Monastic Writers

The principal sources for this investigation are the chronicles of three Benedictine monks, written in northern France in the decade following the First Crusade: Baldric of Bourgueil’s Historia Ierosolimitana (‘History of the Jerusalemites’), Guibert of Nogent’s Dei Gesta per Francos (‘God’s Deeds through the Franks’), and Robert the Monk’s Historia Iherosolimitana (‘History of the Jerusalemites’).Footnote ⁵ These works represent the earliest dedicated monastic narratives of the First Crusade and the Council of Clermont. All three authors undertook a ‘theological refinement’ of the crusade narrative, the unlikely success of which they saw as an attestation of the power of God and an exemplar of righteous warfare.Footnote ⁶ Since the term ‘crusade’ did not exist at this time, either semantically or conceptually, they had the capacity to dictate its meaning according to their own monastic conceptualizations, distinct from the lived experience of the crusaders themselves.Footnote ⁷ As part of this process, Baldric, Guibert and Robert each undertook, seemingly independently, to rework the text of the Gesta Francorum (‘Deeds of the Franks’), an account completed by an anonymous, probably clerical, crusader shortly after the crusade’s end.Footnote ⁸ The monastic writers almost certainly had access to various manuscript versions of the Gesta Francorum, different both from one another and from that which survives.Footnote ⁹ Although we cannot know precisely what they each undertook to rewrite, all three sought to narrate a fuller account of the expedition to Jerusalem and its place in providential history.Footnote ¹⁰ Monastic history writing was a carefully crafted affair designed to demonstrate the divine in past events, and provide good and bad exempla for the contemplation of monastic readers.Footnote ¹¹ Rewriting the Gesta Francorum was a necessary means of imposing a recognizable monastic theology onto worthy events, and more fully revealing their implications.

Monastic interest in the crusaders can be partly explained by their perspective of the crusade as a participation in and perpetuation of the work of God. The three Benedictine authors all described the First Crusade as an undertaking inspired and led by the divine.Footnote ¹² Guibert even took care to reframe the title of the ‘Deeds of the Franks’ to highlight the role of God, entitling his account ‘God’s Deeds through the Franks’. The monks’ own daily lives were formulated around the ‘work of God’ (opus Dei) in the form of their daily divine office, a liturgical series of hours of prayer and contemplation. These meditative practices were bolstered by lectio divina, a spiritual reading that allowed them to contemplate the divine within the written word. The production of texts that expanded upon the events of the crusade was a way in which monks could contribute to that work of God from within the cloister; a practice Thomas Smith has perceptively termed ‘scribal crusading’.Footnote ¹³ The monk and the crusader were therefore both milites Christi, soldiers of Christ, who fought his battles on their respective battlefields.Footnote ¹⁴ However, the identity of the crusader lasted only as long as the campaign did, and particular praise was reserved for crusaders who either remained in the Holy Land to continue their service to God, or who renounced the world for the monastery in order to continue serving God under a new identity.Footnote ¹⁵

The Cross and Clermont

Contemporary perceptions and imagery of the cross had a long and varied semiotic history: it was among other things a symbol of the Passion of Christ; a sign under which myriad blessings were made; and the vexillum Christi, the banner behind which Christian peace, protection and salvation were maintained.Footnote ¹⁶ Contemporary traditions of preaching the cross, such as the Sermo de Sancto Cruce (‘Sermon on the Holy Cross’) of Abbot Odilo of Cluny (d. 1048), which may have formed part of Pope Urban’s own intellectual and pastoral background from his time as prior of Cluny (c.1070–4), would also have influenced monastic understanding of the investiture of the cross in 1095. These sermons, based upon a patristic inheritance, typically focused on the four points of the cross as virtues necessary for the maintenance of a holy life, and to take it up, literally or metaphorically, was to behave in imitation of Christ (imitatio Christi).Footnote ¹⁷ To be a cross-bearer was to be identified as embodying Christ’s virtue and will. The cross was also the triumphant weapon over the enemies of God and the protector of his followers, imagery which was woven through historical example in the monks’ divine office.Footnote ¹⁸ It was therefore a pertinent image for a military expedition such as the crusade.

