by Freddy Silva
And yet for all the pope’s rhetoric, there may have been those present who perceived an ulterior motive. Five months earlier, one of the few highlights at the Council of Piacenza—at least for Urban II—was the reception by the pope of envoys sent from Constantinople by Emperor Commenus. The Byzantine emperor had a big problem: for a number of years the Turks had been eating away at his empire, having already gobbled up most of Anatolia, Syria, and Palestine. The council proved a most opportune moment for Commenus: Urban was close by, geographically speaking, and seven years earlier, this promising new pope had overturned Commenus’s excommunication from the church. So the portents looked fortuitous for another small favor from one of Commenus’s few friends, particularly if it included dispatching an army of new knights by way of Constantinople.
Commenus was a shrewd manipulator. His ambassadors not only exaggerated the need for an army, but just in case the pope faltered, they also were to remind him that Jerusalem was presently under restrictive Seljuk control, with the rights of visitation of pilgrims at stake. In any event, Urban’s performance at Clermont succeeded beyond both men’s wildest dreams, and within months tens of thousands volunteered to rid the Near East of Turks and recapture the holy places.
The Council of Clermont.
One person who required little excuse to embark on this Crusade was an ardent monk of small stature from Amiens named Peter the Hermit. In his lifetime Peter had been a soldier and a married father of five children, as well as a noble and a vassal of Count Eustache of Boulogne.8 And yet Peter renounced everything to become a reclusive monk, except for the one time he made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was horrified at the treatment of pilgrims there, so much so that he was granted an audience with Simeon, the city’s patriarch, during which Peter promised to canvass nobles across the whole of Europe, even the pope, on his behalf: “I shrink not from taking upon me a task for the salvation of my soul; and with the help of the Lord I am ready to go and seek out all of them, solicit them, show unto them the immensity of your troubles, and pray them all to hasten on the day of your relief.”9
Simeon could hardly turn down such an offer of help, especially given Peter’s character references. His contemporary Guibert de Nogent said of him:
His outside made but a very poor appearance; yet superior powers swayed this miserable body; he had a quick intellect and a penetrating eye, and he spoke with ease and fluency. We saw him at that time scouring city and town, and preaching everywhere; the people crowded round him, heaped presents upon him, and celebrated his sanctity by such great praises that I remember not that like honor was ever rendered to any other person. He displayed great generosity in the disposal of all things that were given him. He restored wives to their husbands, not without the addition of gifts from himself, and he re-established, with marvellous authority, peace and good understanding between those who had been at variance. In all that he did or said he seemed to have in him something divine.10
Peter the Hermit.
So generous was Peter the Hermit to the poor and so honored for his great piety was he that even the hairs of his mule were plucked as holy relics.
Encouraged by Peter’s eagerness, Simeon accepted the pilgrim’s offer and handed him some letters prior to his departure.
Peter, dressed in his woolen tunic and serge cloak, with arms and feet bare, succeeded in meeting with Urban II in Rome and handed him Simeon’s letters discussing the dire situation in the Holy Land. This was just the beginning of his recruitment drive along the arduous route back to the French lands. Years of errant preaching while living on nothing but a little bread, wine, and some fish finally paid off, and on this frigid November afternoon in Clermont he now stood on a sturdy wooden platform beside Urban II.
The frail hermit spoke first, his skin and skeleton precariously held together by his zeal, but still he addressed the open space, now carpeted by an endless ragtag army of followers whom he had converted to march on the Holy Land. Guibert de Nogent would comment that Peter looked much like his donkey and smelled considerably worse. Peter shared with the crowd the tortures, tribulations, miseries, and humiliations suffered by the Christian pilgrims, himself included, at the hands of the Turks.
“God wills it, God wills it.”
There was little left for Urban II to stoke the fervor of the mob aside from an obviously overpatriotic speech capped by a unique selling proposition: “Take ye, then, the road to Jerusalem for the remission of your sins, and depart assured of the imperishable glory which awaits you in the kingdom of heaven.”
