by Marcus Bull
Oxford University Press, 1993
As the title of his book shows,
Marcus Bull takes a very specific area of southern France in which a
significant amount of charter and cartulary records survive in the monastic and
secular ecclesiastical communities to build a case for understanding knightly
piety in this period. In a nut shell,
rather than supporting an early concept that the First Crusade had its
inception in the Peace of God movement led by the church, or the more modern
understanding that the Reconquista of
Spain had any impact on the Christian versus Muslim world, Bull states flatly
that it was at a local level in the communication between the laity and their
churches that the conception of fighting for Christ was fostered. Using the importance of benefices to the
church on behalf of souls, devoting family members to the cloister including
children who would pray for their kinsman, and the established idea of
pilgrimage fully ingrained in the medieval mind, Bull argues that the
conception of penance for sin and the fear of the interim world between earth
and the Heaven or Hell awaiting, was the real force behind crusading.
While highly influential and often
cited as this work may be, the weakness of the argument lie in several obvious
areas that even Bull points out briefly.
First the work is in many ways reliant on a small but important part of
Europe as a whole. Motivations in one
corner of Christendom can be suggested as a guide to others, but southern
France holds peculiar attitudes of its own from this period, and was far more
influenced by the boarder it shared with Spain than Bull wants to give
credit. Truly the records kept by the
Church do not bear out the attitudes of the common or everyday man, but it
seems somewhat simple to argue that the French were barely involved in the
interests of their southern neighbor when it came to coming to blows with the
Muslim occupancy of Andalusia. Family
connections among the lay nobility are underplayed by Bull. The idea of an actual crusade or holy war
against the Muslim communities (and Jewish) did not form until later, but it is
a mistake to believe that there was no underlying influence on contemporaries
just a little over the Pyrenees mountains.
Secondly, chronicles from this
period must rely to a greater and lesser extent on the nature of the writers
themselves, and what they feel is important or of adequate not to compose. Interpretation of events rests with the
historian, which not all of these men were, for example Matthew of Edessa
versus Fulcher of Chartres, both of whom wrote in widely divergent styles and
with different analysis of events the recorded.
On the whole, Marcus Bull’s book
goes a long way towards establishing a realistic view of the medieval mind set
predating the First Crusade, and the influences left after the ultimately
successful outcome. His argument that
the element of making a gift to God through one’s property, family or time and
money, fits well with the serious commitment that crusading required if it were
to get an individual on his or her way, and explains away the fallacy of a completely
unexpected acclimation at the preaching of the crusade by Urban II at Clermont
in November of 1095, that clerical writers tended to stress. The inclinations were already there, and it
did not take much of a spark to set a gasoline doused pile of wood on fire.
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