There is no original account of Pope Urban’s speech at Clermont which survives. However, all original accounts seeking to reproduce the events of the council agree that some form of cross-conferral did take place, by which those wishing to go on crusade sewed a cloth cross onto their clothing as a representation of the vow they had taken.Footnote ¹⁹ There was no defined rite for cross-conferral in this period, and the practice remained fluid until the thirteenth century. It seems unlikely, however, that either the cross or the vow was the product of spontaneity. The council was a pre-planned and staged event, and the pope would have had plenty of time to play stage manager.Footnote ²⁰ Even more time was available to the chroniclers, who had the added advantage of knowing the outcome of the crusade, and could interpret its beginning accordingly. Especially because the ritual of conferring the crusader cross was undefined, it was, as Philippe Buc has reminded us for all rituals, vulnerable to the imposition of a different interpretation by those who witnessed or recounted it.Footnote ²¹ Those who experienced it may have understood it differently.

The monastic crusade chronicles therefore do not reflect the reality of the ritual so much as what their authors believed, with hindsight, ought to have been said or to have taken place. Guibert himself had not been present at Clermont, and stated explicitly that what he wrote was Urban’s ‘meaning, and not his exact words’.Footnote ²² Baldric and Robert both claimed eyewitness status, but admitted that their versions of the speech were editorialized.Footnote ²³ This authorial policy need not have hindered the episode’s significance. As Elizabeth Lapina has pointed out, eyewitness testimony was not always upheld as infallible, and many non-eyewitnesses highlighted divine inspiration as the superior source of understanding.Footnote ²⁴ In addition, these monastic reproductions of Urban’s speech were no longer a rallying cry to the warriors of Western Christendom, but sermons for contemplative audiences within the monastery, as well as for their patrons and others with whom they interacted. As the meaning of ritual is dictated by those undertaking and witnessing it, the investiture of the cross in the monastic chronicles is therefore likely to be a version arranged according to existing monastic understanding.

In the Gesta Francorum, the Council of Clermont and the taking of the cross are afforded only a brief passage. Having heard Urban’s words, the Franks ‘straightaway began to sew the cross onto the right shoulders of their garments, saying that they would all with one accord follow the footsteps of Christ’.Footnote ²⁵ This succinctness may be explained by the probable identity of the author as a southern Italian, who neither was in the vicinity of the council nor had any other version of the speech upon which to draw. The author may have witnessed the distribution of crosses by the Italian Norman Bohemond of Taranto, who had his most expensive cloak cut up to make them, an event which is afforded slightly more detail in the Gesta Francorum. Footnote ²⁶ However, this was explicitly a response to seeing the cross-bearing Frankish crusaders rather than an innovation by Bohemond himself. For our northern Benedictines, who all also include a version of Bohemond’s distribution of crosses, this alone was insufficient.Footnote ²⁷

The prominence of Clermont in the accounts by Baldric, Guibert and Robert is in stark contrast to the minimal reference in the Gesta Francorum. Robert explains that he had been commissioned to write his own history in part to correct this brevity.Footnote ²⁸ Compared to the brevity of the Gesta Francorum (eighty-five words in the critical edition), all three Benedictines produced at least a thousand words on Pope Urban’s call to arms.Footnote ²⁹ The monastic chroniclers also made distinctive changes to the form of the investiture of the cross, as a means of re-choreographing the ritual. According to Baldric:

Similarly, Guibert reported:

Robert recounted that Pope Urban preached that:

As well as recognizing the importance of the crusade within their contemporary history, the greater detail added by the monastic chroniclers demonstrates their understanding of the importance of ritual investiture at its outset. The implications of this are considered in more detail below.