“God wills it, God wills it.”
Pope Urban II.
Drunk on hope and religion, it is doubtful that few remained behind in the freezing drizzle to hear the coordinated date of departure for the entire Crusade, which was to be led by knights and commence the following August on the Feast of the Assumption. Or for that matter, to take in the final portion of Urban’s speech, requesting restraint: “We ordain not, and we advise not, that the journey be undertaken by the old or the weak, or such as be not suited for arms, and let not women set out without their husbands or their brothers . . . and no layman shall commence the march save with the blessing of his pastor.”11
But in times characterized by an economy based on plunder, the promise of a remission of sins and the glory of the kingdom of heaven was sufficient to incite three armies combining some 120,000 poorly equipped peasants. No sooner was the winter snow replaced by spring than in March 1096 central Europe was one long, unprepared, unorganized swarm of men, women, children, farmers, even the infirm, marching in three, sometimes five “armies” of nonmilitary personnel. Peter the Hermit headed one. A second was led by another colorful character, a former lord from the Île-de-France who, like Peter, sought a truer, mystical experience of God and thus renounced his worldly possessions to march to Jerusalem. He would be known as Walter the Penniless.
This was the People’s Crusade.
Along the punishing road east to Constantinople many inquired desperately upon arriving at every new village, “Is this Jerusalem?”
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1096. AUGUST. CONSTANTINOPLE, CAPITAL OF THE HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE . . .
It was a miracle, and Emperor Commenus rubbed his hands with glee at the sight of it: a vast column of people approaching the city. Here at last, the reward for his efforts to prize out of the pope a fresh army that would certainly restore his faded power over a dwindling empire.
But this sublime vision of a mighty and shining fighting force slowly decayed as one after another of thousands of soiled, unsanitary, and hungry peasants pressed up to the city gate, expecting hospitality from the Holy Roman emperor.
This was not an army of knights but of locusts.
The trouble with a large mass of disorganized medieval zealots marching from village to village on little more than a vision of hope and the charity of local villagers is that no leadership can adequately provide for their physical needs, and by the time the People’s Crusade had crossed Hungary it was not just taking charity so much as devouring it. Many resorted to pilfering from the initially hospitable Christian populations, eventually turning to stealing local wives, raping women, burning granaries, and generally embarking on plunder, some of it at the behest of one of the “leaders,” Count Emerico, who “himself took part in the plunder and incited his comrades to crime.”1
They murdered four thousand in Hungary alone before setting the Serbian city of Belgrade ablaze. But not before looting it.
Commenus saw nothing but having to provide sustenance for a band of paupers, vagabonds, and opportunists. The city gates remained firmly bolted, and the People’s Crusade made do by pitching tents outside the insurmountable walls.
Emperor Commenus.
Weeks of idleness ensued, and with their noses pressed to the window of riches inside Constantinople, the pilgrims took to pillaging homes on the outskirts of the capital. Despite the very best efforts of Peter the Hermit and Walter the Penniless to set examples of decorum
, brigandage replaced discipline: “They were not held back by the decency of the people of the province, nor were they mollified by the Emperor’s affability, but they behaved very insolently, wrecking palaces, burning public buildings, tearing the roofs off churches that were covered with lead, and then offering to sell the lead back to the Greeks.”2
A seething Commenus eventually made the sensible decision to gather provisions and deliver his capital from this swarm, even furnishing the People’s Crusade with boats to take them across the narrow strait of the Bosphorus and into Anatolia.
And off his hands.
4
1096. AUGUST. WITH THE NORTHERN ARMY, PREPARING TO DEPART . . .
The Feast of the Assumption came soon enough for the thousands of knights persuaded either by conscience or Urban II’s rhetoric to stand in the fields of Lorraine and Flanders, adjusting their equipment and waiting the order that would propel a vast column of fighting men toward the Holy Land. The bright August sunshine flittering across their chain mail was a good omen.
