The Byzantine Empire in the later eleventh century was staggering under the blows of the Seljuk Turks, and turned for aid to the papacy, despite the schism that divided them. Pope Urban II responded to the appeal by summoning a council of churchmen and nobles at Clermont, with the object of seeking armed help for the East and the freeing of the Holy Places. His words struck one of the hidden springs of history, and on that November day of 1095 he called into being the age of the crusades. He had hardly finished speaking when his hearers pledged themselves with tumultuous ardour to the cause he preached, crying 'Deus lo vult! Deus lo vult!' and tearing up strips of linen into crosses to wear as the badge of the Holy War.
Urban’s call to arms was answered by all ranks of society, but it was the class represented at Clermont that made the success of the crusades possible: the ‘powerful and honoured men, proud in the belt of secular knighthood’, who had received his words. The wild impulse to Jerusalem and the fragile kingdoms of Out-remer were distinctively their creation, and that
Because of a convergence of military and social development that took place at this time. The knights - the heavy cavalrymen with their coats of mail, their lances and their powerful horses - were the arm to which the warfare of the age was yielding mastery. Because of the expense of their equipage, their rank was reaching a stage of identification with that of the manorial lords who were cohering at this time into a visible feudal estate. Urban spoke to them at the moment when they were ready to add religious dedication to the old warrior virtues. By taking up the banner of the crusade they created the ideal of chivalry, of which the military orders of the Church were to become the highest expression.
The army assembled by Pope Urban’s exalted plea conquered Jerusalem in July 1099, and as the crusaders returned from the fulfilment of their vow the fame of the Hospital of St John was disseminated all over Europe. For Brother Gerard had risen to the occasion presented by these unusually forceful pilgrims, and, besides acting as - one suspects - the most efficient billeting officer the crusaders had encountered in their three-year campaign, had shown them a vocation of humble service that was not the least of the wonders they found at the tomb of Christ. To the lands where these reports ran the Hospital became, next to the Holy Sepulchre itself, the chief of the Christian institutions in the Holy City. Godfrey de Bouillon, the conqueror of Jerusalem, gave it its first endowments in the new feudal state; kings and nobles followed his example, so that within a few years the Hospital possessed rich properties in the Christian lands bordering the Mediterranean,
These were much more than ornamental gains; the resourceful Gerard was busy with vast schemes, not merely sheltering the pilgrims in Jerusalem but setting up a great network of spiritual travel from Western Europe to the Holy Land. By 1113 he had under his authority seven ancillary hospices, at Bari, Otranto, Taranto, Messina, Pisa, Asti and Saint-Gilles. Until then pilgrimages had almost exclusively followed the land route, making a brief sea crossing from Apulia to northern Greece and
* The surname Tunc (fancified into French as Tenque or Tonque) seems to be an invention of the seventeenth-century writer Anne de Naberat/ and has been explained as a misinterpretation of the phrase 'Geraldus tunc. . in some unknown document. Although the error was soon exposed, the Order has shown a surprising pertinacity in attributing its foundation to Gerard Then.
Then following the Roman roads to Constantinople and through Anatolia to Jerusalem; but Gerard’s hospices were all (except Asti) in important embarkation places for the Holy Land, and their foundation seems to reflect a plan, very proper to an Amalfitan, to promote direct travel by sea. He probably instituted the service of maritime transport for pilgrims which became so extensive and so competitive beside the commercial carriers, that the city of Marseilles eventually limited the Hospitallers and Templars to a quota of 6,000 pilgrims a year. At the same time the material needs of the hospital, and of Outremer as a whole, were enormous; most of Gerard’s European hospices also seem to have been goods depots, and the Hospital of St John became perhaps one of the most important organisers of the life-line of material supply which remained essential to the crusader states throughout the two centuries of their existence.
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