Monks were not unique in emphasizing this moment as the beginning of the crusade. One of the main accounts of Urban’s speech and the investiture of the cross, plausibly the closest in form to what Urban actually said, is that of the cleric and crusade participant Fulcher of Chartres.Footnote ³³ However, several significant non-monastic accounts of the First Crusade written in the early twelfth century omitted any mention of the Council of Clermont, or did so only in passing, and consequently failed to present the investiture of the cross at the crusade’s outset.Footnote ³⁴ Their exclusion of Clermont reflects their own, non-monastic experiences and agendas. The Norman chaplain Ralph of Caen, for instance, narrated the deeds of Tancred de Hauteville (d. 1112), who had not been present at Clermont and for whose personal crusade journey it therefore had less bearing. In contrast, that Baldric, Guibert and Robert deliberately reconstructed the Council of Clermont indicates their common purpose in assigning importance to the conferral of the cross as part of the instigation of the crusade.

Monastic Profession and Investiture

The significance that the Benedictine authors place on the investiture of the crusader cross at Clermont reflects the importance of such rituals to medieval society, and to monks in particular.Footnote ³⁵ Conferring the cross would be especially familiar to monks who already conceived of themselves as cross-bearers. A treatise composed at the abbey of Bec in the early twelfth century, De professionibus monachorum (‘On the Profession of Monks’), suggested that bearing the cross implied a total subjection to God and renunciation of free will, just as one crucified cannot move under his own power: ‘Such is the monk [Sic et monachus]’.Footnote ³⁶ For monks, there was a ritualized moment, that of the profession, in which this cross was conferred. It was assimilated with the image of the monastic habit (habitus), although whether this was intended allegorically or whether monks were literally given or marked with the sign of the cross is often unclear.Footnote ³⁷

The shape of the habit was itself understood in likeness of a cross. According to a similitude attributed to St Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109), probably written by one of his monastic students some time before 1130, the monastic vestments were ‘in the same manner as the cross, [which] reminds the wearer always to remember the Lord’s Passion.’Footnote ³⁸ Gilbert Crispin, a student of Anselm at Bec, similarly described the habit as cruciform ‘in the extension of our sleeves and head-covering’, by which monks constantly bore ‘the mortification of the inner man’.Footnote ³⁹ By bearing the cross, monks demonstrated their ideal of apostolic poverty and imitation of Christ’s Passion by renouncing worldly comforts and giving themselves up entirely to God. Various monastic authors ascribed significance to certain elements of their dress, each indicative of a Christ-like virtue to be embodied by the wearer.Footnote ⁴⁰ In this way too the habit reflected the cross. Monks understood their habit as representing exteriorly the inner virtues which demarked, in their own understanding, the superiority of the monastic order. In the fifth century, John Cassian had begun his Institutes of the Coenobia with a description of the monk’s clothing as a metaphor through which to understand their inner worship, while the twelfth-century Anselmian similitude advised that anyone wishing to maintain religion ought to bind himself like a monk outwardly in order to demonstrate his inward virtuousness.Footnote ⁴¹ Baldric, Guibert and Robert, as well as their monastic readership, would have been familiar with symbolic investiture in this manner. That crusaders were presented as fellow cross-bearers implied their similar undertaking of imitatio Christi, both in virtue and by the renunciation of their own wills to undertake the work of God.

The symbolic importance of the habit demonstrates the link between uniform and uniformity, that the outerwear of the monks both reflected their inner virtue and tied them together internally and externally as a social group. Unity was a crucial consideration for monks who lived together in community, and something they sought to cultivate within their writing.Footnote ⁴² Only those who bore the uniform of the habit were a part of that social group. The term habitus was an inheritance of Aristotle’s notion of hexis (commonly translated in modern English as ‘disposition’).Footnote ⁴³ It refers to a sociological concept of group identity based on behavioural norms, attitudes and morals that was acquired through social observation rather than a natural state. Mutual participation in shared behaviours helped shape a common will and identity. Habitus was not a term used solely in relation to monastic life; for instance, in the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas used the concept to refer to a mode of behaviour granted by God and by which a Christian may live in a godly way.Footnote ⁴⁴ It is nevertheless especially noteworthy in the case of monks, because the Latin term for their clothing was the same as the dispositional habitus. The symbolic monastic habit therefore both reflected and confirmed the social group identity of the monks under a shared way of life.

