Mind-Munitions

74
Propaganda in the Middle Ages
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 signi
ficant 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