Crusade as Miracle

In the prologue to his narrative history of the First Crusade, Guibert of Nogent argues that the events of that venture should be viewed as inspired and accomplished by God's will, and God's will alone. Even his act of writing the crusade’s history, he adds, was the will of God. The idea that the First Crusade was God's achievement, enacted through the Franks, even extends to the work’s title: Dei gesta per Francos (The Deeds of God through the Franks). In these times, Guibert states, God worked miracles greater than any He had previously performed. According to Robert the Monk, another Benedictine monk who, like Guibert, was writing a history of the First Crusade in the first decade of the twelfth century, the 1099 crusader conquest of Jerusalem was God's third most significant miracle, after the Creation and Christ's Crucifixion. In around 1200, the author/compiler of the Historia Peregrinorum, likely a Cistercian monk at the Swabian monastery of Salem (Salmansweiler), noted that Frederick Barbarossa’s involvement in the Third Crusade was a miracle of divine, not human, power. Around five years later another German Cistercian monk, Gunther of Pairis, stated in his Hystoria Constantinopolitana, an account of the Fourth Crusade’s capture of Constantinople, that however impious the crusaders’ actions might appear, no one should doubt that their achievement was God's will. Importantly, the idea that crusading, as salvific armed pilgrimage, was an act of God in which the participants were earthly instruments, can be found throughout various medieval narratives of crusading activity. Indeed, the emphasis that authors like Guibert and Robert placed on the divine agency at the heart of crusading reflects transforming attitudes towards warfare in a Latin Christian context. While the belief that violence could be divinely sanctioned was far from novel, however, the penitential form of warfare that the First Crusade represented was. Moreover, as the works of authors like Gunther and the anonymous composer of the Historia Peregrinorum reveal, the importance of emphasising God's involvement in subsequent crusading endeavours did not necessarily diminish over time.

It is this idea of divine agency that this chapter is primarily concerned with, in particular the role which miracles played in demonstrating God's involvement in crusading efforts. As we will see, according to many twelfth-century Latin Christian understandings, it was God's intervention which elevated the miraculous from the everyday workings of Creation.