The process of investing the habit at the monastic profession was itself also a symbol of group identity-making. Ritual processes such as this were important means of communicating identity within a community, for they promoted and demonstrated shared understanding and cooperation.Footnote ⁴⁵ The very existence of the ritual, in a sense, helped to define the monastic social group, and its written memorialization at both the profession itself and in later chronicle accounts helped to crystallize the transformation of identity which the profession instigated.Footnote ⁴⁶ In the Rule of St Benedict, an originally sixth-century text that must be presumed to have been familiar to every Benedictine in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the monastic profession was codified as a ritual process designed to impose monastic identity upon the participant after a period of testing as a novice. When profession was finally made, ‘from that very hour [and not before] he should be considered a member of the community.’Footnote ⁴⁷ The first act that the new monk undertook was to be stripped of his old clothes and vested in those of the monastery.Footnote ⁴⁸ This symbolic reclothing reflected both the divestment of the world, and the investiture into the new monastic social group. To be dressed as a monk was a visual shorthand to demonstrate the ways in which the monk was distinguished from their worldly fellows.Footnote ⁴⁹

The extent to which the Rule’s provisions were followed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries is difficult to determine, especially in terms of clothing. Not all of what Benedict had instituted for sixth-century Monte Cassino was likely to have been either suitable or even recognizable for the different fashions and climate of eleventh-century northern France.Footnote ⁵⁰ However, while the nature of the monastic habit may have changed, the existence of the ritual appears to have not. The eleventh century saw the production of a variety of customary texts building on Benedict’s provisions, which demonstrate a conscious and ongoing engagement with ritual practices. For instance, the Monastic Constitutions produced by the Benedictine archbishop of Canterbury Lanfranc around 1077 for circulation to English Benedictine houses, as well as the customary produced in the mid-1080s by the monk Bernard for the abbey of Cluny, both reiterate the investiture of monastic clothing as the culmination of the ritual process of making new monks.Footnote ⁵¹ Although the exact nature and timing of symbolic reclothing within the process of profession varied across both place and time, its centrality within the ritual remained consistent.Footnote ⁵² The Bec treatise De professionibus summarized the place of the habit within the monastic profession ritual: ‘the donning of the holy habit, with the blessing, makes the monk.’Footnote ⁵³

The habit could also be ritually divested from those who did not conform to the virtues it represented. Benedict’s Rule instituted that a monk’s old clothes should be set aside after his profession, so that if he abandoned the monastery he should be stripped of the monastic habit and reclothed as an outsider.Footnote ⁵⁴ In the eleventh century, Lanfranc prescribed the divesting and revesting of the habit for fugitive monks who wished to recommit themselves to the cloister.Footnote ⁵⁵ The identity-making of the symbolic investiture, which meant that one was only a monk after having been invested with the habit, clearly lasted only as long as the adorned adhered to the ideals of that identity. Fugitive monks were considered apostates, who had turned their backs from the service of Christ, and so were unworthy of wearing Christ’s cross.

Crusader Cross as Invested Symbol

Placing accounts of the investiture of the cross at Clermont in the context of monastic ritual identity-making gives greater clarity and depth to analysis of the assumptions and intentions of the authors. The investiture of the cross was emphasized by the Benedictine chroniclers as a means of presenting the crusaders as a unified group under God and his cross.Footnote ⁵⁶ The wearing of crosses certainly made the crusaders distinctive, and may have been deliberately intended to identify crusaders physically as a privileged group. Principally, it distinguished them from other pilgrims, who had never before 1095 adopted the symbol of the cross.Footnote ⁵⁷ In some ways, the process drew directly from the ritual of investiture familiar to monks. It was given so much prominence at the beginning of the narrative because, like the monastic profession and vestment, it was this process which confirmed the crusaders’ new identity.

