The Age of Faith

by Will Durant

  wonderful things were to be seen. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded … others were shot with arrows, or forced to jump from the towers; others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet. One rode about everywhere amid the corpses of men and horses.19

  Other contemporaries contribute details: women were stabbed to death, suckling babes were snatched by the leg from their mothers’ breasts and flung over the walls, or had their necks broken by being dashed against posts;20 and 70,000 Moslems remaining in the city were slaughtered. The surviving Jews were herded into a synagogue and burned alive. The victors flocked to the church of the Holy Sepulcher, whose grotto, they believed, had once held the crucified Christ. There, embracing one another, they wept with joy and release, and thanked the God of Mercies for their victory.

  III. THE LATIN KINGDOM OF JERUSALEM: 1099–1143

  Godfrey of Bouillon, whose exceptional integrity had finally won recognition, was chosen to rule Jerusalem and its environs under the modest title of Defender of the Holy Sepulcher. Here, where Byzantine rule had ceased 465 years before, no pretense was made of subordination to Alexius; the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem became at once a sovereign state. The Greek Church was disestablished, its patriarch fled to Cyprus, and the parishes of the new kingdom accepted the Latin liturgy, an Italian primate, and papal rule.

  The price of sovereignty is the capacity for self-defense. Two weeks after the great liberation, an Egyptian army came up to Ascalon to reliberate a city holy for too many faiths. Godfrey defeated it, but a year later he died (1100). His less able brother, Baldwin I (1100–18), took the loftier title of king. Under King Fulk, Count of Anjou (1131–43), the new state included most of Palestine and Syria; but the Moslems still held Aleppo, Damascus, and Emesa. The kingdom was divided into four feudal principalities, centering respectively at Jerusalem, Antioch, Edessa, and Tripolis. Each of the four was parceled into practically independent fiefs, whose jealous lords made war, coined money, and otherwise aped sovereignty. The king was elected by the barons, and was checked by an ecclesiastical hierarchy subject only to the pope. He was further weakened by ceding the control of several ports—Jaffa, Tyre, Acre, Beirut, Ascalon—to Venice, Pisa, or Genoa as the price of naval aid and seaborne supplies. The structure and law of the kingdom were formulated in the Assizes of Jerusalem—one of the most logical and ruthless codifications of feudal government. The barons assumed all ownership of land, reduced the former owners—Christian or Moslem—to the condition of serfs, and laid upon them feudal obligations severer than any in contemporary Europe. The native Christian population looked back to Moslem rule as a golden age.21

  The young kingdom had many elements of weakness, but it had a unique support in new orders of military monks. As far back as 1048 the merchants of Amalfi had obtained Moslem permission to build a hospital at Jerusalem for poor or ailing pilgrims. About 1120 the staff of this institution was reorganized by Raymond du Puy as a religious order vowed to chastity, poverty, obedience, and the military protection of Christians in Palestine; and these Hospitalers, or Knights of the Hospital of St. John, became one of the noblest charitable bodies in the Christian world. About the same time (1119) Hugh de Payens and eight other crusader knights solemnly dedicated themselves to monastic discipline and the martial service of Christianity. They obtained from Baldwin II a residence near the site of Solomon’s Temple, and were soon called Knights Templar. St. Bernard drew up a stern rule for them, which was not long obeyed; he praised them for being “most learned in the art of war,” and bade them “wash seldom,” and closely crop their hair.22 “The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War,” wrote Bernard to the Templars, in a passage worthy of Mohammed, “is sure of his reward; more sure if he himself is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan, because Christ is thereby glorified”;23 men must learn to kill with a good conscience if they are to fight successful wars. A Hospitaler wore a black robe with a white cross on the left sleeve; a Templar a white robe with a red cross on the mantle. Each hated the other religiously. From protecting and nursing pilgrims the Hospitalers and Templars passed to active attacks upon Saracen strongholds; though the Templars numbered but 300, and the Hospitalers some 600, in 1180,24 they played a prominent part in the battles of the Crusades, and earned great repute as warriors. Both orders campaigned for financial support, and received it from Church and state, from rich and poor; in the thirteenth century each owned great estates in Europe, including abbeys, villages, and towns. Both astonished Christians and Saracens by building vast fortresses in Syria, where, dedicated individually to poverty, they enjoyed collective luxury amid the toils of war.25 In 1190 the Germans in Palestine, aided by a few at home, founded the Teutonic Knights, and established a hospital near Acre.

