusader states, painted a glowing picture of life in the Holy Land, to tempt new crusaders to leave their hand-to-mouth existence and stake their claim to the cornucopia of riches:

Those who were poor [in the West], here God makes rich. Those who had few coins, here possess countless bezants;* and those who had not a villa, here, by the gift of God, already possess a city8

Fulcher was exaggerating, but from a general truth. Life in Outremer was dangerous and uncertain, but it was also wealthy. People lived in cities famous since antiquity, splendidly built in stone by the ancients and enriched by centuries of international commerce. Floors were covered in carpets, not strewn with reeds. Levantine towns had pure, running water, sewers and public baths. Food was varied: savoury, spiced and sweet. To the conquerors, however lowly, luxuries unimaginable in the West, such as silk clothing, sugar and oranges, were easily affordable. For those bridling in Europe under the feudal yoke, there were also clear social benefits. In Outremer the lowest Frankish peasant was immediately superior to the vast majority of the conquered (Muslim and native Christian) population. Still, most crusaders preferred to return to their homes after visiting the holy sites or campaigning for a season against the heathen. This made for a relatively small number of permanent expatriates and plenty of opportunities for ambitious immigrants of whatever class. Indeed, the crusaders suffered from an endemic manpower shortage in the East. This was something the Church well understood, which was why propaganda like Fulcher’s was so important. The Church needed to emphasize the rewards of crusading. The general message of Christian preaching may have been non-violence and the holiness of poverty, but when it came to the crusade, there was no contradiction between worldly and spiritual enrichment. As Fulcher put it, ‘God wishes to enrich us all.’9

For the rulers and great lords there were obvious risks to going on crusade, and the Pope recognized these by expressly guaranteeing protection to the lands and goods of anyone who took the cross. These great leaders were among those who would typically sail to the Holy Land in the spring, campaign for a season and then return home. Their wealth was back in Europe, and the Holy Land offered few additional prospects and much greater risk. Exceptions – such as the powerful Count Fulk of Anjou, who gave up his fief for life in the Holy Land – were few, and Fulk was compensated with the kingship of Jerusalem itself.

For those with little to lose, however, the potential rewards of a crusade were compelling and well worth the gamble. As Flora wryly observes to Phillis in the twelfth-century poem The Debate of the Knight and the Clerk, ‘It is not love that makes young knights brave. It is poverty.’10 The ambitious Reynald fell into this category, for although the Old French version of William of Tyre, the Estoire d’Eracles, tells us that Reynald was ‘well-born’, he was also ‘not a very rich man’. The lords of Donzy were affluent, middle-ranking barons and the family’s fortunes were on the up, but Reynald was a younger son. He had no fortune of his own and, critically, no certainty of inheriting land. His most valuable possessions were probably the tools of his trade: chainmail, longsword and, if he was lucky, a good warhorse. Indeed, as a landless younger son in the twelfth century, Reynald would have had little hope of a prosperous future. The tyranny of primogeniture meant that his oldest brother would inherit the family titles and property. For a man like Reynald, the crusade was literally a God-given opportunity to win a fief of his own in the East, settle down there and achieve a social standing and lifestyle far beyond his expectations in France.

The First Crusade provided brilliant, tempting examples of what could be achieved by an energetic, ambitious younger son who was prepared to take the cross – and a few risks. Bohemond of Taranto, the great Norman hero of the First Crusade and first Frankish Prince of Antioch, had been without a patrimony in his native Italy. Godfrey de Bouillon himself – Reynald’s model – was also a younger son. Peter of Blois, who penned an idealized portrait of Reynald in which he is depicted as a kind of warrior saint, tried to suggest that Reynald was not moved by earthly gain; he claimed that Reynald chose the crusade over worldly wealth by abandoning an advantageous marriage to go to Outremer.11 From what we know of Reynald’s later life in the East, this story seems very unlikely, and we can be sure that the desire for worldly advancement – in social rank and wealth – figured highly in his decision to take the cross.

An alternative course for younger sons was to enter the Church; this was the career path of Baldwin of Boulogne, younger brother of Godfrey de Bouillon. By the time of the First Crusade, Baldwin was already a wealthy and powerful bishop, but he cast the cloister aside for the crusade. He became the first crusader Count of Edessa and, in 1100, succeeded his brother to become King Baldwin I of Jerusalem. Like the ambitious Baldwin, Reynald was clearly not suited to the peaceful, contemplative life.

Indeed, completely the opposite.

