Or, Why The Germans Did Not Go On the *Second Crusade?
The answer is: they actually did. But their role in this Crusade will be markedly less significant than the one they played in the previous expeditions, due to a series of contrived circumstances that we'll see right now.
A composite map of the [Holy] Römisches Reich depicting its territorial extent before the Salian dynasty. It must be explained that the northeastern part of the Empire, that is, the Billung March, was lost to the pagan "Wends" in the later Ottonian phase, as did much of Saxony north of the Elbe river.
In 1137, when the word about the Papal summon substantiated in the bull
Ut Omnes Gentes Christorum spread in Germany, it was actually received with great enthusiasm. The communities and provinces of Swabia, Bavaria, and of the Rhineland and Saxony, were experiencing an unprecedented demographic and economic expansion, coupled with a spiritual revivalism, similar to what was happening in Francia, in the Iberian Peninsula and in Scandinavia, and the idea of “
taking the cross” to discover distant and mythical worlds was tantalizing. If the ecclesiastic estates were particularly influential in places such as Mainz, Magdeburg and Trier, one could see a parallel development of self-governing communes in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Nuremberg, among other places, and these rising commoner classes routinely cajoled the Kaiser to be favored with greater privileges than those of the Lombard and Tuscan emporia.
At the time, the few extant legal documents that describe the Imperial organization of the early 12th Century give us an embryonic form of the distinction between the fiefs of the Reich that will develop in the next following centuries, between the:
- “Urbes Curatoriales” – the fiefs whose holder was a member of the Church hierarchy, usually an archbishop or a bishop, and, sometimes, an abbot;
- “Urbes Principenses” – urban settlements governed by a feudal lord, usually of baronial or comital rank, and, rarely, directly by the Dukes or Margraves (e.g. Regensburg in Bavaria or Nancy in Upper Lorraine);
- And “Urbes Ministeriales” – territories ruled by magistrates (called “Vögt” or “Praepositus”) directly subordinate to the Imperial Crown, as was the case of Aachen and Worms.
The Crusading enthusiasm was particularly more fervent in the more urbanized regions of the Reich, notably the Rhineland and Lorraine, but also the Alpine region and central Burgundy. We read about various enterprises furnished by the collective resources invested by groups of citizens, and elder men and women alike believed that their own salvation could be secured by proxy, as their own sons and daughters would make the pilgrimage in their stead. On the other side of the realm, however, noticeably in the northern regions that comprised the country of the Saxons, there were but a few adepts. This can be explained by the fact that these regions were under a constant state of hostility against the “
Wends”, a confederation of pagan Slavic peoples living in Pomerania and Pomerelia, whose population and insolence had grown tenfold ever since they had expelled the conquering armies of the Ottonian Emperors of old.
Detail of engraving depicting the bustling city of Cologne (c. 1200), whose "Gothic" architecture would become renowned through the whole continent
As it happened, however, the current Emperor,
Lothair II, was not particularly interested in leading the “most exalted expedition” with his various subjects, likely afflicted with the ails of advanced age. So far, his reign had been stable and tranquil, and devoid of any significant military actions; by diplomacy, he obliged the
King of Denmark, the bastard Eric II, into paying homage in exchange for recognition of his claim to the throne; in another front, he mediated the conflict between Bohemia and Poland, and obtained tribute from
King Boleslaw III the “Wry-mouthed”. In Italy, his relationship with the Papacy had hitherto been mostly amicable, and, after becoming the undisputed master of the southern half of the peninsula, Duke Roger of Sicily, Apulia and Calabria also acknowledged Imperial suzerainty. There were, however, elements that constantly intrigued to jeopardize his dominance, most notably the Swabian
Hohenstaufen, who had been greatly favored by the late Salian Emperors, and resented the fact that they had not attained the Imperial supremacy. Of particular note, the Kaiser was rivaled by
Frederick II, the Duke of Swabia, and his brother
Conrad of Franconia, the same that had been elected an anti-king in 1127, opposed to Lothair. Conrad’s recognition of Kaiser Lothair II had only happened a few years before, in 1135, and thus the ruling monarch still held a bitter animosity towards the Hohenstaufen, and carefully monitored their every step.
The lack of patronage from the monarch most certainly caused the adhesion of the German subjects to the *Second Crusade to be fragmented, and their efforts, dispersed. Everywhere one could hear about the noblemen in Bohemia gathering their banners, as did the freemen of the Rhineland and the knights of Franconia, but there was no concerted enterprise as that devised by the King of France.
To be fair, the Hohenstaufen brothers petitioned to the Emperor for him to assemble a great host, but were met with a lukewarm reception and vague promises. It soon became clear that the ears of the King gave more attention to the interests of the Saxon lords, who desired to campaign against the pagans in the Baltic littoral, and had no intention of venturing as far as Asia.