Baldric, Guibert and Robert also made explicit the pope’s role in investing the symbol at the outset, something not directly stated in the Gesta Francorum. Footnote ⁵⁸ The crusader cross was almost certainly an institution of Pope Urban’s, but it is significant that the Benedictine authors all felt it necessary to ensure this was specified. In the eleventh-century customaries, the investiture of the habit had to be undertaken by the abbot; one could not simply don the habit and be considered a member of the monastic community. The formula ‘it is not the habit but a regular profession that makes the monk’ was familiar in concept well before its codification in canon law around 1230.Footnote ⁵⁹ Nevertheless, there was often ambiguity regarding the identity of those who wore the habit. Guibert himself echoed this uncertainty in a sermon he claimed to have given upon his election to the abbacy of Nogent-sous-Coucy, in which he counselled against granting too much to somebody on account of their bodily habitus, lest their internal habitus not match its quality.Footnote ⁶⁰ By highlighting the pope’s role in the establishment of the crusader cross, the chroniclers reiterated the importance of legitimate authority within rituals of social identity-making. Like monks, the ideal crusader was made, they did not simply become. Baldric of Bourgueil denounced as ‘entirely spurious’ (falsum omnino) certain people who flaunted dubious cross-shaped birthmarks and even ‘applied hot iron to themselves in the image of the cross’.Footnote ⁶¹ Baldric’s rejection of these popular expressions of cross-bearing solidified the necessity of papal authority in its bestowal. By spontaneously adopting the symbol in various improper forms, these people had circumvented this crucial aspect of ritualized investiture.

Crusade accounts narrate a similar treatment of those who failed to uphold their invested identity to that instituted for monastic outlaws. At the time when the monks were writing, there was no clear rule for how crusaders who abjured their vows ought to be treated. Robert the Monk implied the practice of a choreography of vestment, in which those who turned back from the crusade should transfer the cross from their chest or forehead to their back, bringing to pass ‘through this double symbolism what God himself orders in the Gospel: “he that taketh not his cross, and followeth after me, is not worthy of me” [Matthew 10: 38].’Footnote ⁶² However, outside the confines of the cloister, this practice would be nearly impossible to police. Instead, Baldric, Guibert and Robert denounced those who failed to uphold their crusade vow more generally as apostates, outcasts from Christian society and unworthy of God until their wrongdoing was put right.Footnote ⁶³ They all wrote with the knowledge that some who had abandoned the initial crusade later re-embarked upon the journey and reached Jerusalem (or died trying) in the years following, and they all display certain ‘apologetic tendencies’ compared to eyewitness accounts.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, that some sought to rectify their desertion should not disguise the impropriety of abandoning the way of Christ which the chroniclers established at the crusade’s outset. The language they employed was similar to that of De professionibus, which also highlighted the belief that those who abandoned avowed service to God were unfit for his kingdom.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Cross and Military Arms

Importantly, although the crusaders were invested with a cross, monastic chroniclers did not intend to make monks out of them. Crusaders bore the cross, but not the habit, and chroniclers were clear that the identity of the crusader was distinct from that of the monk. According to Guibert, holy wars had been instituted by God for the salvation of the ‘knightly order [ordo equestris] … without [them] having chosen (as is customary) a monastic life’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Robert and Baldric were also clear on this account. The pope allegedly addressed the Franks due to their pre-eminence in war, and exhorted them to act as ‘fearless warriors [intrepidi preliatores]’ while clerics supported them by ‘stretch[ing] out unwearied hands to heaven in prayer’.Footnote ⁶⁷ The identity with which the crusaders were invested by the religious symbol of the cross was a distinctly military one. Just as with the cruciform monastic habit, in these crusade narratives the cross was bound with another symbol, that of the cingulum militiae (‘military belt’) or military arms more generally.