En route they were to rendezvous with three other armies of similarly inspired men marching from separate locations throughout Europe, amalgamating at Constantinople to form a fighting unit of four thousand knights and thirty thousand infantrymen. Unlike the People’s Crusade, this northern branch of the crusading army was led by Flemish nobles who commanded discipline—three brothers of Merovingian bloodline, sons of Eustace II, Count of Boulogne.1 The youngest, Baudoin de Boulogne, was a student of the liberal arts; then there was Eustace III, who had inherited the title of Count of Boulogne after his father’s death; and finally, tall, blond, bearded, and pious, a model knight named Godefroi de Bouillon.
A chronicler of the Crusades named Raoul of Caen described Godefroi thus: “The lustre of nobility was enhanced in his case by the splendor of the most exalted virtues, as well in affairs of the world as of heaven. As to the latter, he distinguished himself by his generosity towards the poor, and his pity for those who had committed faults. Furthermore, his humility, his extreme gentleness, his moderation, his justice, and his chastity were great; he shone as a light amongst the monks, even more than as a duke amongst the knights.”
And just as well, because being the second of three brothers, Godefroi stood to inherit little and was thus afforded fewer advantages in life. That is until his uncle Godefroi the Hunchback (son of Godefroi the Bearded) died without an heir and bequeathed the lordship of Bouillon to his young, enlightened nephew.
As the crusading armies threaded their way through the kingdoms of central Europe, they encountered a populace browbeaten but wiser from the marauding behavior of their forerunners, the People’s Crusade. Aside from a few skirmishes with the Greeks and an incident in Hungary—in which Baudoin volunteered to be held in ransom by the king to ensure the proper conduct of the armies through his territory—things generally went smoothly.
By November 1096, Godefroi de Bouillon and his mounted knights and infantrymen were within reach of Constantinople when they came under sporadic harassment by troops that later turned out to have been sent by Emperor Commenus. Perhaps after his experience of the People’s Crusade the emperor had become suspicious of the help Urban II was sending his way; furthermore, the presence in the arriving army of the emperor’s old nemesis, Prince Bohemund, did little to appease Commenus’ paranoia.
Nevertheless, within four months all the Crusaders combined at the gates of Constantinople. They required sustenance and expected this simple courtesy from Commenus.
Commenus made promises and then broke them. Advances were betrayed by hostility, further irritating the soldiers. Then he demanded their sworn obedience and fealty. When he received neither he attempted to subdue them by famine while lavishing great feasts on selective knights—a potential candidate for multiple personality disorder. But the year was drawing to a close and winter called. Finally the Crusaders had had enough and resorted to plundering the countryside.
The year 1097 arrived, and still Anatolia beckoned the Crusaders from across the narrow waterway of the Bosphorus. The rocky chasm separating Europe from the East perfectly reflected the impasse between the knights and their neurotic host.
It was at this point that Godefroi de Bouillon must have detected an ulterior motive behind the pope’s push for a Crusade. As far as this knight was concerned, his intent was to march to Jerusalem, liberate the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and reestablish the accord between Christians and Arabs, even if it meant a fragile one. It was a clear plan, yet Commenus provided nothing but obstacles; in fact, he now demanded an oath of obedience from the nobles in charge of the armies. To all intents and purposes, the Crusade appeared like an opportunistic accord between the pope and the Holy Roman emperor to commandeer soldiers and rid the Turks from the emperor’s lands.
For Godefroi, the reality of the situation was that tens of thousands of men needed to be ferried across the Bosphorus. They could build their own ships for the short hop, but that would take months. Commenus knew this; he also owned all the vessels in Constantinople. The only way forward was diplomacy and compromise, so Godefroi and the nobles convened with the emperor, whereupon the ever-scheming Commenus proposed a modified oath. In return for the ferrying of troops into Turkish territory the army leaders agreed to assist him by marching on the city of Nicaea, attack the Turks in their stronghold, and liberate the city in the name of Christendom. Godefroi grudgingly agreed to the modified oath; Raimond—another leader of the army—told Commenus politely to go stuff himself, but at least gave a pledge not to attack him.
