Share of Normandy and Flanders.
Place chosen for the council. no Norman Conquest.[1] As it was, the part of the Teutonic nations in the crusades is undoubtedly secondary to that of the Latin nations. Germany takes no leading part till a later stage; Scandinavia takes no leading part at all; England is brought into the scene as an appendage to Normandy. The English crusaders served under the banner of the Norman Duke.[2] Among the secondary powers Flanders indeed appears among the foremost; but Flanders, a fief of the crown of Paris, was, as a power, though not as a people, more Latin than Teutonic. The elder Count Robert had won the honour of forestalling the crusade by sending help to the Eastern Emperor on his own account.[3] It was fittingly in a Latin city, in a Gaulish city, that Urban, himself by birth a Frenchman in the stricter sense,[4] called the nations of the West to arms. But it was equally fitting that it should not be within the immediate dominion of a king who had no heart for the enterprise, of a king whose own moral offences it was one of the duties of the Pontiff and his council to denounce. Not in the dominions of any king, not in the dominions of any of the great dukes and counts who were in power on a level with kings, but in the land of the lowlier counts, not as yet dauphins, of Auvergne, the assembly met whose acts were to lead to the winning back of the Holy City for Christendom, but with which we are more directly concerned as causing William the Red to reign at Rouen as well as at Winchester.
- ↑ See N. C. vol. v. p. 356.
- ↑ Ib. p. 93.
- ↑ See above, p. 411.
- ↑ Urban came from Rheims, but it is important to remember how little entitled Auvergne was in that day to the French name. This comes out oddly enough in an entry in the Chronicle, 1102, when thieves of all parts seem to have conspired to rob the minster of Peterborough; "Þa coman þeofas sum of Aluearnie, sum of France, and sum of Flanders, and breokan þæt mynstre of Burh."