If not destined for the priesthood, a young nobleman had one profession open to him – warrior. Young aristocrats were bred and raised to fight. These days it is hard to imagine what this entailed. It was not a matter of rough-and-tumble horseplay to toughen the youngster up, interspersed with some fencing and sparring. No, horseplay meant the serious horsemanship of the joust, with sharpened spears, and rough-and-tumble the lethal business of the tournament mêlée. A squire’s upbringing was more than just a school of hard knocks. It was the creation of a killing machine, where the paramount virtues were bravery, honour, skill at arms and the ability to deliver the telling blow with the greatest effectiveness, with ruthless intent and without scruple or hesitation. No double maths, followed by biology, for Reynald. His lessons were: charging with the couched lance, hunting with spear and crossbow, wrestling in full armour, killing with the longsword, killing with the dagger.

Picture the terrifying child soldiers of Africa, with a veneer of courtly manners, and you may get an idea of what was being bred in the castle courtyards of the twelfth century, or in the knights’ schools that produced masters of violence like Reynald or the unparalleled William Marshall, another ‘new man’ who hauled himself up from obscurity through force of arms. The big difference between the twelfth-century squire and the traumatized African kids is that medieval children were not doing something seen as evil. Unlike the vacant-eyed seven-year-old killers in Liberia, kidnapped and forced into senseless murder outside any existing social norms, the knight, however vicious, was a pillar of society. His development formed a vital part of the social order, and both religious and secular authorities validated the rectitude of his actions.

What a boy is bred to do, the man will do. In twelfth-century Europe there were trained killers running wild in lands where war was unfortunately often in short supply. Tournaments were one way in which knights vented these martial passions, and these mock-battles were critical to a knight’s training. Reynald took part in tournaments and enthusiastically embraced the pageantry that went along with them. He was certainly among the target audience of crusading propaganda, such as the song Chevalier, Mult Estes Guariz. This song’s lyrics are a stirring secular call to holy war, and would have been sung in the halls of nobles such as the lords of Donzy. It was designed to appeal directly to Reynald and his ilk, by likening the coming crusade to a tournament:

God has organized a tourney between Heaven and Hell… the Son of God the Creator has fixed a day for being at Edessa; there shall the sinners be saved… who will fight fiercely to wreak the vengeance of God12

Of course, tournaments were never enough to sate the desires and energies of medieval warriors. The oversupply of fighting men resulted in chronic banditry and feuding, frequently led by frustrated younger sons. The crusade harnessed this pent-up violence for praiseworthy ends. As the monk Guibert of Nogent wrote:

In our own time, God has instituted a Holy War, so that the order of knights and the unstable multitude who used to engage in mutual slaughter in the manner of ancient paganism may find a new way of gaining salvation.13

This had also been an important feature of the First Crusade, which tried to impose the ‘Peace of God’ in Europe, while channelling the ferocity of the knightly class against the infidel. According to the chronicler Fulcher of Chartres, Pope Urban II had proclaimed:

Let those who have been robbers now be soldiers of Christ. Let those who have been hirelings for a few pieces of silver now attain an eternal reward.14

Abbot Bernard himself, in his relentless letter-writing and preaching tours in support of the Second Crusade, repeatedly berated warring nobles and urged them to take vengeance on the heathen rather than kill each other. ‘Put a stop to it now,’ he said of their feuding:

It is not fighting but foolery Thus to risk both soul and body is not brave but shocking, is not strength but folly. But now O mighty soldiers, O men of war, you have a cause for which you fight without danger to your souls: a cause in which to conquer is glorious and for which to die is to gain.15

This was great news for Reynald. Raised as a warrior, he probably knew little beyond the rules of knighthood. Peace was no good for him. He had few skills and no penchant for peace. Twelfth-century warriors, like the troubadour Bertran de Born, revelled in their calling:

Whoever may plough and cultivate his land, I have always taken trouble about how I may get bolts and darts, helmets and hauberks, horses and swords, for thus do I please myself; and I take joy in assaults and tournaments, in making gifts and making love.16

This was what Reynald excelled at. It was what his upbringing and all his instincts drove him to do. The genius of the crusade was that it provided him with a way to get his kicks and exercise his skills in a legitimate, praiseworthy manner. For Reynald, it was an obvious choice. It is no good retrospectively, and anachronistically, criticizing him or his contemporaries for this. It was the way things were. The code of chivalry put strictures on knighthood, yes; but at its core it promoted ferocity. This applied to any knight worth his salt. The knights who went on crusade were born, bred and brainwashed for the task. So too were the Saracens they fought, who saw themselves as fighting their own version of holy war, the jihad. The entire culture around Reynald was one of barely varnished brutality.