Now, Duke Conrad of Franconia earnestly wanted to take the cross, but his brother convinced him against it. Departing from Germany right now would mean curtailing their political influence and delay their pretenses to Imperial kingship, especially considering that Lothair was already old. And, certainly, their greatest political adversary, the Duke of Bavaria – who was the Kaiser’s son-in-law and poised to succeed him upon his death – would never go to the Orient if his rivals stayed in Europe.
This explains why only the Lorrainers endeavored to join the *Second Crusade in its first phase, led by
Simon I [
brother of Theodorich of Flanders], who would, though, unexpectedly die in 1139 A.D., while traversing Hungary. This tragedy would dissolve his army and put Lorraine out of the expedition for the time being.
*****
It was in late 1138, however, that the troubles began. The Crusadist movement, in various places, was quickly enraptured by the apocalypticist rhetoric so honed by the low-ranking prelates. It was all too common to hear about divine and angelic apparitions, miraculous happenings, and ominous events, not unlike the omens witnessed by their pagan forefathers; it was just that, now, these otherworldly phantasms were associated with saints and angels, and not with brooding forest gods or cave dwellers. Astrologers and exorcists, in these years, were regarded as authorities; their prophecies and divinations were taken literally, such as one voiced by a certain Burgundian esoteric scientist, who claimed that the Apocalypse was imminent, and that every man and women ought to march with their children and elders to “Babylon”, where God would pass the ultimate judgment.
What drew the attention of the authorities, however, was a column of cross-bearers that traversed along the Rhine valley just as the snows of November began to fall. It was a large congregation of minor knights, parochial priests, peasants, laborers, artisans, mostly from the countries of Westphalia and Lorraine, led by an impostor who claimed to be the resurrected
Archbishop of Magdeburg, Norbert of Xanten (d. 1134), and, for this reason, was named “
Pseudo-Norbert”. His inflamed preaching led the Crusaders to perpetrate a series of questionable acts in the region located between Lorraine, Burgundy and Swabia. The First Crusade had shown that religious fervor could be easily harnessed to produce collateral impact against religious minorities, most notably the Jews, whose communities had grown tenfold under the Ottonians, and suffered greatly at the hands of the Lorrainer armies,
40 years before. Now, this “Norbertine” host once again stoked the flames of intolerance and agitated the rabble with antisemite hatred, but, this time, the damage was lesser on human lives, and more on their patrimony, which was dilapidated by infuriated Crusaders, from Speyer to Haguenau. It was commonly said that they could not go to the Orient to face the infidel before purging their own country of the “Christ-killers” who drank the blood of innocents!
A particularly vicious episode, one that provoked widespread uproar, happened in the parish of Schönau, where they attacked and butchered the congregation affiliated to Worms, supposedly to purge the realm from “lepers and heretics”. They believed that the region was a haven for a group of sectarians that had recently denounced as heretics, the
Henricians, unaware that these ones had been active in the region of Alpine Burgundy, not in Rhineland. Then, the Prince-Bishop of Worms, infuriated by the unexpected barbarity and the violation of the sacrosanct patrimony of the Church, excommunicated the Norbertines and demanded satisfaction from the lay prince, in this case, Duke Frederick II of Swabia. The Hohenstaufen magnate, unwilling to take any action in the onset of a cold winter, argued that it was all an ecclesiastic matter, to which he held no jurisdiction.
Unsatisfied, the Diocese of Worms then appealed directly to the Imperial Court. Emperor Lothair II, at the time sojourning in an ancient Roman bath-town near Lünenburg, heard about the episodes of violence by the Crusaders in the eve of Christmas, and was outraged by the contemptuous abuse of the memory of the late Archbishop Norbert - who was a personal friend of his - and took immediate action in face of the negligence of the Swabians. Before the year ended, an interdict was placed upon the communities whose knights had participated in the atrocities and ordering reparation to the ransacked Jewish and Christian districts. By the Kaiser's decree, the
ministeriales, both secular, and spiritual, were expected to withhold any support to these “cross-bearers” who had broken their vows of piety and, if they perpetrated acts of violence inside Imperial territory, they were to be arrested and put to trial.
The purposed solution to the problem, predictably, caused other problems.
In both Swabia and in Franconia, the Hohenstaufen brothers coalesced with like-minded Church ministers, chief among them the Archbishops of Mainz and of Augsburg, and denounced what they saw as an usurpation of both seigniorial and ecclesiastic prerogatives. We can suspect, as per the narrative of
Otto of Freising, that the ambitious Staufer purposefully exaggerated the situation out of its initial proportion in an effort to provoke a political crisis. And in this, after all, they succeeded, when the Papacy became entangled in the legal quandary, and placed himself against the Kaiser’s interests.
Non-contemporary illumination of Emperor Lothair II (sometimes reckoned as "III", as if preceded by Lothair II, King of Lotharingia, who, however, was never crowned Emperor)
By 1140, the whole political structure of the Reich had been paralyzed, and the misunderstandings between the stubborn Lothair and the zealous Anacletus threatened to revive the turmoil of the Investiture Controversy, which had been mostly dwindled after the celebration of the Concordat of Worms. The Kaiser’s most stalwart partisan was his son-in-law,
Henry X Welf of Bavaria, who by then was also the overlord of the Duchy of Saxony, and brother to
Welf VI, the Margrave of Tuscany and Spoleto. Among his supporters there were also the great bannerlords of the north,
Albert of Brandenburg and
Conrad of Meissen, who had greatly benefited from Lothair’s patronage. Fearing the strength of this coalition, in the case the realm broke into open warfare, the Hohenstaufen allied with the
Babenbergers of Austria. But their greatest success was in co-opting the allegiance of many republican communes and episcopalian congregations, presenting themselves as the protectors of the privileges and prerogatives of the burghers and clergymen against the King’s authority.
What the Swabians could not have foreseen was that their adversaries would launch a preemptive strike, headed by none other than the Duke of Bavaria – whose
casus belli was the supposed violation, by the Hohenstaufen magnate Frederick, of the Welfen’s inheritance in Altdorf and in Ravensburg. Frederick protested against what he saw as an unjustified aggression, but, by early 1141, the Swabian levies had already been conscripted to face the knightly vanguard from Bavaria in the border regions, all while the forces of Tuscany and Spoleto were being assembled in Parma with the intent of crossing the Alps.
Fortunately, Pope Anacletus II interfered with surgical precision, and successfully obtained a truce between the belligerent parties before significant operations had been concluded. To solve the disputes, he summoned the Kaiser and his vassals to a conference in Trento [
Trènt].
There, an armistice was obtained, and the lords who had broken the peace of the realm and raised arms forged a pact to join together in the *Second Crusade as penitence, in what amounted to the most remarkable example of a “trucial expedition” so far. It is also worth noting that the Pope implicitly legitimized Lothair’s imperial interdict against the Rhinelander communities that had ushered violence against Jews (and Christians) alike. Once again he reaffirmed the
Sicut Judaeis bull and admonished the German lords that the conversion of the Judeans might not be achieved by bloodshed.
Finally, as a concession to his own interests, Lothair obtained from Pope Anacletus II a sanction to wage a holy war against the “Wends” – a campaign that promised to increase the territorial reach of the Saxon potentates loyal to the Emperor –, on the condition that their armies could only be mustered after the German Crusaders had returned home from the Outremer.
As it generally happens in the course of human events, neither of the architects of this pact would survive to see it concluded: Pope Anacletus II would pass away in 1144, the final year of the *Second Crusade, and Lothair II in 1146, in the eve of the “
Pomeranian Crusade”. Then, it would be seen that the Compact of Trento had merely delayed an inevitable dynastic war between the Welfen and the Hohenstaufen, one that would reshape the very political fabric of the [Holy] Roman Reich.
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Notes and comments: Lothair II is an historical HRE Emperor, but his life diverges a bit from OTL. The most noticeable fact is that, whereas IOTL he waged a long war against the recently crowned King of Sicily, in the context of a dispute between the legitimate Pope Innocent II and the Antipope Anacletus II, and died of a disease he contracted while returning from Italy to Germany, here his death is butterflied because its peculiar circumstances cannot be replicated.
The same goes to Henry X of Bavaria, whose death, albeit of natural causes, was sudden (aged only 30 years old). Considering the divergences, once again, we see that these two individuals will survive their historical deceasing dates.
All the other characters mentioned are historical: IOTL Frederick of Swabia – the father of Frederick Barbarossa – tried unsuccessfully to bid for the Imperial Crown, as did his younger brother Conrad III, who, oddly enough, was recognized King of Germany, but was never coronated Roman Emperor (so he is usually kept out of the official records).
As you might be seeing, one of the divergences I’m interested in exploring is to favor the Welfs instead of the Hohenstaufen. This gives us some very interesting implications, because the Welfs, up until the Staufers broke their feudal territories, had accumulated the prestigious Duchies of Bavaria and Saxony, as well as the Canossan inheritance, and were unquestionably the most powerful vassals of the Emperor. With this divergence, we can perhaps conceive a gradual political centralization of the Empire, as many TL’s present.
The Henrician heresy is also an historical one, as you can see in the link posted above, but there is no evidence that they became present in southern Germany; their area of influence was, however, in southeastern France, so I figured it would be a very convenient curiosity to go unnoticed.
Despite being significantly anticipated, TTL Wendish Crusade won’t be significantly different from OTL, so I won’t be delving in details about it in the next installments.
Also, keep up the great work - this is the best Crusader timeline ive read and it has excited me to learn more about the era (as any great timeline will do!)