For Guibert, the synonymity was explicit. The cross was a sign of the ‘honourable profession [honestae professionis]’ which the crusaders had undertaken, ‘something like a soldier’s belt, or rather that for those about to fight for the Lord, something bearing the sign of the Lord’s Passion.’Footnote ⁶⁸ He further noted certain old men or boys who accompanied the crusaders, but who did not intend to draw swords themselves. Guibert credited them for their zeal for imitatio Christi, ‘but not according to knowledge’ (Romans 10: 2), and noted theirs as a ‘vain’ (vane) undertaking even though God granted them salvation for their good intentions.Footnote ⁶⁹ According to Baldric, the synonymity was achieved through Pope Urban’s addressing specifically those who were equipped with the cingulum militiae, which he urged them to ‘lay aside … or [else] march out boldly as soldiers of Christ’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Robert, although he did not draw this comparison directly, nevertheless made the connection clear. The Franks were a people on whom God had bestowed particular glory in arms (itself a virtue invested rather than inherent), and only the ‘most valiant soldiers’ (fortissimi milites) ought to undertake the crusade.Footnote ⁷¹ The rest, the ‘old, simple-minded, or those unsuited to battle’, ought not to undertake the journey, for they would be ‘a burden rather than of any practical use’.Footnote ⁷² For all our monks, then, the identity of the crusader was to be that of the arms-bearer. In this regard, it is worth also mentioning the account of the German Benedictine Ekkehard of Aura (writing c.1106), who described the distribution of swords alongside pilgrims’ scrips and staves as part of the ‘new rite [novo ritu]’ of blessing the departing cross-bearers.Footnote ⁷³ This took place after the investiture of the cross itself, demonstrating clearly the association of both symbols within the bounds of ritual.

In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, military arms were almost as symbolically entwined with the miles (‘knight/soldier’) as the habit was with the monk.Footnote ⁷⁴ From antiquity, the cingulum militiae and military arms had been a means of visually distinguishing soldiers from civilians.Footnote ⁷⁵ This distinction was solidified in the twelfth century by certain practices attested in monastic literature, such as that of milites depositing their arms on the altar of a church to which they wished to dedicate themselves.Footnote ⁷⁶ This may have been what Baldric referred to when he quoted Pope Urban’s advice that milites unwilling to go on crusade ought to lay aside their arms. This was a ritual gesture, a symbolic divestiture that represented the renunciation of a social identity (that of the miles) by the simultaneous renunciation of its symbol. Monks also understood that milites could be made by the conferral of their symbolic arms. In his Monodies, which include reflection on his early life and adult experiences, Guibert noted that his mother had at one point promised to support him through the bestowal of arms if he wished to become a miles. Footnote ⁷⁷ Although there is little direct evidence in this period for clerical participation in these rituals, the terms of the 1102 Council of London included a clause that forbade abbots from making milites, suggesting that at the time of the crusade there had been a form of profession-like ritual for creating new milites with which monastic communities could engage directly.Footnote ⁷⁸ Although the terms of the council did not specify how milites were to be made, it is probable that abbots did so in ritual forms with which they were familiar, including the conferral of a symbol. Moreover, the council also reiterated the need for religious persons (particularly bishops) to dress appropriately for their order.

How the process for making milites was conceived around the time of the First Crusade must remain speculative, for unlike the monastic profession ritual there was no codified process for creating a miles in this period. However, Max Lieberman has demonstrated that arms-giving practices did exist in the eleventh century, inconsistent in form and application, but nonetheless representative of a constitutive ritual designed to create new milites. Footnote ⁷⁹ The silences regarding these rituals which typify contemporary sources mean that it is impossible to gain an accurate picture of how widespread these practices were. However, although conscious ritual deliveries of arms were probably more prominent among the higher-status milites who dominate the historical record, it is unlikely they were exclusive to them.Footnote ⁸⁰ It was a phenomenon widespread enough to suggest that military arms, and the cingulum militiae in particular, were central symbols for identifying the milites, even before the formalization around the end of the twelfth century of a ‘knightly’ identity and a social ritual that could be termed (albeit still with caution) ‘knighting’.Footnote ⁸¹ As with the monastic habit, the symbol reflected the identity, and its conferral represented the investiture of that identity. Assessing the ‘knightly habitus’ is not really possible until at least the later twelfth century, when records from the lay nobility survive in sufficient volume for their self-conceptualization to be reconstructed with a certain level of confidence.Footnote ⁸² John France has suggested that the early twelfth-century ‘knighting’ ritual represented ‘the moment of promotion to a self-conscious group’.Footnote ⁸³ If ‘knighting’ rituals are a sign of group consciousness, then the monastic depiction of deliveries of arms tells us of the monks’ own consciousness and intention to portray the milites as a distinct social group. Arms-giving rituals in monastic writing therefore reflect the same narrative of social identity-making as the monastic profession rituals with which Baldric, Guibert and Robert would be familiar.

