Bible and Sword: England and Palestine From the Bronze Age to Balfour

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  This worry and the growing realization that no united effort could probably ever be wrung from the divided army put him in the mood to end the war by a negotiated truce. Through the winter and into the spring of 1192 the conferences dragged on, with proposals and counterproposals concerning the possession of Jerusalem and the various coastal cities and Crusader’s castles and even including Richard’s absurd and cynical suggestion that his sister Joanna marry Saladin’s brother and that they rule Jerusalem between them. The courteous and diplomatic Saladin kept the talks in progress by skilled speechcraft and a constant flow of gifts—a magnificent Spanish horse for Richard, a scarlet tent, fresh fruits or cooling snow brought from the mountains, seven camels richly caparisoned, and a skilled physician to minister to the King.

  Meanwhile messengers from England with reports of John’s depredations up and down the kingdom implored Richard to return. He decided on a final effort for Jerusalem in June 1192; but again united councils could net be obtained, and bitterly the King gave up. As he turned back from the great goal for which so much effort, blood, and treasure had been vainly spent, a knight turned his steps to a hilltop from which the towers of Jerusalem could be seen. But Richard veiled his face with his cloak, saying: “Blessed Lord God, I pray thee not to let me see thy Holy City that I could not deliver from the hands of thy enemies.”

  The futility of remaining in Palestine was now obvious. Richard was preparing to sail from Acre when news came that the Saracens had surrounded Jaffa, where a small force of Christians was holding out in imminent danger of death. It was almost as if the fates had taken a hand to amend the bitter humiliation of a brave man. For in the battle of Jaffa Richard performed such feats of arms and won such glory as rang on the tongues of all men. The memory of his exactions was dimmed by the reports of his valor, and when, three years later, Eleanor moved heaven and earth to raise the gigantic ransom demanded by Richard’s captor, Englishmen responded with every ounce of treasure, so great was their pride in the Lion-Hearted King.

  IRR’s account of the relief of Jaffa, written perhaps that very night, seems almost to burst with pride and ecstasy in the battle and in the King’s mighty deeds. Richard, he says, interrupted all counsels of caution and exclaimed, “As God lives I will be with them and give them all the aid I can.” Already on board ship, he turned the helm southward, ran his galley on the beach at Jaffa, and waded ashore, up to his middle in the waves at the head of a small landing party of but eighty knights and three hundred cross-bowmen.

  Himself armed with an arbalest, which he soon exchanged for his “fierce sword,” he and his companions dashed forward against the Turks who covered the beach and soon pushed them back. After a terrific battle the town was taken and the Christian garrison saved, but the Turks, ashamed at having been put to rout by so small a number, sent in a new force to take Richard by surprise as he slept in his tent. A last-minute warning shout “To arms! to arms!” awoke the King.

  “God of all virtues! Lives there a man who would not be shaken by such a sudden alarm?… Oh, who could fully relate the terrible attacks of the infidels? The Turks at first rushed on with horrid yells, hurling their javelins and shooting their arrows. The King ran along the ranks and exhorted every man to be firm and not to flinch. The Turks came on like a whirlwind again and again making the appearance of an attack, that our men might be induced to give way, and when they were close up they swerved their horses off in another direction. The King and his knights who were on horseback perceiving this, put spurs to their horses and charged into the middle of the enemy upsetting them right and left and piercing a large number through the body with their lances.… What a terrible combat was then waged! A multitude of Turks … rushed towards the royal standard of the lion for they would rather have slain the King than a thousand others.… But such was the energy of his courage that it seemed to rejoice at having found an occasion to display itself. His sword which shone like lightning cut down men and horses alike, cleaving them to the middle.”

