The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land

by Thomas Asbridge

For all these references to the ‘remission of sins’ awarded to the First Crusaders, the actual formulation of the spiritual rewards being offered remained vague and equivocal. Questions that might trouble theologians and even warriors–Would participation remit all sins or only those confessed? Was martyrdom guaranteed to all those who died on crusade?–had yet to be answered definitively. It was Bernard, abbot of Clairvaux and supporter of the Templars, who dealt with one of the thorniest theological consequences of crusading. With the preaching of the First Crusade, the papacy had, in a sense, unwittingly opened Pandora’s Box. The call for a crusading army to manifest God’s divine will on earth might suggest that God actually needed man, and therefore could not be truly omnipotent–a train of thought that obviously had explosive potential. Bernard countered this problem with typical intellectual agility. He argued that God only pretended to be in need as an act of charity, deliberately engineering the threat to the Holy Land so that Christians could have another chance to tap into this new mode of spiritual purification. In one step the abbot defended the idea of crusading and promoted its devotional efficacy. Bernard would play a central role in the promulgation of the Second Crusade, but in the first instance the work of launching the expedition was undertaken by others.