Fantastic Metropolis

All this power, however, had its disadvantages. When a religion is young and expanding, it can be syncretic: it can absorb the rites of the cult of Brigit and create a St. Brigid, it can incorporate into itself the traditions of the Cynocephali in the form of St. Christopher. It spreads by virtue of its novelty as well: by being new, it can appeal to those who have found themselves disenfranchised by the cults and faiths they knew before. But by becoming the franchise, it falls to Catholicism to disenfranchise others. How is the faith expected to convert those who have grown up among it and thus feel familiar contempt for it? Furthermore, the faith’s growing popularity and its use by the Empire and later by lords and monarchs to justify their rule, to use it to prop up the social order causes those who study the religion more (especially as the central book of the faith is translated into languages that more can read, such as when Alfred of Wessex has the Bible translated into Old English) to begin to apprehend the difference between what they see the Church (and those lords and kings who claim divine support) actually doing and what the ideals are professed to be. As a result, by the late 900s, the clash between the Islamic invaders of Spain and their Christian rivals (and sometimes subjects) had at once reintroduced a good deal of lost scientific, astrological/astronomical and even cultural knowledge (allowing for the return of classical authors like Juvenal to the curriculum of Christian schools) and had introduced new religious ideas to a Europe that had begun to stagnate as well as grow disinclined to keep waiting for an apocalypse that didn’t seem to be on its way. When Urban II declared the First Crusade in 1095, he was doing so in part to alleviate social pressures in Europe: a century of military adventurism had seen the Normans extend feudalism over Saxon England and Moor-dominated Sicily and Italian Lombardy, and a whole host of second and third sons without much chance of a patrimony were itching for someplace to despoil and conquer. And let us not forget that not only was Spain still in Muslim hands, but the Seljuk were making themselves known for the first time in the Middle East, threatening even Constantinople and Jerusalem, leading Alexius Comnenus, Emperor of Constantinople, to make an urgent plea for assistance in the form of a letter to Urban II himself.

All very fine, save that the Crusade was a lot less successful than Urban might have hoped. Oh, it began very well indeed for Western Christendom. By July of 1099, while Hildegard was a child of less than a year old (and thus, two years away from her first vision) the Crusade had taken Jerusalem, led by (among others) Raymond of Toulouse of the Saint-Gilles family of Languedoc. Despite this initial success, a new Crusade was being proposed by the 1140s and Bernard of Clairvaux, who had taken his name from the monastery he’d founded on land donated by Count Hugh of Champagne (himself a prominent member of the order known at the time as “The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ” and which would become known as the Knights Templar due in part to Bernard’s influence over the Council of Troyes and Pope Honorius II) was the point-man for promoting it, while at the same time for over forty years, men who had gone to fight in the Holy Land were returning to their homes, changed by the experience. One example of a changed man was the aforementioned Hugh of Champagne, who disavowed his wife on changes of infidelity, disinherited her son as a bastard, and passed control of Champagne to his nephew Theobald, dedicating himself to the Templar order founded by his own vassal Hugh of Payens. Another example of a man changed by the crusades would be Stephen of Blois, who took part in the expedition alongside Raymond of Toulouse and whose own son Stephen would contend with Matilda, wife of Geoffrey of Anjou and daughter of Henry I of England, for the throne left behind by William the Conqueror. (Interestingly, it was Hugh of Payens who helped bring the marriage of Geoffrey of Anjou and Matilda about while on a fundraising mission for the Templars in 1127, brokering it as part of a deal that married Fulk of Anjou, Geoffrey’s father, to Melisende, the daughter of King Baldwin II of Jerusalem. Fulk was an associate member of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jesus Christ.) So busy was Bernard in this purpose that it is entirely possible that his mission (doubtless not approved of by the descendants of Raymond of Toulouse, he who breached the walls of Jerusalem) to Languedoc in 1145 to combat that Cathar heresy might not even have happened if he’d not been exposed to the blazing, anti-rational visionary fury of Hildegard’s writings.