  All day he fought, and IRR tells how at times he wielded a sword in one hand and a lance in the other, how he carved a path for himself like a reaper with a sickle, how he inspired such terror in the Turks as to create a panic among them in their rush to get out of his way, how he saw the noble Earl of Leicester fallen from his horse and fighting bravely on foot, how he spurred to him and replaced him on his horse, how he snatched Ralph de Maubon from the enemy and restored him to the army, how Saladin in the midst of battle sent him two fresh horses in honor of his courage, and how the King said he would accept any number of horses from an enemy worse than Saladin, so great was his need of them; how at last “the King, the fierce, the extraordinary King … returned safe and unhurt to his friends … his person stuck all over with javelins like a deer pierced by the hunters and the trappings of his horse were thickly covered with arrows.” And when Saladin asked his crestfallen warriors why they had not taken Melec Ric they answered: “In truth, my lord there never was such a knight since the beginning of the world … to engage with him is fatal and his deeds are beyond human nature.”

  A three years’ armistice was now signed, leaving Jerusalem and the hill country to the Saracens but restoring the Church of the Sepulcher and the pilgrims’ right of free access to it to the Christians, who also retained the coastal plain and its ports from Tyre to Jaffa. Three parties of Crusaders went up to see the Holy City, but without Richard, who, if he could not go as conqueror, would not go at all. The Lion-Heart sailed away, but the legend of his might remained a byword among the Arabs. If a horse shied at a noise in the bushes, it was believed that the spirit of Melec Ric had frightened him, and a crying child was quieted by the admonition “Hush, England is coming!”

  One effect of the Crusades on England was the upheavals in tenure caused by so many knights’ mortgaging their lands for cash to outfit themselves. The King was not the only one to go to extremes for money. One John de Camoys sold his wife and all her chattels. A certain Andrew Astley sold his whole state to the abbey of Combe in Warwickshire for three hundred and twenty marks sterling. Others mortgaged their lands, usually to rich abbeys, for three or four or seven years, and if they survived the wars to return home, they were often too impoverished to redeem their property and were forced to spend out their lives as poor brethren in a monastery.

  The sixteenth-century researches of Leland and Camden into monastery archives and local parish records turned up many facts about the Crusades. There was one Osborne Gifford who was excommunicated for abducting two nuns (one was apparently not enough) and as the price of absolution had to undertake a three years’ crusade in the Holy Land, during which he could wear no shirt or knight’s habit, nor could he ever in his life enter a nunnery again. Roger de Mowbray was a rarity who went twice to Palestine in the years of the Second Crusade and survived capture by the Saracens as well. Anyone so favored by fortune was sure to be made the subject of romantic adventures, and Roger was said to have intervened in a mortal combat between a dragon and a lion and, having slain the dragon, so won the gratitude of the lion that it followed him all the way home to England. His son Nigel went with Richard on the Third Crusade. Another made prisoner by the Saracens was Hugh de Hatton, who escaped after seven years’ captivity and made his way home in rags. Learning from a shepherd who did not recognize him that he had been given up for dead, Hugh entered his castle, to meet what welcome we do not know. The story leaves him at the threshold, another in the line of long-lost warriors who have been returning home incognito ever since Ulysses came back from Troy.

  Banishment was a frequent reason for going off to the Holy Wars. The doughty Fulk Fitzwarin so angered Prince John in a chess game that John hit him over the head with the chessboard, whereupon Fulk retaliated with a blow that almost killed the bad-tempered prince. Promptly banished from court, he set off for Palestine, but was driven by storms to the Barbary coast, where he too was taken prisoner by the Saracens. His captivity appears to have been a pleasant one,
for he is reputed to have enjoyed the love of “a noble lady caullid Idonie” during his stay in the Sultan’s domain. Eventually he made his way east to join Richard’s army at the siege of Acre. In that noble company also was William de Pratelles, famous for saving Richard from capture during a hunting party surprised by an enemy raid. William shouted, “I am the king!” and was carried off a prisoner, but fortunately one of the last things Richard did in Palestine was to exchange ten Turks for his gallant friend.

  Even the wicked John, when he was King after Richard’s death, took the cross; in the faded ink of Magna Carta it can be read how he promised to adjust all property claims made on him “before we undertook the crusade.” But the stern barons, not trusting his intentions, also forced him to promise to make good their claims right away “if perchance we tarry at home and do not make our pilgrimage.”