The earliest detailed account of the ritual of military identity-making within monastic writing is that of the delivery of arms to Count Geoffrey of Anjou in 1128, composed by John of Marmoutier between 1170 and 1180 in his Historia Gaufredi (‘History of Geoffrey’). According to John, after having been interviewed by King Henry I to ascertain his suitability, Geoffrey took a bath; on emerging, he was dressed in ‘incomparable armour’ (lorica incomparabili) of impenetrable double-woven mail. He then donned iron greaves, was affixed with golden spurs, a shield festooned with golden lioncels was hung around his neck, and a tempered helmet (again, supposedly impenetrable) placed on his head. Finally, he was equipped with an ash spear tipped with Poitevin iron and a sword allegedly crafted by the mythical smith Wayland.Footnote ⁸⁴ This is, of course, a highly stylized episode and cannot be taken as an accurate depiction of arms-giving rituals in the later twelfth century, let alone of Count Geoffrey’s own in the 1120s. However, even within the bounds of imaginative literature, symbolic investiture is a predominant theme. Count Geoffrey became a miles primarily through being dressed as one. The formula employed here is not monastic, but rather exported from the literary world of the chansons de geste, vernacular poems which celebrated the deeds of (predominantly) heroic laypeople.Footnote ⁸⁵ However, like most monastic histories, the Historia Gaufredi was written primarily for a monastic audience, and so the episode should be understood as a deliberate insertion understandable to John and his fellow monks as the adoption of a habitus. The superlative quality of the arms he received was intended to reflect the same qualities in Geoffrey as a miles.

In monastic works written closer to the First Crusade it is unusual to find descriptions of the process of the milites’ profession in any detail, if at all.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the reception of arms and other military equipment remain the central, indeed frequently the only, element mentioned, which suggests that this was an understood means of identifying milites. The long-established practice of stripping the cingulum from recalcitrant milites (for a permanent or fixed term, redolent of monastic practices with the habit) may also be noted in this regard.Footnote ⁸⁷ That arms could be ritually removed implies their place as a symbol of social identity-making. Only milites ought to bear arms, just as only monks ought to wear the habit, although again it is implausible that this ideal reflected reality. Nor is it likely that symbolically stripping a miles’ arms often successfully disarmed him: in the case of former crusader Thomas of Marle, he was not even present when the sentence was passed.Footnote ⁸⁸ Nevertheless, this demonstrates the role of the cingulum militiae in defining the boundaries of military identity, at least within monastic conceptualization.

The Implications of Symbolic Investiture

The place of the crusader cross within monastic accounts of the First Crusade must therefore be understood as indelibly bound up with contemporary understanding of ritual and arms-bearing, as well as manifesting the imposition of the monks’ own order onto the world they described. While it is plausible to argue, as Cecilia Gaposchkin does, that it was ‘not the sword that defined the crusader, but … the cross’, it is also important to highlight the symbolic blending of the two images: the combination of the cross with military arms defined the social identity of the crusaders, just as its combination with the habit defined the monk.Footnote ⁸⁹ The purpose of endowing crusaders with a symbol that was, as Guibert had noted, superior to that of military arms, was related to the direct correlation between the quality of the invested symbol and the qualities of the recipient.Footnote ⁹⁰ Cistercian monks, for instance, made a conscious change in the colour of their habit, from the black of the Benedictines to undyed white, because they believed it better reflected their closer adherence to monasticism’s ascetic ideals.