  Most of the Crusaders returned to Europe after freeing Jerusalem, leaving the man power of the harassed government perilously low. Many pilgrims came, but few remained to fight. On the north the Greeks watched for a chance to recover Antioch, Edessa, and other cities which they claimed as Byzantine; to the east, the Saracens were being aroused and unified by Moslem appeals and Christian raids. Mohammedan refugees from Jerusalem told in bitter detail the fall of that city to the Christians; they stormed the Great Mosque of Baghdad, and demanded that Moslem arms should liberate Jerusalem, and the sacred Dome of the Rock, from unclean infidel hands.26 The caliph was powerless to heed their pleas, but Zangi, the young slave-born Prince of Mosul, responded. In 1144 his small well-led army took from the Christians their eastern outpost al-Ruah; and a few months later he recaptured Edessa for Islam. Zangi was assassinated, but he was succeeded by a son, Nur-ud-din, of equal courage and greater ability. It was the news of these events that stirred Europe to the Second Crusade.

  IV. THE SECOND CRUSADE: 1146–8

  St. Bernard appealed to Pope Eugenius III to sound another call to arms. Eugenius, enmeshed in conflict with the infidels of Rome, begged Bernard to undertake the task himself. It was a wise suggestion, for the saint was a greater man than he whom he had made Pope. When he left his cell at Clairvaux to preach the crusade to the French, the skepticism that hides in the heart of faith was silenced, and the fears spread by narratives of the First Crusade were stilled. Bernard went directly to King Louis VII, and persuaded him to take the cross. With the King at his side he spoke to a multitude at Vézelay (1146); when he had finished, the crowd enlisted en masse; the crosses prepared proved too few, and Bernard tore his robe to pieces to provide additional emblems. “Cities and castles are emptied,” he wrote to the Pope; “there is not left one man to seven women, and everywhere there are widows to still living husbands.” Having won France he passed to Germany, where his fervent eloquence induced the Emperor Conrad III to accept the crusade as the one cause that could unify the Guelf and Hohenstaufen factions then rending the realm. Many nobles followed Conrad’s lead; among them the young Frederick of Swabia who would become Barbarossa, and would die in the Third Crusade.

  At Easter of 1147 Conrad and the Germans set out; at Pentecost Louis and the French followed at a cautious distance, uncertain whether the Germans or the Turks were their most hated foes. The Germans felt a like hesitation between Turks and Greeks; and so many Byzantine towns were pillaged on the way that many closed their gates, and dispensed a scanty ration by baskets let down from the walls. Manuel Comnenus, now Eastern Emperor, gently suggested that the noble hosts should cross the Hellespont at Sestos, instead of going through Constantinople; but Conrad and Louis refused. A party in Louis’ council urged him to take Constantinople for France; he refrained; but again the Greeks may have learned of his temptation. They were frightened by the stature and armor of the Western knights, and amused by their feminine entourage. His troublesome Eleanor accompanied Louis, and troubadours accompanied the Queen; the counts of Flanders and Toulouse were escorted by their countesses, and the baggage train of the French was heavy with trunks and boxes of apparel and cosmetics
designed to ensure the beauty of these ladies against all the vicissitudes of climate, war, and time. Manuel hastened to transport the two armies across the Bosporus, and supplied the Greeks with debased coinage for dealings with the Crusaders. In Asia a dearth of provisions, and the high prices demanded by the Greeks, led to many conflicts between saviors and saved; and Frederick of the Red Beard mourned that his sword had to shed Christian blood for the privilege of encountering infidels.