  John, of course, did tarry, but his younger son Richard, Earl of Cornwall, was as determined to go as his namesake Richard I had been. As the only responsible man at court, where a pack of French favorites was making a shambles of the government under the complacent eye of his incompetent brother Henry III, Earl Richard felt unable to depart as long as he was heir apparent. But as soon as a son was born to the King he set out for Palestine. Everyone tried to dissuade him, including the Pope, who urged him to buy a remission of his vow. The papal solicitude was no doubt influenced by the fact that Richard, who owned the tin and lead mines of Cornwall and vast timberlands, was reputed the richest prince in Europe. But the Earl would not sell his vow; instead he sold his woods to raise the necessary funds. When he took his leave, says William of Tyre, the people wept, for he was a person wholly minding the public welfare; whereon he told them that even if he had not made his vow he would sooner go than witness the miseries that were coming on the realm. With him went the valiant William Longsword, Earl of Salisbury, later killed in the Crusade in Egypt, seven barons, some fifty or sixty knights, and the usual company of bow- and lance-men. When, however, they landed at Acre in October 1240 they found a truce prevailing between Franks and Moslems, the latter embroiled in the usual war between the Caliphates of Egypt and Syria. As the terms of the truce had not been fulfilled Earl Richard, in the footsteps of his late uncle, marched for Jaffa, but was met by a peace offer from the hard-pressed Sultan of Egypt. A stiff man to deal with, the Earl emerged after long negotiations with the best terms ever won by the Crusaders in treaty: Jerusalem, Nazareth, Bethlehem, and most of the Holy Land were left to the Christians. Earl Richard returned to be hailed on every hand as the deliverer of the Sepulcher.

  He had been joined in Palestine by Simon de Montfort, whose recent marriage to the King’s sister had raised such a storm that he found it prudent to leave home for Palestine. Simon, who was to be called a second Joshua in battle, had recently, with the Crusader’s consistent animus against the Jews, expelled the descendants of Joshua from his borough of Leicester. He had not yet emerged as the great opponent of royal tyranny, perhaps the only man to fight for principle in all the bloody feuds between kings and nobles from the Conquest to the Tudors. Though he left no mark on events in Palestine, his powerful personality and abilities must have been recognized by the local Franks, for they offered him the regency of the Latin kingdom during the minority of its boy ruler. But Simon felt greater longings in him and went home to make himself master of England before his ultimate defeat and brutal death.

  The end of the crusading era was now drawing near. Palestine had become a battleground for new Islamic hordes. Kharezmians and Kurds were pushed down from the north by the advancing Mongols and were followed soon by the Tartar Khans themselves. Within two years of the Earl of Cornwall’s treaty victories, Jerusalem was again lost. Tyre and Acre remained the last toeholds of the Franks in Palestine. Subsequent Crusades were directed at Egypt and the Barbary coast, where the Mameluke dynasty ruled. The last organized efforts of the West were the two fruitless expeditions led by St. Louis of France, that “drum filled with wind” as the Moslem poet called him.

  In the second of these, 1269–72, he was joined by Prince Edward of England, who undertook the Crusade in fulfillment of a vow made when he accomplished the overthrow of Simon de Montfort. On his arrival at Tunis with four earls, four barons, and about a thousand men Edward was disgusted to find that Louis and the other princes had signed a treaty with the Sultan. Edward promptly sailed for Acre with his own men, where he raised an army of about seven thousand from the local Franks; but he accomplished nothing more than the conquest of Nazareth in revenge for the Saracens’ destruction of Christian shrines in that place. Struck down by an assassin’s poisoned dagger, the Prince was near death for months. Finally he too signed a truce, to last for ten years, ten months, and ten days, after which he departed for home, where he found himself king on arrival. He was the last prince of the West to fight in Palestine.