The superiority of the crusaders to other arms-bearers is, once again, a deliberate feature of the monastic crusade chronicles. According to Guibert, unlike almost all others who had ever borne arms, the crusaders were not driven by a desire for money or fame but ‘simply to protect Holy Church’.Footnote ⁹¹ They were, in his mind, comparable to the Maccabees, warriors of Scripture who fought in the name of the Lord.Footnote ⁹² Baldric described the laymen who took the cross at Clermont as ‘magnificent men, although they wore the sword-belt of lay knighthood’.Footnote ⁹³ His implication was both of the inferiority of the symbol of the cingulum militiae, and that the superior crusaders deserved a similarly superior symbol to that of their contemporaries who were allegedly engaged in mutual and ungodly slaughter.Footnote ⁹⁴ Robert the Monk noted the superiority of the Christian army directly by their wondrous arms. They were such, he claimed, ‘as befitted an army of God engaged on such a venture: what human eye could bear the glitter of their breastplates, helmets, shields, or lances in brilliant sunshine?’Footnote ⁹⁵ The pre-eminence of their arms as reflecting their military prominence is reminiscent of Geoffrey of Anjou’s arming in the Historia Gaufredi. According to Robert, the crusader leader Godfrey of Bouillon had a blade that no armour or shield could withstand.Footnote ⁹⁶ One wonders how it would fare against Geoffrey’s impenetrable armour.

Of course, individual crusaders were often far from paragons of Christian milites. As a group within monks’ narratives, however, they were invested with an ideal based upon monastic morals. It has been powerfully argued that the chief aim of Baldric, Guibert and Robert had been to infuse the lay crusaders with monastic values and depict the crusade itself, to borrow Jonathan Riley-Smith’s phrase, as a ‘military monastery on the move’.Footnote ⁹⁷ This argument is convincing, although the social identity with which the crusaders were invested was clearly distinct from that of monks. Even when Robert or Guibert praised Godfrey of Bouillon by suggesting that his virtue could ‘give the impression of a monk’ and was ‘worthy to be imitated by monks’, it was never to say that he was one.Footnote ⁹⁸ A better conceptualization is offered by Katherine Allen Smith: that of the crusade depicted as a ‘moral performance’ of traditional spiritual geographies.Footnote ⁹⁹ As she points out, the Benedictine crusade chroniclers brought to bear the sum of their intellectual training and monastic morals not as professional crusade chroniclers (no such thing can be thought to have existed in the first decade of the twelfth century) but as monks. The morals and ideals they narrated were unsurprisingly monastic in form, and they presented them by superimposing the virtues of the cross they themselves wore and the ritual of investiture they would have found so familiar.

The powerful symbol of the cross, the experience of the monastic profession, and the understanding of military arms as a symbol of the milites all coalesced in the Benedictine chroniclers’ depiction of the Council of Clermont. It is only by acknowledging these wider considerations, and in particular the role of ritual investiture alongside the significance of the symbol itself, that their presentation of the event and its place within contemporary society can be fully understood. Monastic accounts of the investiture of the crusader cross should be read alongside contemporary narratives of arms-giving as part of a developing monastic conceptualization of military identity in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. They also depict a twofold bestowal of identity. On the one hand, the conferral of the cross brought crusaders and monks together under the umbrella of cross-bearing, portraying the virtuousness of crusading as another form of the ‘work of God’. Its depiction by monastic authors maintained the milites’ distinction from monks through conscious use of the imagery of arms, associated with the superior symbol of the cross. Giles Constable has argued that crusaders did not fit into ‘the accepted patterns of medieval society’ because of their new type of fighting for God.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In the version of the crusade presented by Baldric, Guibert and Robert, however, this is not the case. The crusaders’ social identity, even if it lasted only as long as the crusade did, was demonstrated by the ritual investiture of the cross and suggested a way according to monastic morals in which milites could find their place in Christian society. Monastic readers of the crusade narratives, fellow cross-bearers, were accordingly encouraged to remain steadfast in their own societal place.