  Conrad insisted, against Manuel’s advice, on taking the route followed by the First Crusade. Despite or because of their Greek guides, the Germans fell into a succession of foodless wastes and Moslem snares; and their loss of life was disheartening. At Dorylaeum, where the First Crusade had defeated Qilij Arslan, Conrad’s army met the main Moslem force, and was so badly beaten that hardly one Christian in ten survived. The French army, far behind, was deceived by false news of a German victory; it advanced recklessly, and was decimated by starvation and Moslem raids. Reaching Attalia, Louis bargained with Greek ship captains to transport his army by sea to Christian Tarsus or Antioch; the captains demanded an impossible fee per passenger; Louis and several nobles, Eleanor and several ladies, took passage to Antioch, leaving the French army in Attalia. Mohammedan forces swept down upon the city, and slaughtered nearly every Frenchman in it (1148).

  Louis reached Jerusalem with ladies but no army, Conrad with a pitiful remnant of the force with which he had left Ratisbon. From these survivors, and soldiers already in the capital, an army was improvised, and marched against Damascus under the divided command of Conrad, Louis, and Baldwin III (1143–62). During the siege disputes arose among the nobles as to which should rule Damascus when it fell. Moslem agents found their way into the Christian army, and bribed certain leaders to a policy of inaction or retreat.27 When word came that the emirs of Aleppo and Mosul were advancing with a large force to relieve Damascus, the advocates of retreat prevailed; the Christian army broke into fragments, and fled to Antioch, Acre, or Jerusalem. Conrad, defeated and diseased, returned in disgrace to Germany. Eleanor and most of the French knights returned to France. Louis remained another year in Palestine, making pilgrimages to sacred shrines.

  Europe was stunned by the collapse of the Second Crusade. Men began to ask how it was that the Almighty allowed His defenders to be so humiliated; critics assailed St. Bernard as a reckless visionary who had sent men to their death; and here and there emboldened skeptics called in question the most basic tenets of the Christian faith. Bernard replied that the ways of the Almighty are beyond human understanding, and that the disaster must have been a punishment for Christian sins. But from this time the philosophic doubts that Abélard (d. 1142) had scattered found expression even among the people. Enthusiasm for the Crusades rapidly waned; and the Age of Faith prepared to defend itself by fire and sword against the inroads of alien beliefs, or no belief at all.

  V. SALADIN

  Meanwhile a strange new civilization had developed in Christian Syria and Palestine. The Europeans who had settled there since 1099 gradually adopted the Near Eastern garb of wound headdress and flowing robe as suited to a climate of sun and sand. As they became more familiar with the Moslems living in the kingdom, mutual unfamiliarity and hostility decreased. Moslem merchants freely entered Christian settlements and sold their wares; Moslem and Jewish physicians were preferred by Christian patients;28 Moslem worship in mosques was permitted by the Christian clergy; and the Koran was taught in Moslem schools in Christian Antioch and Tripolis. Safe conducts for travelers and traders were exchanged between Christian and Moslem states. As only a few Christian wives had come with the Crusaders, many Christian settlers married Syrian women; soon their mixed offspring constituted a large element of the population. Arabic became the daily speech of all commoners. Christian princes made alliances with Moslem emirs against Christian rivals, and Moslem emirs sometimes asked the aid of the “polytheists” in diplomacy or war. Personal friendships developed between Christians and Mohammedans. Ibn Jubair, who toured Christian Syria in 1183, described his fellow Moslems there as prosperous, and as well treated by the Franks. He mourned to see Acre “swarming with pigs and crosses,” and odorous with a vile European smell, but he had some hopes that the infidels would gradually be civilized by the superior civilization to which they had come.29

  In the forty years of peace that followed the Second Crusade, the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem continued to be torn with internal strife, while its Moslem enemies moved toward unity. Nur-ud-din spread his power from Aleppo to Damascus (1164); when he died, Saladin brought Egypt and Moslem Syria under one rule (1175). Genoese, Venetian, and Pisan merchants disordered the Eastern ports with their mortal rivalry. Knights quarreled for the royal power in Jerusalem; and when Guy de Lusignan maneuvered his way to the throne (1186), disaffection spread among the aristocracy; “if this Guy is a king,” said his brother Geoffrey, “I am worthy to be a god.” Reginald of Châtillon made himself sovereign in the great castle of Karak beyond the Jordan, near the Arabian frontier, and repeatedly violated the truce arranged between the Latin king and Saladin. He announced his intention to invade Arabia, destroy the tomb of “the accursed camel driver” at Medina, and smash the Kaaba at Mecca in fragments to the ground.30 His small force of knightly adventurers sailed down the Red Sea, landed at el-Haura, and marched to Medina; they were surprised by an Egyptian detachment, and all were cut down except a few who escaped with Reginald, and some prisoners who were taken to Mecca and slaughtered instead of goats at the annual pilgrimage sacrifice (1183).

  Saladin had heretofore contented himself with minor forays against Palestine; now, offended to the depths of his piety, he re-formed the army that had won him Damascus, and met the forces of the Latin kingdom in an indecisive battle on the historic plain of Esdraelon (1183). A few months later he attacked Reginald at Karak, but failed to enter the citadel. In 1185 he signed a four-year truce with the Latin kingdom. But in 1186 Reginald, bored with peace, waylaid a Moslem caravan, and took rich booty and several prisoners, including Saladin’s sister. “Since they trusted in Mohammed,” said Reginald, “let Mohammed come and save them.” Mohammed did not come; but Saladin, infuriated, sounded the call for a holy war against the Christians, and swore to kill Reginald with his own hand.

  The crucial engagement of the Crusades was fought at Hittin, near Tiberias, on July 4, 1187. Saladin, familiar with the terrain, took up positions controlling all the wells; the heavily armored Christians, having marched across the plain in midsummer heat, entered battle gasping with thirst. Taking advantage of the wind, the Saracens started a brush fire whose smoke further harassed the Crusaders. In the blind confusion the Frank footmen were separated from the cavalry, and were cut down; the knights, fighting with desperation against weapons, smoke, and thirst, at last fell exhausted to the ground, and were captured or slain. Apparently by Saladin’s orders, no mercy was shown to Templars or Hospitalers. He directed that King Guy and Duke Reginald be brought before him; to the King he gave drink as a pledge of pardon; to Reginald he gave the choice of death or acknowledging Mohammed as a prophet of God; when Reginald refused, Saladin slew him. Part of the booty taken by the victors was the True Cross, which had been borne as a battle standard by a priest; Saladin sent it to the caliph at Baghdad. Seeing that no army remained to challenge him, he proceeded to capture Acre, where he freed 4000 Moslem prisoners, and paid his troops with the wealth of the busy port. For a few months nearly all Palestine was in his hands.

  As he approached Jerusalem the leading citizens came out to bid for peace. “I believe,” he told them, “that Jerusalem is the home of God, as you also believe; and I will not willingly lay siege to it, or put it to assault.” He offered it freedom to fortify itself, and to cultivate unhindered the land for fifteen miles around, and promised to supply all deficiencies of money and food, until Pentecost; if, when that day came, they saw hope of being rescued, they might keep the city and honorably resist him; if no such prospect appeared, they were to yield p
eaceably, and he would spare the lives and property of the Christian inhabitants. The delegates refused the offer, saying that they would never surrender the city where the Saviour had died for mankind.31 The siege lasted only twelve days. When the city capitulated, Saladin required a ransom of ten gold pieces ($47.50?) for each man, five for each woman, one for each child; the poorest 7000 were to be freed on the surrender of the 30,000 gold bezants (c. $270,000) which had been sent to the Hospitalers by Henry II of England. These terms were accepted, says a Christian chronicler, “with gratitude and lamentation”; perhaps some learned Christians compared these events of 1187 with those of 1099. Saladin’s brother al-Adil asked for the gift of a thousand slaves from the still unransomed poor; it was granted, and he freed them. Balian, leader of the Christian resistance, asked a like boon, received it, and freed another thousand; the Christian primate asked and received and did likewise. Then Saladin said: “My brother has made his alms, and the patriarch and Balian have made theirs; now I would make mine”; and he freed all the old who could not pay. Apparently some 15,000 of the 60,000 captured Christians remained unransomed, and became slaves. Among the ransomed were the wives and daughters of the nobles who had been killed or captured at Hittin. Softened by their tears, Saladin released to them such husbands and fathers (including King Guy) as could be found in Moslem captivity, and (relates Ernoul, squire to Balian) to “the dames and damsels whose lords were dead he distributed from his own treasure so much that they gave praise to God, and published abroad the kindness and honor that Saladin had done them.”32