  A letter reached Edward in 1281 from Sir Joseph de Cancy, a knight of the Hospital of St. John whom the King had commissioned to keep him informed of “news of events as they befell in the Holy Land.” It tells of a battle Sir Joseph witnessed between the Saracens and the Mongol Tartars and goes on to lament: “Never in our remembrance was the Holy Land in such poor estate as it is at this day, wasted by lack of rain, divers pestilences and the paynim.… Never have we seen so few soldiers [of the Franks] or so little good counsel in it.” He is sure that with able generals and adequate supplies the infidel could be driven out, and he concludes by urging Edward to come back and complete the conquest.

  But now the time had run out. Edward was engaged in conquering a nearer kingdom over the border, and he never returned to the East. The later popes had fouled their own cause by the unction with which they persuaded Crusaders to buy back their vows with gold for the Vatican coffers. When the Grand Master of the Templars came to Europe to beg for help against the resurgent Mamelukes he was able to round up no more than a few hundred Italian mercenaries. Palestine was a lost cause. Exactly one hundred years after Richard the Lion-Heart broke the walls of Acre two hundred thousand Mamelukes marched against the Crusaders’ last city. In 1291 Acre fell; the same year that Edward expelled the Jews from England the last Christians were driven from Palestine.

  CHAPTER V

  THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH

  In the year 1538 Henry VIII issued a proclamation ordering “one book of the whole Bible of the largest volume in English” to be placed in every church in England. The proclamation further ordered the clergy to place the Bible “in some convenient place … whereas your parishioners may most commodiously resort to the same and read it”; also “that you shall discourage no man from reading or hearing of the said Bible but you shall expressly stir, provoke and. exhort every person to read the same.”

  With the translation of the Bible into English and its adoption as the highest authority for an autonomous English Church, the history, traditions, and moral law of the Hebrew nation became part of the English culture; became for a period of three centuries the most powerful single influence on that culture. It linked, to repeat Matthew Arnold’s phrase, “the genius and history of us English to the genius and history of the Hebrew people.” This is far from saying that it made England a Judaeophil nation, but without the background of the English Bible it is doubtful that the Balfour Declaration would ever have been issued in the name of the British government or the Mandate for Palestine undertaken, even given the strategic factors that later came into play.

  Wherever the Reformation took hold the Bible replaced the Pope as the final spiritual authority. The Palestinian origins of Christianity were stressed more and more in order to reduce the pretensions of Rome. Where the papal bull had ruled earlier the word of God as revealed in the Hebrew testaments to Abraham and Moses, to Isaiah, Elijah, and Daniel, to Jesus and Paul now governed instead.

  “Consider the great historical fact,” said Thomas Huxley, “that this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history, that it has become the nati
onal epic of Britain.” Here is the curious fact of the family history of one nation becoming the national epic of another. After the publication of the King James version in 1611 the adoption was complete. The Bible was as much England’s own as Good Queen Bess or Queen Victoria. Writers on the English Bible habitually use phrases like “this national Bible,” “this greatest of English classics”; and one, H. W. Hoare in his Evolution of the English Bible, even goes so far as to call it “the most venerable of the national heirlooms,” which shows how far enthusiasm can betray a scholar. For the English Bible is not venerable as compared to, for example, Chaucer, nor is it an heirloom except in translation. Its content was and remains a record of the origins, the beliefs, the laws and customs and the history of the Jewish people of Palestine, most of it set down before anyone in England could read or write. And yet no other book penetrated so deeply the bone and the spirit of English life. When the dying Walter Scott asked Lockhart to read aloud to him and Lockhart asked what book, Scott replied: “There is but one.”

  Whether the innate content of the Bible or the beauty of the King James version was the more responsible for its influences on the English people is a matter of opinion. A library could be assembled of works dealing only with the effect of the Authorized Version on the speech and literature of England. But it is not the literary aspect that concerns us so much as the effect of the Bible in familiarizing, in associating, the English with the Hebraic tradition of Palestine.