And so it was that by the spring of 1097 the Crusaders finally made landfall in Anatolia with the help of the emperor’s ships. However, even as Godefroi’s army prepared to lay siege to Nicaea, they discovered Commenus had made a secret treaty with the Turks, in which the surrender of the city was ensured to the emperor, thus making it look as though his Byzantine army, not the Crusaders, had won the conflict.
Godefroi and the other leaders of the Crusade.
Following the betrayal, Godefroi and his brothers, along with their respective Crusading armies, turned south toward Jerusalem and resumed their original intent.
5
1098. ON THE DESERT ROAD NEAR ANTIOCH . . .
In the distance they resembled blackened matchsticks shimmering in the heat rising off the arid plains of the Levant. By the time the crusading knights caught up with them in Syria, the remnants of the People’s Crusade numbered less than ten percent of the original desperate souls who had ventured out from the Frankish kingdoms.
The stories were gruesome. Priests traveling among them provoked the pilgrims by suggesting the Turks swallowed their valuables so as to conceal them from robbers, so whenever they captured one, the pilgrims cut open his belly and eager fingers probed among bloody intestines for hidden treasure.
The pilgrims were butchered in turn by the equally barbaric Turks. Those captured alive were placed in town squares and used for target practice by archers. Those who survived were returned to the desert, where they resorted on occasion to drinking their own urine. Or starved to death.
As for Peter the Hermit, his zeal had finally been foreshortened by the Turks, who tortured him. Godefroi de Bouillon was pleased enough just to find him still alive. The knight dismounted his horse, hugged the emaciated evangelist like a long-lost friend, and had him nursed back to some sort of health.
During his convalescence Peter recounted in lurid detail “how the people, who had preceded them under his guidance, had shown themselves destitute of intelligence, improvident, and unmanageable at the same time; and so it was far more by their own fault than by the deed of any other that they had succumbed to the weight of their calamities.”1 His vigor renewed, the monk continued the journey with Godefroi’s army on the remaining miles of dirt, sand, and rock still standing between them and Jerusalem.
That Godefroi himself appears to have marched to the Holy Land with his own objective right from the start was evident in his enga
gements with the Turks, for although his role in the army was important, his involvement in the battles and skirmishes in the Levant was minor. And battles there were aplenty.
The remnants of the People’s Crusade.
Writing to his wife in France, the knight Étienne Henri de Blois was hopeful that the remaining three hundred miles to Jerusalem would take a mere five weeks to cover.2 In reality it took the Crusaders two years before they finally caught a glimpse of the city they had so persevered to reach.
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140 BC. IN A LAND IN WESTERN IBERIA CALLED LUSITANIA . . .
A previously unstoppable Julius Caesar was vexed: “There exists a civilization in the northern confines of Iberia who refuses to govern itself and will not allow itself to be governed.”1 The tribe giving him and subsequent Roman legions two hundred years of aggravation was the Lusitani, a Celtic tribe whose name translates as “people of the light of Ani.”
Ani is one of the primary deities of the Celtic world, a variant of the Sumerian goddess Inanna. In later incarnations she reappears as Saint Anne, grandmother of Jesus. Regardless of her many derivatives—Ana, Anu, Annan, Danu, Dana—she was considered the mother of the gods. Her influence is still reflected in the origin of place names throughout Europe, such as the river Danube, or the Paps of Anu, the fabled sacred hills of Ireland, once venerated by another legendary Celtic race, the Tuadhe d’Anu, the “people of Anu.” Like so many ancient races, the Tuadhe are said to have introduced mathematics, agriculture, the arts, and music; they possessed the fine gift of temperament and knowledge that gave them control over the forces of nature, and such attributes had them compared to gods.