An example of the dehumanizing upbringing experienced by young warriors is provided by one of Reynald’s enemies in the East, Usama Ibn Munqidh. While crusader knights are often depicted as rude, crude barbarian soldiers without any refinement, their Islamic opponents are usually shown as culturally and intellectually superior. This is inaccurate. Oriental civilization was overall undoubtedly superior in many ways; however, the Islamic Middle East at the time of the crusades – for all its relative sophistication – was riven by wars between rival princes and was ruled, like the Franks, by a bellicose warrior class, whether Turkish, Kurdish or Arabic. Usama was the archetype for these opponents of the crusaders – an Arabic ‘warrior and gentleman’ who is seen as the epitome of ‘Arab civilization as it flourished at the time of the crusades’.17 Usama, like Reynald, was brought up first and foremost as a warrior. In one of his poems he wrote:

My whole ambition was to engage in combat with my rivals, whom

I always took

For prey.18

His life was spent endlessly training for warfare. When he was not practising in arms and chainmail (Frankish mail was best), he was practising through the proxy of hunting. Instead of chasing boar and partridge along the Loing and roe deer in the rolling hills of Burgundy, Usama hunted francolin on the banks of the Orontes, leopard and lion in the dense thickets along the River Jordan. His father, who (typically for these warrior lords) was ‘greatly addicted to warfare’, taught him to kill from an early age. In his memoirs Usama describes how, using his little knife, he carefully sawed the head off a sleeping snake, while his father watched proudly.

Another of Usama’s anecdotes is even more revealing of the moral make-up of those men who fought each other during the crusades. When he was ten years old, Usama tells us, he hit one of his family retainers with a stick. When the servant pushed back at him, Usama simply:

pulled a knife from my belt and stabbed him with it. A big attendant of my father named Asad the Leader came, examined him and saw the wound, out of which flowed blood like bubbles of water every time the wounded man breathed Asad turned pale, shivered and fell unconscious.19

The man Usama had stabbed died later that day.

Remarkably, Usama does not tell us this story to shock us with his actions, or to examine the rights and wrongs of a ten-year-old boy casually killing a man on a whim. Rather, he uses it to illustrate ‘some men’s weakness of soul and faintness of heart, which I did not think possible among women’. To him, the sudden, callous murder is something that passes without comment. The ability to kill with such nonchalance had been instilled from his earliest years and would have been regarded as normal – even desirable – in a young medieval nobleman, whether Christian or Muslim. The only thing that shocks Usama about this event is the fact that his father’s big, strong attendant could faint at the sight of blood; something Usama was obviously well used to, even by the age of ten.

Dealing with blood was also one of the things Reynald would have had to master early in his development. As the monk Roger of Hoveden wrote, first-hand experience of violence was a vital part of a knightly education in the twelfth century:

He is not fit for battle who has never seen blood flow, who has not heard his teeth crunch under the blow of an opponent, or felt the full weight of his adversary upon him.20

Once in the East, Reynald would soon reveal his propensity for decisive action and extreme violence. It was a trait that appalled and shocked his enemies and sometimes his fellow Christians, but it was far from unique.

This is of course not to say that fighting men never thought beyond the violence of their trade. Usama was a poet and author, and so were troubadour knights like Bertran de Born and William IX of Poitiers. We do not know if Reynald was able to read – most knights could not – but even if he was not literary, a knight’s military activities had other dimensions, most importantly religious ones.

For modern readers it is sometimes difficult to understand how Christianity – the religion of ‘turn the other cheek’ – could have condoned, let alone blessed and encouraged, such violence in its name. It is a problem that the Church wrestled with as well, and the crusade was one of their solutions. Ever since St Augustine’s theory of a ‘just war’ in the fifth century AD, a Christian justification of aggression had been available.21 Many theorists had developed these ideas after Augustine, and by the twelfth century ‘the duty of the duly ordained soldiery’ was well accepted as a vital part of society. In his pioneering work of political science, Policraticus, the brilliant cleric John of Salisbury, Reynald’s contemporary, wrote that a knight’s duties were:

To defend the Church, to assail infidelity, to venerate the priesthood, to protect the poor from injuries, to pacify the province, to pour out their blood for their brothers (as the formula of their oath instructs them).22

Clearly twelfth-century Christendom saw no contradiction in mixing religion and violence.

Along with clerical theorists like John of Salisbury, the temporal legends of King Arthur and the Holy Grail – with their conjunction of religious and military images and storylines – confirm that knights saw themselves as spiritual warriors, fulfilling a holy duty. The most perfect expressions of this were of course the Military Orders, ‘the new knighthood’ championed by Abbot Bernard. The warrior monks of orders like the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights Templar were a: